Helen Castor > Quotes

“Amid the chaos and confusion, one thing alone was certain: for the first time, a woman would sit upon the throne of England.”
― Helen Castor, She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth

“. . . she at once put on an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the modest gait and bearing proper to the gentle sex,” the Gesta’s author complained, “began to walk and speak and do all things more stiffly and more haughtily than she had been wont, to such a point that soon, in the capital of the land subject to her, she actually made herself queen of all England and gloried in being so called.”
― Helen Castor, She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth

“If she had truly been sent by God, she would not wear men’s clothes in contravention of God’s law and the Church’s teaching. The nature of her supposed mission was no excuse for this abomination, since no ‘greater’ good could ever justify sin – and in any case women were forbidden to fight, just as they were forbidden to preach, to teach, to administer the sacraments, and all other duties that belonged to men.”
― Helen Castor, Joan of Arc

“Even for Joan, there was a familiarity, by now, to the workings of the military machine. The noise was deafening. The roar of the Armagnac cannon was answered by artillery blasts from the walls above; whenever a Parisian gunner struck his target, the screams of mutilated horses and men added a nerve-shredding counterpoint to the shouts of the soldiers who toiled in the moat, hurling bundles of wood into the standing water at the bottom in an attempt to build a makeshift pathway to the foot of the walls.”
― Helen Castor, Joan of Arc

“She is, famously, a protean icon: a hero to nationalists, monarchists, liberals, socialists, the right, the left, Catholics, Protestants, traditionalists, feminists, Vichy and the Resistance.”
― Helen Castor, Joan of Arc

“His physicians did not know it, but an attack of measles, such as the one from which the king had recovered a year earlier, serves to suppress the victim’s resistance to tuberculosis.”
― Helen Castor, She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth

“Henry was found sitting quietly under a tree,”
― Helen Castor, Blood & Roses

“their way.”
― Helen Castor, Blood & Roses

“She had been an exceptional leader in an exceptional moment – a miraculous anomaly who, by the will of heaven, had transformed the landscape in which she stood. She knew that God was with her, and how much work still lay ahead. But what if those around her believed the moment of miracles had passed?”
― Helen Castor, Joan of Arc

“The country was populous and wealthy, and patterns of landholding there complex and fragmented. What more could a lawyer want than a place in which endless occasions for dispute arose among a large population with plenty of money to spend on litigation?”
― Helen Castor, Blood & Roses: The Paston Family and the Wars of the Roses

“King Henry—have exchanged her son’s inheritance for”
― Helen Castor, She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth

“What had been right in 1431 in English Rouen – to secure the girl’s salvation by persuading her to abjure her heresy and embrace the loving counsel of the Church – was wrong twenty-five years later, in a kingdom from which God had driven the English with their tails between their legs.”
― Helen Castor, Joan of Arc

“For the first time in the kingdom’s history, all the contenders for the crown that Edward was about to relinquish were female.”
― Helen Castor, She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth

“And then, on 23 February, just eleven days after the massacre at Rouvray, a little band of six armed men arrived, dusty from the road, at the great castle of Chinon. With them rode a girl, dressed as a boy, her dark hair cut short. Her name was Joan, and she had come with a message from God.”
― Helen Castor, Joan of Arc

“For those in search of Joan herself, the surviving documents produced by these tribunals present a double challenge. Though their purpose may be clear, their rules of engagement – articles of inquiry, for example, glimpsed only through the responses they elicit – can be disconcertingly elusive. And the difficulty of interpreting the information they contain is compounded by the shockingly vivid presence of a girl who, through the unforeseeable effect of her own unyielding conviction, had achieved what should, for someone of her sex and class, have been impossible. Her forceful charisma is palpable in the transcript of the trial that condemned her to a heretic’s death. When dazzlingly displayed through the differently partisan judgement which annulled that verdict, it transformed the Maid into a legend, an icon and a saint.”
― Helen Castor, Joan of Arc

“It was to kings, not queens, that Tudor sovereigns looked for example and warning. (“I am Richard II, know ye not that?” Elizabeth sharply remarked in response to Shakespeare’s meditation on the nature of kingship.)”
― Helen Castor, She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth

“That evening, the king rode through the gates of Reims while crowds cried ‘Noël!’ in welcome. The cheers were politic, but their meaning was inscrutable; after so many years of conflict it was impossible to distinguish between expressions of relief and fear, between enthusiasm and exhaustion.”
― Helen Castor, Joan of Arc