Conversations with Tyler23 Juli 2025

Helen Castor on Medieval Power and Personalities

Helen Castor is a British historian and BBC broadcaster who left Cambridge because she wanted to write narrative history focused on individuals rather than the analytical style typical of academia. As someone interested in individual psychology and the functioning of power, Castor finds medieval England offers the perfect setting because its sophisticated power structures exist in "bare bones" without the "great apparatus of state," bringing individual power plays into sharper relief. Her latest book, The Eagle and the Hart, exemplifies this approach by examining Richard II and Henry IV as individuals whose personal choices became constitutional precedents that echo through English history.

Tyler and Helen explore what English government could and couldn't do in the 14th century, why landed nobles obeyed the king, why parliament chose to fund wars with France, whether England could have won the Hundred Years' War, the constitutional precedents set by Henry IV's deposition of Richard II, how Shakespeare's Richard II scandalized Elizabethan audiences, Richard's superb artistic taste versus Henry's lack, why Chaucer suddenly becomes possible in this period, whether Richard II's fatal trip to Ireland was like Captain Kirk beaming down to a hostile planet, how historians continue to discover new evidence about the period, how Shakespeare's Henriad influences our historical understanding, Castor's most successful work habits, what she finds fascinating about Asimov's I, Robot, the subject of her next book, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded April 2nd, 2025.

Help keep the show ad free by donating today!

Other ways to connect

Follow us on X and Instagram
Follow Tyler on X
Follow Helen on X
Sign up for our newsletter
Join our Discord
Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu
Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here.

Photo Credit: Stuart Simpson

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(295)

Andrew Graham-Dixon on Vermeer, a Forgotten Sect, and Underrated Artists

Andrew Graham-Dixon's new book, Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, rests on the conviction that you cannot understand what's in a painting without knowing what its maker was thinking about. In Vermeer's ...

22 Juli 0s

Chase Koch on Principles, Music, and Overcoming Entropy

Chase Koch grew up receiving Sunday philosophy lessons from his father Charles and, by his own account, spent most of them half asleep while his sister supplied the answers. The principles didn't land...

15 Juli 54min

Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth

Joel Mokyr co-won the 2025 economics Nobel for exploring the question that traces back to the beginning of economics: how did sustained economic growth suddenly become normal? For nearly all of human ...

8 Juli 46min

Joanne Paul on Thomas More and the Tudor World

Joanne Paul is a historian at the University of Sussex, author, and a go-to Tudor expert on YouTube. She tells Tyler she's drawn to the 16th century because it sits between the medieval and the modern...

24 Juni 50min

Dave Baszucki on Roblox, Teen Entrepreneurs, and the Future of Play

Dave Baszucki is co-founder and CEO of Roblox, the user-generated gaming platform where all the games are built by the community itself. With over 100 million daily active users and projected revenue ...

17 Juni 53min

Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character

Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian who has made a career out of explaining Germany to the world—and, just as importantly, to Germans themselves. Born in East Germany in 1985 and now based in Br...

10 Juni 1h 1min

Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization

Toby Wilkinson is one of the world's leading Egyptologists, whose books have ranged across the full sweep of pharaonic history. His latest, The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to ...

27 Maj 45min

Bob Spitz on the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and the Art of Biography

Bob Spitz has written major biographies of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones — but also, somehow, Ronald Reagan and Julia Child. In rock, his credentials were hard won: ...

13 Maj 55min