Woman was never born to rule. Medieval man never doubted that simple proposition. Neither did the 15th- and 16th-century men whose deplorably low opinion of uppity women helps provide Helen Castor, an accomplished and elegant historian, with a framework for her third book.

It’s possible that the doomed Duke of York was voicing the view of Shakespeare himself when he informed Margaret of Anjou (Henry VI’s avenging queen, preparing to plunge a dagger into the usurping duke’s heart before mocking his corpse with a paper crown) that she was a “she-wolf” — and one worse, by far, than any of the four-legged variety. It’s certain that John Knox, hurling imprecations at England’s fervently Roman Catholic Queen Mary from his Genevan exile in 1558, believed he spoke for all Protestant men when he called women “a monstrous regiment” that, “among all enormities that do this day abound upon the face of the whole earth, is most detestable and damnable.” Unluckily for Knox, 1558 was the very year in which a Protestant woman succeeded her Catholic sister on the English throne. Grovelling letters from Geneva failed to win him the right, as a member of the superior sex, to issue manly guidance to the affronted new Queen Elizabeth.

For the purposes of Castor’s study, Elizabeth represents the apotheosis of female royalty. Here was a woman savvy enough to cast herself as mother of the nation (“for every one of you, and as many as are English, are my children”) while reassuring them that the daughter of Henry VIII also possessed “the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.” Skilful oratory also played a major role in Elizabeth’s hold over her subjects, an aspect of governance to which Castor gives scant attention. She might usefully have considered whether such a consummate mastery of rhetoric could have swayed the destinies of the four royal consorts who form the central subject of “She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth.”

Whatever Matilda, Eleanor, Isabella and Margaret may have lacked in eloquence, they compensated for in pluck. Which of us would care to replicate Henry I’s fearless daughter Matilda’s midnight flight from imprisonment in a castle by crossing an icebound river and trekking seven miles through the freezing countryside? Yet Matilda’s courage won no plaudits from the male chroniclers of medieval England. Ignoring the fact that Henry I had himself designated her as his successor, the disgruntled official historians gasped at her effrontery: “She actually made herself queen of all England and gloried in so being called.”