Community History
Professor John Watts
Featured Publication
The Making of Polities: Europe, 1300–1500
This major survey of political life in late medieval Europe provides a framework for understanding the developments that shaped this turbulent period. Rather than emphasising crisis, decline, disorder or the birth of the modern state, this account centres on the mixed results of political and governmental growth across the continent. The age of the Hundred Years War, schism and revolt was also a time of rapid growth in jurisdiction, taxation and representation, of spreading literacy and evolving political technique.
Research Projects
Current DPhil Students
Teaching
I have supervised sixteen doctoral students and a similar number of master's students on a range of topics in later medieval history, British and European, between the thirteenth and the early sixteenth centuries. I am most interested in politics, but I see that as a very broad field, and have enjoyed supervising work which is just as centrally concerned with culture and ideas, gender and sexuality, and society and the economy.
I teach a range of undergraduate papers in medieval history between 1000 and 1550, as well as historiography and the first-year option on 'Theories of the State'.