The Making of Polities

This major survey of political life in late medieval Europe - the first for more than thirty years - provides an entirely new 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. This mixture of state formation and political convulsion lay at the heart of the 'making of polities'. Offering a full introduction to political events and processes from the fourteenth century to the sixteenth, this book combines a broad, comparative account with discussion of individual regions and states, including eastern and northern Europe alongside the more familiar west and south.

(Cambridge)

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'This is a work of genuine importance, excellently constructed and rigorously thought out, combining accessibility with great originality. It is a wise, mature, thought-provoking book. This book injects new life into the study of late medieval politics; it offers a highly stimulating and easily accessible overview of political conduct in the late Middle Ages; it is rich in new ideas and will be a fundamental point of reference for future discussion of the politics of the period.' David Abulafia, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge

(Cambridge)

John Watts is a Fellow and Tutor in History, Corpus Christi College, Oxford. His previous publications include Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (1996) and, as editor, Power and Identity in the Middle Ages (2007).

(Cambridge)

1. Introduction; 2. Europe in 1300: the political inheritance; 3. The fourteenth century; 4. The fifteenth century; 5. Conclusion; Bibliographical notes.

(Cambridge)