The Making of Polities
The Making of Polities
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. 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.
- The first overview of political life in late medieval Europe for thirty years
- Provides a new perspective on the age of the Hundred Years War, Peasant's Revolt, Great Schism, Black Death and Renaissance
- Combines a broad overview with attention to individual regions and states ranging from the British Isles to Poland, Scandinavia and the Mediterranean
Reviews & endorsements
"...his sanguine view of the importance of this period is compelling. Highly recommended." -Choice
"Watts’s book is a remarkable feat. It essays a reinterpretation of late medieval western European history which is far more than a work of synthesis …. It is courageous, original, and thought-provoking. It demonstrates the inadequacies of all the current conventional assumptions, and is to be welcomed for putting politics and ideas back at centre stage. Despite the title of the series in which it is published, this is much more than a text-book." – English Historical Review (2012) (George Garnett).
"very convincing book … develops a truly superb narrative, thanks to the European perspective" -Historische Zeitschrift (2010) (Karl Ubl)
"…succeeds with clarity and originality in its declared intention of reinterpreting and reassembling all the pieces of the puzzle in a coherent whole which is greater than the sum of its parts." - Storica (2010) (Isabella Lazzarini)
"an important new synthesis of late medieval politics and political culture: one that offers a strong and clear argument, both substantive and methodological; one that moves away from a focus on the nation-state and the large Western kingdoms; and one that succeeds in drawing out the parallels and commonalities that give the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries across the entire continent of Europe unity, logic, and direction." – The Medieval Review (2010) (Adam Kosto)
Product details
May 2009Paperback
9780521796644
484 pages
216 × 138 × 23 mm
0.67kg
2 maps
Available
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Table of Contents
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Europe in 1300: the political inheritance
- 3. The fourteenth century
- 4. The fifteenth century
- 5. Conclusion
- Bibliographical notes.
