Professor George Garnett
Professor of Medieval History
St Hugh's College
Research Interests
His first research interests lay in English history of the tenth to thirteenth centuries, specifically what used to be called constitutional history. He has published a large study of the impact of the Norman Conquest on notions of kingship, succession, and tenure; a briefer introduction to the Conquest; and many essays on these and related themes. He also works on political thought in a more conventional sense: he has published an edition of Vindiciae, contra tyrannos, the highly influential sixteenth-century Huguenot resistance treatise, and a study of the role of providential history in the thought of the fourteenth-century Italian theorist and anti-papal publicist, Marsilius of Padua. An edition (jointly with M.J. Ryan) of the three treatises on city government and other related writings of the fourteenth-century civilian, Bartolus of Sassoferrato, was published in 2024. Thanks to a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, in 2021 he published the first volume of a history of the history of the Norman Conquest, from the late eleventh century to the beginning of the seventeenth: The Norman Conquest in English History, Volume I: A Broken Chain? (OUP 2021). It has just been reissued in paperback. The second volume will take the story up to the mid eighteenth century. Several prolegomena on early modern English lawyers and antiquaries are already in print.
He is Literary Director of the Selden Society.
Publications
The Norman Conquest in English History Volume I: A Broken Chain?
The Norman Conquest in English History, Volume 1: A Broken Chain? pursues a central theme in English historical thinking over seven centuries. Covering more than half a millennium, this first volume explains how and why the experience of the Norman Conquest prompted both an unprecedented campaign in the early twelfth century to write (or create) the history of England, and to excavate (and fabricate) pre-Conquest English law. Garnett traces the treatment of the Conquest in English historiography, legal theory and practice, and political argument through the middle ages and early modern period, examining the dispersal of these materials from libraries afer the dissolution of the monasteries, and the attempts made to rescue, edit, and print many of them in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. These preservation efforts enabled the Conquest to become still more contested in the constitutional cataclysms of the seventeenth century than it had been in the eleventh and twelfth.
DPhil Students
In the Media
- 2024 - Marsilius of Padua - BBC Radio 4, Melvyn Bragg