Professor John Watts
Professor of Later Medieval History
Corpus Christi College
Publications
The Wars of the Roses: A Medieval Civil War
This concise and interpretative book digs under the surface events of the Wars of the Roses to explore the underlying dynamics of a typical civil war. Beginning with a demonstration of why the well-worn storylines of the Wars are so misleading, it moves on to expose the pressure for reform that animated the conflict and helped to shape its outcomes. It continues by looking at the logics of division and the reasons why the Wars, once started, were so hard to resolve. It concludes by returning to debates long discussed by historians: the role of the economy in the conflict, and the interaction between English affairs and the politics of the British Isles and the near continent. Throughout, a central concern is to emphasise the fluidity and uncertainty of these civil wars: once authority broke down, anything could happen.
DPhil Students
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.