John Watts, The Making of Polities: Europe, 1300-1500

Watts, John. The Making of Polities: Europe 1300-1500. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.

John Watts is primarily interested in establishing a different paradigm for considering political systems in the late medieval Europe (a period designation which, among several others, Watts identifies as part of a misleading critical tradition still largely based on work from the 1960s and 1970s). Watts argues that most historical scholarship of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Europe focuses on three “Grand Narratives” of political development: socioeconomic, warfare, and early statehood. For Watts, each of these is problematic as they place all events as deriving from the narrative at hand, neglecting necessary attention to other influential factors. Instead of following one of these or even creating a new narrative, John Watts indicates that his purpose is to consider how various structures and systems of power influence political development in this period. By taking this approach, Watts hopes to avoid the pitfalls that come with ascribing a single grand narrative to a long period of history with a great amount of varying factors. For Watts, fourteenth and fifteenth century Europe was under the opposing and overlapping influences of a number of different systems and structures, including large secular organizations such as empires, kingdoms, and cities, religious institutions such as the medieval Church, and even systems of thought including the prevalence of Roman law and Aristotelian philosophy. I imagine it worked something like this:

In other words, rather than looking at a single system of causal events, one has to consider how a great deal of systems and structures overlap, interconnect, oppose, and react to one another in order to better understand the historical situation of a given period.

By focusing on the patterns that crop up in this period, Watts hopes to consider this period without engaging in the tunnel vision that other grand narratives can cause. Moreover, considering the various structures and patterns that lead to historical events rather than focusing on a single variable elucidates study of how events in one historical period lead to another. To point, Watts maintains that “Taken all together, these forms and patterns, physical, mental, and linguistic, can be regarded as the basic currencies in which later medieval politics were conducted: they help to explain why the politics of these centuries followed the courses they did, and why and how they changed over time” (36).  This approach to political history of late medieval Europe seems to reflect more recent scholarly work, albeit at a more sweeping scale. For example, Dr. Alisoun Beach’s recent keynote address at the 2012 Translatio conference focused in large part on a practice in German scholarship called Landesgeschichte (or, to translate the term poorly, Regional History). This practice often focuses on a single area and limited time frame in order to consider all of the potential factors that could have significance to the events therein. Watts’ focus is obviously much larger geographically and temporally, but his approach to consider a wide range of possible influences on political development forces one to move beyond the single grand narrative that seems most appealing.  

In regards to my own interests, Watts’ book does more than provide an interesting overview of political change in the late middle ages. One aspect I’ve struggled a bit with my work is that, in approaching Middle English texts from an economic and gender studies approach, I might be both limiting the scope of my own readings and arguing that economic issues are the primary way to read these texts. I certainly think that medieval economic thought is important to these texts – and vital to understanding a larger cultural concern with money, labor, and women – but if I follow Watts’ approach and consider economic thought as not the predominant issue but one structure among many that influences these texts, I feel that I’ll have room to consider the importance of these issues without ignoring the many other overlapping influences on these texts. In a way, Watts’ main approach has had this effect on how I approach my work: