The Making of Polities: Europe, 1300-1500 (Cambridge Medieval Textbooks)
"...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)