Professor George Garnett
Professor of Medieval History
St Hugh's College
01865 (2)74972
George Garnett is a medievalist with interests ranging well into the early modern period. He has supervised research students working on English and Norman history from the ninth to the fifteenth century; on medieval and early modern political thought; and on medieval and early modern legal history, both British and European.
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, is in press. Thanks to a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, he has just 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). 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.
