People

Contact details

Email: joe.bergin@manchester.ac.uk

Profile

Joseph Bergin has been Emeritus Professor of Modern History since his retirement in 2011, having taught at the University since 1978. He is a Fellow of the British Academy (1996), Correspondant Étranger of the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (2011) and a member of the Academia Europea (2012).

His research interests lie mainly in the religious, social and political history of early modern France from the later sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, but also has strong comparative historical interests, especially in Italian, German and Spanish history of the same period. He has also been active for many years as a translator of historical scholarship from French to English, having recently translated Arlette Jouanna’s The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre: the mysteries of a crime of state, for Manchester University Press (2013). His most recent work is a book entitled The Politics of Religion in 17th Century France, due for publication in 2014. After which he hopes to write a one-volume history of France for Palgrave’s Essential Histories series. Formerly chair of MUP’s Editorial Committee (1998-2011), he continues to act as an editor of its Studies in Early Modern European History.

Nick Higham is Emeritus professor in Early Medieval and Landscape History in History, SALC, University of Manchester. His research interests focus on two interrelated areas: the History and Archaeology of the Early Middle Ages in Britain, and the Landscape and Settlement History of North West and North England in the Middle Ages. He has supervised many successful research students in both areas.

Contact details

Email: Nick.J.Higham@man.ac.uk

Telephone: +44 (0)162 587 4792

Dr. Nicholas John Higham
History
School of Arts, Languages and Cultures
The University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester
M13 9PL

Principal publications

Authored books

• The Carvetii Sutton, Tribes of Roman Britain Series, 1985, 2nd. Ed. 1991, 158pp (joint author)
• The Northern Counties to AD 1000 Longman, Regional History of England Series, 1986, 392pp
• Rome, Britain and the Anglo-Saxons Routledge 1992, 263pp
• The Kingdom of Northumbria AD 350-1100 Sutton, 1993, 296pp
• The origins of Cheshire 1993 MUP, 231pp
• The English Conquest: Gildas and Britain in the Fifth Century MUP, 1994, 220pp
• An English Empire: Bede and the early Anglo-Saxon Kings MUP, 1995, 269pp
• The Convert Kings: power and religious affiliation in early Anglo-Saxon England MUP 1997, 293pp
• The Death of Anglo-Saxon England Sutton, 1997, 234pp
• The Norman Conquest Sutton 1998, 118pp
• King Arthur: Myth-Making and History Routledge 2002, 295pp

Reviews

'shows brilliantly how the quite different historical contexts of HB and AC give rise to different Arthurs, both in terms of their symbolic figuration and of their political meaning. ...a marvellously detailed, accessible and thoughtful account not only of the origins of the historical Arthur, but also of the ways in which early texts can be interpreted in their historical context and through close reading in terms of the Old Testament models necessary for salvation history.' TLS, July 12 2002

'Voici une belle leçon d'historographie...Cette étude represente, en somme, un jalon essentiel dans les études arthuriennes, un ouvrage immanquablement a retenir dans la literature pléthorique consacrée au sujet'. Martin Aurell, Medieval Review, October 2003

''a valuable contribution to the case for seeing Arthur as a mythical construct rather than a historical reality' Barbara Yorke, History, July 2003

'an essential read for all concerned with the history of sub-Roman Britain or with Arthurian Literature' Stephen Fanning, Speculum, Apr. 2004

A Frontier Landscape: The North-West in the Middle Ages Windgather Press 2004, 273pp
(Re-)Reading Bede: The Ecclesiastical History in Context, Routledge 2006, 279pp

Edited books

• The Changing Past Manchester University, Dept. of Extra-Mural Studies, 1979, 87pp
• Excavations at Ordsall Hall Demesne Farm 1978-79, Greater Manchester Archaeological Group 1980, 36pp
• Edward the Elder, Routledge 2001, 320pp (jointly with D.H.Hill)
• Archaeology of the Roman Empire: a memorial to Professor G. D. B. Jones, British Archaeological Reports International Series 940, 2001, 355pp

Conference Proceedings

• 'Early Field Survival in North Cumbria', British Archaeological Reports BS 48, 1978, 119-26
• 'An aerial survey of the Upper Lune Valley' in The Changing Past ed. N. J. Higham, 1979, 31-8
• 'Continuity in North West England in the 1st Millennium A.D.' ditto, 43-52
• 'Native settlements west of the Pennines', in Rome and the Brigantes ed K. Branigan, Dept. of Archaeology, University of Sheffield, 1980, 41-7
• 'The Roman impact upon rural settlement in Cumbria', in Rural Settlement in the Roman North, ed. P. Clack & S. Hazelgrove, CBA, Durham, 1982, 105-22
• 'The Scandinavians in North Cumbria', in Scandinavian Settlement in Cumbria ed. I Whyte, Scottish Society for Northern Studies, 1985, 37-52
• 'Roman and Native in England north of the Tees: Acculturation and its Limitations', in Rome and the Barbarians, Barbarians and Romans in North-West Europe, ed. J. C. Barrett, Oxford 1989, 153-71
• 'Northumbria, Mercia and the Irish Sea Norse, 893-926' in Viking Treasure from the North-West: the Cuerdale hoard in its context ed. J. Graham-Campbell, Liverpool Museums, 1991, 21-30
• 'Territorial organisation in pre-conquest Cheshire', in The Middle Ages in the North-West ed. T. Scott & P. Starkey, Leopard's Head Press for Liverpool Centre for Medieval Studies, 1995, 1-14
• 'Patterns of Patronage and Power: the governance of late Anglo-Saxon Cheshire', in Government, Religion and Society in Northern England 1000-1700 ed. J. C. Appleby & P. Dalton, Sutton, Stroud, 1-13
• 'The Saxon Conquests in Britain: literary evidence and the case for acculturation in the formation of Anglo-Saxon England' in Studien zur Sachsenforschung 11, ed, H-J. Habler, 1998, 135-44
• 'Dynasty and Cult: the utility of Christian mission to Northumbrian kings between 642 and 654', in Northumbria's Golden Age ed. J. Hawkes and S. Mills, Sutton 1999, 95-104
• 'King Edwin of the Deiri: rhetoric and the reality of power in early England', in Early Deira: Archaeological studies of the East Riding in the fourth to ninth centuries ed. H. Geake & J. Kenny, Oxbow 2000, 41-50
• 'King Edward's posthumous reputation: an introduction' in Edward the Elder ed. N. J. Higham & D. H. Hill, Routledge, 2001, 1-11
• 'The Anglo-Saxon/British interface: History and Ideology', in The Celtic Roots of English, ed. M Filppula et al. University of Joensuu, Studies in English 37, 2002, 29-46
• 'Viking-age settlement in the north-western countryside: lifting the veil?' in Land, Sea and Home ed. J. Hines, et al. Society for Medieval Archaeology, 2003, 
• 'Harold Godwineson: The construction of kingship', in Harold II and the Bayeux Tapestry ed. G. Owen-Crocker, Boydell & Brewer, 2005, 19-34.

Papers

• 'Frontiers, Forts and Farmers: Cumbrian Aerial Survey 1974-5', Archaeological Journal 132, 1975, 16-53 (equal joint author)
• 'Continuity Studies in the first millennium A.D. in North Cumbria' Northern History 14, 1978, 1-18
• 'Dyke systems in Northern Cumbria' Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 28, 1978, 142-56
• 'Two enclosures at Dobcross Hall, Dalston', CWAAST 81, 1981, 1-6
• '"Native" settlement on the north slopes of the Lake District', CWAAST 82 (1982), 29-33
• 'A Romano-British Farm Site and Field System at Yanwath Wood, near Penrith', CWAAST 83, 1983, 49-58
• 'The excavation of two Romano-British farm sites in North Cumbria' Britannia 14, 1983, 45-72 (main author)
• 'Tatton: Settlement and Land-use in one Cheshire Township c.A.D. 1000-1400', The Manchester Geographer NS7 1986, 2-17
• 'The origins of Inglewood Forest' CWAAST 86, 1986, 85-100
• 'Brigantia Revisited' Northern History 23, 1987, 1-19
• 'Landscape and Land-use in Northern England: a survey of agricultural potential', Landscape History 9, 1987, 35-44
• 'The Cheshire Land-holdings of Earl Morcar' Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 137, 1988, 139-47
• 'The Cheshire burhs and the Mercian frontier to 924', Antiquarian Society of Lancs. and Ches. 85, 1989, 193-222
• 'Hough Hall: the trial excavation of a moated platform in Mere township, Cheshire', Chester Archaeological Journal 70 1990 (for 1987-8), 87-98
• 'Settlement, land use and Domesday Ploughlands', Landscape History 12 1991, 33-44
• 'Old Light on the Dark Age Landscape: the description of Britain in the De Excidio Britanniae of Gildas' Journal of Historical Geography 17, 1991, 363-72
• 'Gildas, Roman Walls and British Dykes' Cambridge 
• Medieval Celtic Studies 22 1991, 1-14
• 'Medieval "Overkingship" in Wales: the earliest evidence' Welsh History Review 16, 1992, 145-59
• 'King Cearl, the battle of Chester and the origins of the Mercian "overkingship"', Midland History, 17, 1992, 1-15
• 'Domesday Book: its context and purpose', History 78 1993, 7-21
• 'Gildas and "Agitius": a comment on De Excidio x,1' Bulletin of the Board for Celtic Studies 40, 1993, 123-34
• 'Literary evidence for villas, towns and hillforts in fifth-century Britain', Britannia 25, 1994, 229-32 
• 'The context of Brunanburh' in Names, Places and People, an onomastic miscellany for John McNeal Dodgson ed. A. R. Rumble & A. D. Mills, Paul Watkins, Stamford, 1997, 144-56
• 'Bishop Wilfrid in southern England: a review of his political objectives', Studien zur Sachsenforschung13, 1999, 207-17.
• 'The Tatton Park Project, Part 1: Prehistoric to Sub-Roman Settlement and Land Use', Chester Archaeological Journal 74, 1999 (for 1996-7), 1-61 (main author)
• 'The Tatton Park Project, Part 2: the medieval estates, settlements and halls' Chester Archaeological Journal 75, 2000 (for 1998-9), 61-133
• 'Britons in Northern England in the early middle ages: through a thick glass darkly', Northern History 28, 2001, 5-25
• 'The Tatton Park Project, Part 3' Chester Archaeological Journal 76, 2002 (for 2000-1), 81-125

Encyclopaedia entries

• 'The Danelaw', Raedwald, King of East Anglia', 'Wapentake', 'East Anglia: an Anglo-Saxon kingdom', in Blackwell's Companion to Anglo-Saxon England ed. M. Lapidge, J. Blair, S. Keynes & D. Scragg, Oxford 1999
• 'Deserted Medieval Villages', 'Archaeology and History', 'Croft', 'Toft' 'Messuage', in Medieval Archaeology: an encyclopaedia ed. P. J. Crabtree, Garland Publishing, New York, 2001

Book Reviews

I have published numerous reviews of historical and archaeological monographs in Northern History, History, Speculum, Medieval Archaeology, Landscape History, Nomina, History and Archaeology Review, Albion, American Historical Review, History, Britannia, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, Medieval Settlement Research Group Annual Report, Transactions of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, and Landscapes.

Virtual Field Trips

I have an ongoing interest in new styles of teaching and learning, having served from 1996-2000 as Dean for Undergraduate Studies in the Faculty of Arts. During 2003, I have been experimenting with web-based techniques of widening student access to visual material relevant to the medieval landscape, constructing virtual fieldtrips to Laxton Open Fields, Nottinghamshire, and Tatton Park, Cheshire.

Over the next few years, I propose to extend this to include a series of thematic virtual fieldtrips to different types of monument and/or landscape, focusing particularly on North West England. As illustration, the image above is a page from the virtual field trip to Tatton Park, illustrating the exploration of an early prehistoric site beside Tatton Mere, which was excavated as part of the Tatton Research Project in the 1980s.

About

I am a  social historian of modern Britain and Europe and Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Manchester. My personal website is at www.patrick-joyce.com

Please please feel free to contact me by email at patrickjoyce2@gmail.com or patrick.joyce@manchester.ac.uk, especially if you wish to discuss the experience and history of peasants. Or, the history of time and  the transformation of the past in recent decades, the subject of my future work. 

I have just (May 2023) completed a book called Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World To be published by Allen Lane/The Penguin Press in the UK and Scribner/Simon and Schuster in the USA. In the book I consider how peasants in advanced western societies are now being lost to memory after millenia of time as the dominant social group. This is a loss we all share. The writing invokes the Irish peasant past of my forbears but sets this in the context of the end of the European peasantry, west and east. The book is set in Italy and Poland as well as Ireland. Why should we remember, and how are peasants now remembered?  

In recent writing I have combined history, memoir,  and photography in my new book called  Going to my Father’s House: A History of My Times. Published by Verso, Spring 2021. Parts of this have appeared in Field Day Review as “The Journey West”, in Field Day Review, 10, 2014 and “Time Thickens, Takes on Flesh: The Other West” in  Field Day Review 11, 2015. See on the right for a download of both essays. 

Two interviews about my work as an historian, conducted by the Universities of Padua and Bologna Cultural History Centre, 2009, are available on video, “Patrick Joyce. The Politics of History and History of the Political” and “Cultural History and the Necessity of the Social”.

Research

Education: Cardinal Manning Secondary Modern School, west London, 1956-1961; University of Keele , 1965-9, BA 1969; Balliol College, University of Oxford, D.Phil. 1975.

1979-2007: I taught in the University of Manchester Department of History.  I have held various visiting and other positions, including Professorial Fellow and Honorary Professor, History, University of Edinburgh; Visiting Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics, and University of California San Diego: Visiting Professor of History  at the University of California, Berkeley;  and New York University. I have been a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute Florence, a Trinity Long Room Hub Fellow at Trinity College Dublin,  and a Moore Fellow at the University of Galway, among other positions. I have given research papers in China, Russia, India, and in Brazil, and at numerous universities in Europe. 

 “For over thirty years Patrick Joyce has challenged orthodoxies in history and the social sciences. Through his engagements with cultural Marxism, the linguistic turn, Foucault’s work on governmentality, and material culture, his has been a consistently radical voice in the successive debates over the future and politics of social and cultural history since the later 1970s. While his research has ranged widely from the politics of class in Victorian England to the formation of the modern self, it has always shown a preoccupation with liberalism, modernity and the discipline of history. Although his work has concentrated on Britain, its influence has registered widely, not only in Britain and North America, but across much of the world.”

From the conference in honour of Patrick Joyce, Manchester, March 2008 (see the Festschrift, The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Britain).

Publications

Books

• Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World (Allen Lane/The Penguin Press and USA, Scribner/Simon and Schuster, early 2024)
• Going to My Fathers House: A History of My Times (Verso, 2021)
• The State of Freedom: A Social History of the British State since 1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
•  ed., with Tony Bennett, Material Powers: History, Culture and the Material Turn (Routledge, 2010).
• The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the City in Britain (Verso, 2003).
• The Social in Question : New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, edited by Patrick Joyce, with contribution (Routledge, 2002).
• The Oxford Reader on Class, edited and introduced by Patrick Joyce (Oxford University Press, 1995).
• Democratic Subjects: the Self and the Social in Nineteenth-century England (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
• Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1848-1914 (CUP, 1991).
• The Historical Meanings of Work, edited and introduced by P. Joyce (Cambridge University Press, 1987; CUP Paperback, 1989).
• Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (Harvester Press, Brighton, 1980; Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 1980; Gregg Revival 1991).

Articles include

• Chandra Mukerji and Patrick Joyce “The State of Things: Reconfiguring State History and Theory”, Theory and Society, 2017.
• “The Journey West”, Field Day Review, 10, 2014
  “Time Thickens: the Other West”, Field Day Review, 11, 2015
• What is the Social in Social History?” Past & Present, 206, Feb. 2010
• “The gift of the past: towards a critical history” in K. Jenkins, et al (eds), Manifestoes for History (Routledge, 2007).
• “More secondary modern than postmodern”, Rethinking History, 5:3, Dec.2001.
• “The politics of the liberal archive”, in History of the Human Sciences, Feb.,1999. a revised version of this published 2005, ed. Hans Erich Boedecker, Libraries As Archives (Max Planck Institute and Vandenhoeck & Ruprect, Gottingen).
• “The return of history : postmodernism and the politics of academic history in Britain”, Past and Present, no 158, Feb 1998 207-235.
• “The end of social history?”, Social History, 20:1, Jan. 1995, 73-91.
• “The imaginary discontents of social history”, Social History, 18:1, Jan. 1993.
• “History and post-modernism”, Past and Present, 133, Nov. 1991.
• “Work”, chapter in Cambridge Social History of Great Britain, 1750-1950, vol.II (3 vols.), ed. F.M.L. Thompson (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 131-195.
• “The factory politics of Lancashire in the later nineteenth century”, Historical Journal, XVIII, no. 3, 1975, 525-555

A number of the article and chapters cited above are also extensively anthologised in various readers on the nature of contemporary history, post-modernism and history, etc.

Contact Details

Email: stephen.h.rigby@manchester.ac.uk

You can also view my page at Academia.edu

Profile

Although I retired from the University of Manchester in 2010, I have remained research active. I have four main areas of interest in my research, all of which relate to the undergraduate and postgraduate teaching which I did before retirement. In all of these areas, I have tried to show how traditional medievalist scholarship and empirical historical research can be enhanced by an engagement with a variety of theoretical approaches.

The first of these research topics is medieval English social and economic history, particularly in the period c.1086-1530. Much of my work, including my book on Medieval Grimsby, my edition of the Boston customs accounts, 1377-99 and my article on late-medieval urban population in Economic History Review (2010), has explored urban economic development in the period after the Black Death and I have also published on town government and urban social and political conflict. My English Society in the Later Middle Ages attempted to provide an overview of the period and of the variety of sociological and economic theories with which historians have made sense of it.

My second area of research and teaching is late medieval English literature in its historical context. My Chaucer in Context was a survey of critical attempts to establish the social meaning of medieval literature, an area I also explored in my article on medieval defences of women for Chaucer Review, my discussion of literature as social ideology in the Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages and my Wisdom and Chivalry which discusses Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ in relation to medieval political theory.

My third area of research has been the philosophy of history and the relationship between history and social theory. In particular, I have been interested in assessing the strengths and weaknesses of historical materialism and of Marxist historiography, a subject that I explored in my Marxism and History, Engels and the Formation of Marxism, in my article on ‘Historical causation’ and in the paper on Marx and Engels’s views on medieval society published in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. More recently I have offered an assessment of Foucauldian theory in my discussion of Cabrera’s attempt to codify a ‘postsocial’ historiography.

Finally, in more recent years, my work on medieval literature has led to an interest in medieval social and political theory. Here I have published on Giles of Rome’s defence of contemporary social hierarchies, on the social and political theory of Christine de Pizan and on the use of Aristotelian ethical and political theory by late medieval moralists.

I am currently editing a volume for Oxford University Press in which historians attempt to locate Chaucer’s pilgrims in the ‘General Prologue’ to the Canterbury Tales in their historical context and future projects include an article on the representation of peasants in medieval social ideology.

Publications

Books

• Marxism and History: a Critical Introduction (Manchester University Press, 1987), vi + 314 pp.
• Engels and the Formation of Marxism: History, Dialectics and Revolution (Manchester University Press, 1992), viii + 246 pp.
• Medieval Grimsby: Growth and Decline (Hull University Press, 1993), ix + 224 pp.
• English Society in the Later Middle Ages: Class, Status and Gender (Macmillan, 1995). xii + 408 pp.
• Chaucer in Context: Society, Allegory and Gender (Manchester University Press: Manchester Medieval Studies, 1996), xii + 205 pp.
• Marxism and History: a Critical Introduction (2nd edition, Open University set course-book, Manchester University Press, 1998), xviii + 314 pp.
• The Overseas Trade of Boston in the Reign of Richard II (Lincoln Record Society, 93 (2005), xxxviii + 302).
• Wisdom and Chivalry: Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Medieval Political Theory (Brill, 2009, xvi + 329 pp).
• Marxism and History: a Critical Introduction Translated into Chinese with a new Preface (Yilin Publishing House, 2012), 389 pp.

Edited collections

• A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages (Blackwell, 2003), xviii + 665.
• Town and Countryside in the Age of the Black Death: Essays in Honour of John Hatcher, with Mark Bailey (Brepols, 2012), xxxvii + 472 pp.
• Historians on Chaucer: the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Articles

• 'Urban decline in the later middle ages: some problems of interpreting the statistical data', Urban History Yearbook (1979), pp. 46-59.
• 'The Grimsby lay subsidy roll of 1297', Lincolnshire History and Archaeology, 14 (1979), pp. 39-40.
• 'Urban decline in the later middle ages: the reliability of the non-statistical evidence', Urban History Yearbook (1984), pp. 45-60.
• 'Boston and Grimsby in the middle ages: an administrative contrast', Journal of Medieval History, 10 (1984), pp. 51-66.
• 'The customs administration at Boston in the reign of Richard II', Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 58 (1985), pp. 12-24.
• '"Sore decay" and "fair dwellings": Boston and urban decline in the later middle ages', Midland History, 10 (1985), pp. 47-61.
• 'Late medieval urban prosperity: the evidence of the lay subsidies', Economic History Review, second series, 39 (1986), pp. 411-6 (with replies by J. F. Hadwin and A. R. Bridbury, Ibid., pp. 417-22, 423-6).
• 'Urban "oligarchy" in the later middle ages', in J. A. F. Thomson, ed., Towns and Townspeople in the Fifteenth Century (Alan Sutton, 1988), pp. 62-86.
• 'Urban society in early fourteenth-century England: the evidence of the lay subsidies', in B. Pullan and S. Reynolds, eds, Towns and Townspeople in Medieval and Renaissance Europe: Essays in Memory of J. K. Hyde, B.J.R.L., 72 (1990), pp. 169-184.
• 'Making history', History of European Ideas, 12 (1990), pp. 827-31.
• 'Marxism and the middle ages', History Today, 41/11, (1991), pp. 26-8.
• 'Marxism and the middle ages'. Reprinted in A. Ryan et al., After the End of History, (Collins and Brown, 1992), pp. 14-18.
• 'Historical causation: is one thing more important than another?', History, 80 (1995), pp. 227-42.
• 'Engels revisited', History Today, 45/8 (1995), pp. 8-10.
• 'Marxist historiography' in M. Bentley, ed., Companion to Historiography (Routledge, 1997), pp. 889-928.
• 'Approaches to pre-industrial social structure', in J. H. Denton, ed., Orders and Hierarchies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Macmillan, 1999), pp. 6-25.
• 'Engels after Marx: history', in T. Carver and M. Steger, eds, Engels After Marx (Pennsylvania State U. P., 1999), pp. 109-43.
• 'Medieval England: To have and have not', New Left Review, 236 (1999), pp. 154-9.
• 'Death and old age in the middle ages'. Journal of Early Modern History, 3 (1999), pp. 80-83.
• 'Robin Hood' and 'Social classes and social conflict', in N. F. Cantor, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages (Viking, 1999), pp. 363-4, 390-2.
• 'Government, power and authority, 1300-1540', (with E. Ewan), in D. Palliser, ed., Cambridge Urban History of Britain, volume I (Cambridge U. P., 2000), pp. 291-312.
• 'The Wife of Bath, Christine de Pizan and the medieval case for women', Chaucer Review, 35 (2000), 133-65.
• 'Gendering the Black Death: women in later medieval England', Gender and History, 12 (2000), pp. 745-54.
• '"John of Gaunt's Palace" and the Sutton family of Lincoln', Lincolnshire History and Archaeology, 35 (2000), pp. 35-9.
• 'England: literature and society', in S. H. Rigby, ed., A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages (Blackwell, 2003), pp. 497-520.
• 'England: social conflict and popular politics', (with J. C. Whittle) in S. H. Rigby, ed., A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages (Blackwell, 2003), pp. 65-86.
• 'Serfdom' in J. Mokyr, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, volume 4 (Oxford U. P., 2003), pp. 463-7.
• 'Gendering the Black Death: women in later medieval England'. Reprinted in P. Stafford and A. B. Mulder-Bakker, eds, Gendering the Middle Ages (Blackwell, 2001), pp. 215-24.
• 'Historical materialism: social structure and social change in the Middle Ages', Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 34 (2004), pp. 473-522.
• 'Society and politics', in S. Ellis, ed., An Oxford Guide to Chaucer (Oxford U. P., 2005), pp. 26-49.
• 'Historical causation: is one thing more important than another?'. Reprinted in M. Burns, ed. Historiography: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, vol. II (Routledge, 2005), 27: 226-42.
• History, discourse and the postsocial paradigm: a revolution in historiography?, History and Theory, 45 (2006), pp. 110-23.
• 'Marx, Engels and the Middle Ages', in N. Fryde et al., eds, Die Deutung der mittelalterlichen Gesellschaft in der Moderne (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2006), pp. 147-80.
• 'Social structure and economic change in late medieval England', in R. Horrox and M. Ormrod, eds, Cambridge Social History of England, 1200-1500 (Cambridge U. P., 2006), pp. 1-30.
• 'English society in the later middle ages: deference, ambition and conflict', in P. Brown, ed., A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c.1350-c.1500 (Blackwell, forthcoming).
• 'Ideology and utopia: prudence and magnificence, kingship and tyranny in Chaucer's "Knight's Tale"', in M. Davies and A. Prescott, eds, London and the Kingdom (forthcoming).
• 'Three estates' and 'Theoretical approaches: social and economic history of the middle ages', in R. E. Bjork, ed., Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages (Oxford U.P., 2010), pp. 1617-9, 1625-6.
• 'English society in the later middle ages: deference, ambition and conflict' (see above), translated in Anales de Historia Antiqua, Medieval y Moderna, 42 (2010).
• 'Population, 1086-1524' and 'Wealth and power: secular wealth', in C. Phillips and T. Phillips, An Historical Atlas of Staffordshire (Manchester U.P., 2011), pp. 38-9, 52-3.
• 'Aristotle for aristocrats and poets: Giles of Rome's De regimine principum as theodicy of privilege', Chaucer Review, 46 (2011-12), pp. 259-313.
• 'Medieval Boston: economy, society and administration’, in S. Badham and P. Cockerham, eds, ‘The beste and fayrest of al Lincolnshire’: The Church of St Botolph's, Boston, Lincolnshire, and its Medieval Monuments (British Archaeological Reports, British Series, 554 (2012), pp. 6-28).
• 'Political thought', in G. Owen-Crocker, et al,. eds, Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles (Brill, 2012), pp. 422-6.
• ‘The body politic in the social and political thought of Christine de Pizan (unabridged version)’, on-line Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes, Études christiniennes, mis en ligne le 12 mars 2013. URL : http://crm.revues.org/12965
• ‘The body politic in the social and political thought of Christine de Pizan (abridged version). Part I: reciprocity, hierarchy and political Authority’, Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes, 24 (2012), pp. 461-83.
• ‘The body politic in the social and political Thought of Christine de Pizan (abridged version). Part II: social hierarchy and social justice’, Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes, forthcoming.
• ‘Worthy but wise? Virtuous and non-virtuous forms of courage in the later middle ages’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer (forthcoming, 2013).
• ‘Reading Chaucer: Literature, history and Ideology, in S. H. Rigby, ed., Historians on Chaucer: the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Oxford U. P., forthcoming).
• ‘The Knight’, in S. H. Rigby, ed., Historians on Chaucer: the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Oxford U.P. forthcoming).