The making of polities in later medieval Europe, 1300-1500 (completion of partly-written book).

我的研究目标是完成一本关于中世纪晚期欧洲政治的书，这本书的目标读者是学生和普通读者以及该领域的专家。我们倾向于认为14世纪和15世纪是一个衰落和混乱的时代，在这个时代，中世纪晚期的政治制度--如教皇君主制、神圣罗马帝国、十字军东征和骑士制度、意大利公社和罗马法律--在一系列战争、叛乱、饥荒和瘟疫的影响下腐朽了，这本书将主张呈现一幅更积极的图景。它将提出另一种解释，强调政治发展的过程，并试图解释它们是如何在导致战争和混乱的过程中发挥核心作用的，而这一时期是以战争和混乱著称的。中世纪晚期的政治和体制形式非但没有衰落，反而继续发展，使各种各样的权力者和权力中心--教皇和皇帝、国王和王子、贵族、教堂、军事教团、城市甚至农民--能够获得自己的管辖权、领土和/或其他形式的权力。这种政治创造力的直接结果是冲突和妥协的混合，潜在的竞争力量在对抗和接受等级制度之间转变--这就是为什么那个时期的王国、公国和城邦往往在一致性和和平性方面波动。但长期的结果是向更大的、地区或国家规模的政治过渡，其内部结构更复杂，能够在其边界内代表较小的权力和利益，这一点在15世纪日益明显。虽然这本书不会忽视这一时期的主要人口、经济和军事发展--13世纪10年代的饥荒、黑死病和随后的瘟疫、商业和货币的波动、百年战争，以及意大利、波兰、英国北部和西部以及巴尔干地区的一系列冲突--但它将使人们不再强调政治文化和政治进程在塑造那一时期的政治、经济和战争中所起的作用。

My research aims at the completion of a book on the politics of later medieval Europe, which is aimed at students and general readers as well as specialists in the field. Where we tend to think of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as an age of decline and chaos, in which the political institutions characteristic of the high middle ages - such as the papal monarchy, the Holy Roman Empire, the crusades and chivalrous knighthood, the communes of Italy and the Roman-law influenced kingships of the west - decayed amid a series of wars and revolts, famines and plagues, this book will argue for a more positive picture. It will propose an alternative account, emphasising processes of political development, and seeking to explain how they played a central part in causing the wars and disorders for which the period is so famous. Far from declining, the political and institutional forms of the high middle ages went on developing, enabling a wide range of power-holders and power-centres - popes and emperors, kings and princes, nobles, churches, military orders, cities and even peasants - to acquire jurisdiction, territory and/or other forms of power for themselves. The immediate result of this political creativity was a mixture of conflict and compromise, as potentially contending powers shifted between confrontation and the acceptance of hierarchy - and this is why the kingdoms, principalities and city-states of the period tended to fluctuate in coherence and peacefulness. But the long-term result, increasingly clear in the fifteenth century, was a transition towards larger, region- or nation-sized polities, whose more complex internal structures enabled the representation of the lesser powers and interests within their boundaries. While the account will not neglect the major demographic, economic and military developments of the period - the famines of the 1310s, the Black Death and succeeding plagues, the fluctuations in commerce and coinage, the Hundred Years War and the long sequences of conflict in Italy, Poland, Northern and Western Britain and the Balkans - it will restore a lost emphasis to the role played by political culture and process in shaping the politics - as well as the economy and the warfare - of the period.