Carl Watkins

Carl Watkins is a British medieval historian and author specialising in the religious, cultural and political history of medieval Britain. He is Professor in British History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Magdalene College. His research concentrates particularly on the central and later Middle Ages, exploring how medieval people understood religion, supernatural phenomena, death, prophecy, miracles and political authority. Watkins is especially interested in the difficult boundary between learned theology and popular belief, using chronicles, sermons, miracle collections and other contemporary sources to reconstruct the mental world of medieval communities.

His books include History and the Supernatural in Medieval England, which examines attitudes towards miracles, magic, prophecy and the supernatural between roughly 1050 and 1250, and The Undiscovered Country: Journeys Among the Dead, a broader history of changing British beliefs about death, ghosts and the afterlife. Watkins also wrote Stephen: The Reign of Anarchy for the Penguin Monarchs series, reassessing King Stephen and the civil conflict of the twelfth-century Anarchy. Rather than presenting the period simply as a collapse into disorder, Watkins examines Stephen's uncertain political authority, the disputed royal succession and the pressures that shaped the actions of the king and his magnates. His work therefore combines cultural and religious history with close analysis of medieval kingship and political society.