Professor Carl Watkins

Carl Watkins carries out research into religious culture in the later middle ages and is especially interested in beliefs about, and conceptualisations of, the supernatural in this period. His work encompasses the methodological problems of studying medieval religion, 'high' theological change and 'popular' beliefs about the afterlife and ghosts, angels and demons, miracles and divine signs. He has written about concepts of sinfulness and the emergence of purgatory, has completed a book for Cambridge University Press which explores beliefs about the supernatural in a medieval English context and has, more recently, explored beliefs about the dead during the middle ages (and beyond) in a wider-ranging book published by Bodley Head. He has written also written a short biography of King Stephen (for the ‘Penguin Monarchs’ series).

MA, PhD.

Thirteenth-Century England XVII: Proceedings of the Cambridge Conference 2017, Boydell (2021) (with Andrew Spencer).

'Otherworld Journeys of the Central Middle Ages', in Imagining the Medieval Afterlife, ed. R. Pollard, Cambridge University Press (2020).

Thirteenth-Century England XVI: Proceedings of the Cambridge Conference 2015, Boydell (2017) (with Andrew Spencer).

'Saints and Martyrs', in The Medieval World, ed. P. Linehan, J. Nelson and M. Costambeys (second edition, 2017).

Stephen, Penguin Monarchs (2015)

The Undiscovered Country: journeys among the dead, The Bodley Head (2013).

'Landscape and Belief in Anglo-Norman England', Anglo-Norman Studies 35 (2013).

‘Debating the Good Death: a long view’ (History and Policy Opinion Article, 2013).

‘Religion and Belief’ in A Social History of England, 900-1200, ed. Elisabeth van Houts and Julia Crick, Cambridge University Press (2011).

‘Providence, Experience and Doubt in the Middle Ages’, in Fictions of Knowledge: Fact, Evidence, Doubt, ed. S. Mukherji, Y. Batsaki and J.-M. Schramm, Palgrave (2011).

‘Fascination and Anxiety in Medieval Wonder Stories’, in The Unorthodox Imagination in Late Medieval Britain, ed. Sophie Page (MUP, 2010), 45-65.

History and the Supernatural in Medieval England, Cambridge University Press (2007).

‘“Folklore” and “Popular Religion” in Medieval Britain,’ Folk-Lore, 115, (2004), 140-50.

'Sin, Penance and Purgatory in the Anglo-Norman Realm: the evidence of visions and ghost stories', Past and Present (2002).

‘Memories of the Marvellous in the Anglo-Norman Realm’, Medieval Memories: men, women and the past in the middle ages, ed. E.M.C van Houts, Longman (2001), 92-112.

‘Doctrine, Politics and Purgation: the Vision of Tnúthgal and the Vision of Owein at St Patrick’s Purgatory’ in Journal of Medieval History, 22 (1997), 225-36.