Jonathan McGovern (historian)

Jonathan McGovern FRHistS (born 1993 ) is an English historian and author. He specializes in the study of Tudor England. He is one of the founders of the New Administrative History.

Education and career
McGovern was born in Derby and studied at Landau Forte College, then a City Technology College. He read History and English at St Peter's College, University of Oxford, where he won the Smith Prize. He holds a PhD in English from the University of York and has taught at Nanjing University, China. He is currently Professor of English at the College of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Xiamen University.

Historical perspective
He has defended traditionalist historical methods, arguing for the importance of empiricism in history "as a practical benchmark, not a philosophical position".

Thomas Becket
In 2021, he published his discovery of the eighteenth-century origin of the phrase "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest", which was formerly misattributed to Thomas Becket. The phrase actually originated with Robert Dodsley.

Awards and honours
He is winner of the Sir John Neale Prize (2018), the Gordon Forster Essay Prize (2018) and the Parliamentary History Essay Prize (2019). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a member of the Selden Society, a learned society dedicated to the study of English legal history.

Books

 * The Little History of England. The History Press (2024).
 * The Tudor Sheriff: A Study in Early Modern Administration. Oxford University Press (2022).

Selected articles

 * "Was Elizabethan England Really a Monarchical Republic?", Historical Research, vol. 92, no. 257 (2019), 515–28. doi.org/10.1111/1468-2281.12275.
 * "The Development of the Privy Council Oath in Tudor England", Historical Research, vol. 93, no. 260 (2020), 273–85. doi.org/10.1093/hisres/htaa003.
 * "Royal Counsel in Tudor England, 1485–1603", The Historical Journal, vol. 65, no. 5 (2022), 1442–69. doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X21000820.
 * "The Practical Historical Approach: A Review of the Principles and Methods of Fact-First History", World History Studies, vol. 9, no. 2 (2022), 1‒14.