Publications

Books

The Life and Reign of King Henry VIII (Completed, on submission). 

The Early Parliaments of Henry VIII, 1510–1523 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2025). Forthcoming.

The Little History of England (Cheltenham: The History Press, 2024). 

The Tudor Sheriff: A Study in Early Modern Administration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

Praise for The Tudor Sheriff

'In McGovern's trenchant commentary, industrious research, and explanatory clarity, The Tudor Sheriff is an Eltonian book' –  Paul Cavill, Journal of British Studies

'This could, like so much institutional history, have been a somewhat dry book, but McGovern has skilfully leavened his discussion with a plethora of colourful examples . . . McGovern has produced a valuable addition to the literature, based on extensive archival work in both national and local repositories, and one that is not only informative, but readable and even enjoyable. This is administrative history at its best, and a book that should be essential reading for anyone concerned with the government or politics of the long 16th century' –  Hannes Kleineke, Parliamentary History

'Drawing upon impressively wide-ranging archival work in administrative and legal records . . . the book ably succeeds in its central ambition of demonstrating in comprehensive detail the workings of the shrieval system under the Tudors' –  K. J. Kesselring, English Historical Review

'Anyone who has worked on the administrative history of Tudor England has glimpsed the sheriff, a key figure in regional governance. Dr McGovern's book offers the most comprehensive effort so far to survey and summarise the work of these officers . . . [A]n exhaustively detailed study . . . attests to the capacity for painstaking administrative reconstruction to be valuable in its own right' –  Laura Flannigan, Northern History

'[P]erhaps what is most striking about this book is the confidence and flair with which it is written . . . there is much to commend, from the depth and breadth of archival research on display, to the comprehensive and ambitious nature of the study . . . At a fair price, there is no reason why this book should not occupy a valuable space in university libraries across the kingdom. Perhaps this publication will inspire others and pave the way for a series of new studies into the other various key offices of local administration in early modern England' –  Simon Lambe, History: Reviews of New Books

'The greatest strength of this work is the incredibly wide range of sources from multiple archives on which McGovern draws . . . Through a forensic investigation of a wide range of source material he provides a much-needed study of an important official which has to date been neglected. This book should, and undoubtedly will, become an important text for legal and political historians working on early modern England' – Spike Gibbs, Agricultural History Review

Articles

‘A New Manuscript Witness of William Fleetwood’s ‘Instruccions coment et en quell maner Statutes serrount expoundes’ (c. 1578)’. Accepted, forthcoming in the Journal of Legal History.

‘An Early Draft of John Hooker’s The Order and Usage How to Keep a Parliament in England in These Days (c. 1571).’ Accepted, forthcoming in Parliamentary History.

‘The Official Career of Sir Christopher Hales, Attorney-General and Master of the Rolls under Henry VIII,’ Historical Research 98, no. 279 (2025), 37–50.

‘State of the Field: The New Administrative History’, co-authored with Kirsty Wright and Connor Huddlestone, History: The Journal of the Historical Association 109, no. 388 (2024), 422–444. 

‘The Parliament of Birds and the Fall of Cardinal Wolsey: A Case Study of Political Allegory in Early Modern England’, co-authored with Yuxuan Tao, Studies in Philology 121, no. 4 (2024), 465–478.

‘Parliamentary Procedure in the Reign of Henry VI: New Light on Pilkington’s Case (1455)’, Parliamentary History 43, no. 3 (2024) 266–275. 

‘The Place of History in Wang Shouren’s Writings on Foreign Literature’, Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature 8, no. 2 (2024), 264–279.

‘Unpaid Debts to London Booksellers: John Harrison the Elder’s Lawsuit against Two Chapmen in 1585’, The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 24, no. 3 (2023), 332‒342. 

‘Publicity and Persuasion in Early Modern England: The Babington Plot and its Aftermath, 1586‒1588’, Parergon 40, no. 1 (2023), 119‒143.

‘The Practical Historical Approach: A Review of the Principles and Methods of Fact-First History’, World History Studies 9, no. 2 (2022), 1‒14.

‘Royal Counsel in Tudor England, 1485–1603’, The Historical Journal 65, no. 5 (2022), 1442–1469.

‘The Compters at Poultry and Wood Street in Early Modern London’, The London Journal 46, no. 3 (2021), 249–267.

‘Maliverey Catilyn’s “Booke of the Traytors”: A Narrative of the Treason Trials of Anthony Babington and his Confederates’, Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 140 (2020), 139–176.

‘The Presentation of the Speaker of the Commons in Tudor Parliaments: Pageantry, Persuasion and Management’, Parliamentary History 39, no. 3 (2020), 361–376.

‘The Sheriffs of York and Yorkshire in the Tudor Period’, Northern History 57, no. 1 (2020), 60–76.

‘Allegory as Counsel: “The Garden Plot” and the Anjou Marriage Negotiations of Queen Elizabeth I’, Studies in Philology 117, no. 4 (2020), 743–768.

‘The Development of the Privy Council Oath in Tudor England’, Historical Research 93, no. 260 (2020), 273–285.

‘Was Elizabethan England Really a Monarchical Republic?’, Historical Research 92, no. 257 (2019), 515–528.

‘A New Source Related to Balladry in the Pilgrimage of Grace’, Huntington Library Quarterly 82, no. 2 (2019), 303–313.

‘The Political Sermons of Lancelot Andrewes’, The Seventeenth Century 34, no. 1 (2019), 3–25.

Shorter Articles and Research Notes

‘A. F. Pollard as Unwitting Originator of the Phrase ‘I Would Not Open Windows into Men’s Souls’. Notes & Queries 72, no. 1 (2025), 41–42.

‘New Attestations of Two Proverbs from the Sixteenth Century’, co-authored with Hanzi Tao, Notes & Queries 72, no. 1 (2025), 29–30.

‘An Unnoticed Oration in Praise of Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester’, co-authored with Hanzi Tao, Notes & Queries 72, no. 1 (2025), 27–29.

‘Motto of Katherine Parr’. Notes & Queries 71, no. 4 (2024), 393.

‘“Forgyd Taylis”: A Gloss on Line 43 of Thomas Wyatt or Pseudo-Wyatt’s “O Cruel Heart”’, The Explicator 82, no. 4 (2024), 175–177.

‘An Early English Example of the “Kings are Gods” Argument’, Notes & Queries 71, no. 3 (2024), 299.

‘Sir Peter Carew as the Author of A Copye of a letter (1549) Concerning the Western Rebellion’, Notes & Queries 71, no. 2 (2024), 165–167.

‘Sir David Owen as Knight of the Shire for Sussex in 1523’, Notes & Queries 70, no. 1 (2023), 12.

‘The Identity of Robert Parke, Translator of Juan Gonzales de Mendoza’s Historia de China (1585, 1588)’, Notes & Queries 69, no. 3 (2022), 200–202.

‘Some Elizabethan Sermons Delivered at St. Paul’s Cross (1597)’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 73, no. 1 (2022), 114–116.

‘Thomas More at the Exchequer: A Manorial Dispute’, Moreana 58, no. 2 (2021), 240–242.

‘Three Tudor Tongue Twisters’, Notes & Queries 68, no. 4 (2021), 392–393.

‘The Origin of the Phrase “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”’, Notes and Queries 68, no. 3 (2021), 266.

‘Newly Discovered Notes of a Sermon by Hugh Latimer’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 71, no. 3 (2020), 596–601.

‘A Herald’s Account of Mary I’s Oration at the Guildhall (1 February 1554)’, Notes & Queries 66, no. 3 (2019), 387–388.

‘Nicholas Udall as Author of a Manuscript Answer to the Rebels of Devonshire and Cornwall, 1549’, Notes & Queries 65, no. 1 (2018), 24–25.