William Chester Jordan

William Chester Jordan
Born (1948-04-07) April 7, 1948 (age 76)
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
EducationRipon College (BA)
Princeton University (PhD)
Occupations
  • Medievalist
  • professor
Notable workEurope in the High Middle Ages (2004)
TitleDayton-Stockton Professor of History
AwardsHaskins Medal (1996)
American Philosophical
Society (2000)
American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2009)

William Chester Jordan (born April 7, 1948) is an American medievalist who serves as the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University; he is a recipient of the Haskins Medal for his work concerning the Great Famine of 1315–1317. He is also a former director of the Program in Medieval Studies at Princeton. Jordan has studied and published on the Crusades, English constitutional history, gender, economics, Judaism, and, most recently, church-state relations in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Biography

Jordan received an undergraduate education at Ripon College, earning a bachelor's degree in history, mathematics, and Russian studies.[1] In 1973, he earned his Doctor of Philosophy from Princeton University, where he was a student of Joseph R. Strayer. He was the director of the university's Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies from 1994 to 1999.[2] In 1996, he won the annual Haskins Medal from the Medieval Academy of America for his work on the Great Famine, published in The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century. He was elected the second vice-president of the Medieval Academy of America in 2012.[3] Since 2003, Jordan has served as a trustee of the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, NC.

Jordan has shown a marked interest in pedagogy and edited single-volume and four-volume encyclopaedias on the Middle Ages, aimed at the elementary and middle-school audiences respectively. He is the editor-in-chief of the first supplemental volume of the Dictionary of the Middle Ages.

Besides his scholarship on the Great Famine, Jordan is also known for his study of the reign of Louis IX of France, especially with respect to his Crusades. His Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade is "the most comprehensive secondary source account of the seventh crusade currently available" and has been cited by Frances Gies, Malcolm Barber, and Robert Chazan.[4]

Jordan was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2000,[5] and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.[6] He was awarded the prestigious Barry Prize for Distinguished Intellectual Achievement by the American Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2024.[7]

Publications

Books

  • Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership (Princeton University Press, 1980)
  • From Servitude to Freedom: Manumission in the Senonais in the Thirteenth Century
  • The French Monarchy and the Jews from Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians
  • Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial and Developing Societies
  • The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 1996)
  • Europe in the High Middle Ages (Penguin Books, 2002)
  • A Tale of Two Monasteries: Westminster and Saint-Denis in the Thirteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2009)
  • Men at the Center. Redemptive Governance under Louis IX (Central European University Press, 2012)
  • From England to France: Felony and Exile in the High Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2015)
  • Unceasing Strife, Unending Fear: Jacques de Thérines and the Freedom of the Church in the Age of the Last Capetians (Princeton University Press, 2016)
  • The Capetian Century, 1214-1314 with Jenna Rebecca Phillips (Brepols, 2017)
  • The Apple of his Eye: Converts from Islam in the Reign of Louis IX (Princeton University Press, 2020)
  • Servant of the Crown and steward of the Church: the career of Philippe of Cahors (University of Toronto Press, 2020)

Book chapters

Articles

  • The Last Tormentor of Christ: An Image of the Jew in Ancient and Medieval Exegesis, Art, and Drama. Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series, Vol. 78, No. 1/2 (Jul.–Oct., 1987), pp. 21–47.
  • The Erosion of the Stereotype of the Last Tormentor of Christ. Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series, Vol. 81, No. 1/2 (Jul.–Oct., 1990), pp. 13–44.
  • Approaches to the Court Scene in The Bond Story: Equity and Mercy or Reason and Nature. Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring, 1982), pp. 49–59.
  • Jews, Regalian Rights, and the Constitution in Medieval France. Association for Jewish Studies Review, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1998), pp. 1–16.

References

Notes

  1. ^ "William Chester Jordan | Department of History". history.princeton.edu. Retrieved 2023-02-05.
  2. ^ "Award Ceremonies 2012: Spring General Meeting - Henry Allen Moe Prize in the Humanities William Chester Jordan". American Philosophical Society. Retrieved 4 November 2015.
  3. ^ Medieval Academy of America Annual Meeting Report. http://www.medievalacademy.org/?page=Meeting_Report
  4. ^ Holt (2005).
  5. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2021-11-30.
  6. ^ "William Chester Jordan". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 2021-02-11.
  7. ^ "Awards". American Academy of Sciences & Letters. Retrieved 2024-10-27.