JORDAN, William Chester 1948-

PERSONAL: Born April 7, 1948, in Chicago, IL; son of Johnnie Parker and Marguerite Jane (Mays) Jordan; married Christine Kenyon Hershey, May 30, 1970; children: Victoria Marie, John Mark, Clare Kenyon, Lorna Janice. Ethnicity: "Black." Education: Ripon College, A.B., 1969; Princeton University, Ph.D., 1973.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Department of History, Princeton University, 232 Dickinson Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Historian, medievalist, educator. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, instructor, 1973-74, lecturer, 1974-75, became assistant then associate professor, 1975-86, professor of history, 1986—, Behrman Senior Fellow in the Humanities, 1989-94, director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, 1994-99. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, visiting lecturer, 1981-82; Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, visiting associate professor, 1985, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA, Morgan lecturer, 1985.

MEMBER: Medieval Academy of America (fellow), American Historical Association, American Council of Learned Societies, elected to the American Philosophical Society, Society for the Study of French History, Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East, Haskins Society.

AWARDS, HONORS: Haskins Medal, Medieval Academy of America, 2000; grants and fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Ford Foundation, Danforth Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Annenberg Research Institute; teaching award, Princeton University; Behrman Award, Princeton University, for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Bruce McNab and Teofilo F. Ruiz) Order and Innovation in the Middle Ages: Essays inHonor of Joseph R. Strayer, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1976.

Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study inRulership, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1979.

From Servitude to Freedom: Manumission in theSénonais in the Thirteenth Century ("The Middle Ages" series), University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1986.
The French Monarchy and the Jews: From Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1989.

Women and Credit in Pre-industrial and DevelopingSocieties, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1993.

The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the EarlyFourteenth Century, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1996.

(Editor-in-chief) The Middle Ages (juvenile; four volumes), Scribner (New York, NY), 1996.

(Editor-in-chief) The Middle Ages: A Watts Guide forChildren, Franklin Watts (New York, NY), 1999.

Europe in the High Middle Ages ("The Penguin History of Europe" series), Allen Lane (London, England), 2001, Viking (New York, NY), 2003.

Ideology and Royal Power in Medieval France: Kingship, Crusades, and the Jews ("Collected Studies" series), Ashgate (Burlington, VT), 2001.

(Editor, with Angela N. H. Creager) The Animal-Human Boundary: Historical Perspectives ("Studies in Comparative History" series), University of Rochester Press (Rochester, NY), 2002.

Contributor to journals.

SIDELIGHTS: William Chester Jordan has taught courses on Europe in the High Middle Ages and English Constitutional history to 1700. His career at Princeton University has also included his directorship of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. Jordan has written and/or edited volumes that have as their subjects his fields of interest, including one for younger children and a four-volume encyclopedia for middle-grade students.

Jordan's Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership is a biography of the king known as Saint Louis for his benevolence, but he was also obsessed with restoring Christian rule over the holy places. His first crusade (1248-1254) met defeat, and he died during his second. Library Journal's Richard C. Hoffman called the book "a work of professional scholarship."

From Servitude to Freedom: Manumission in the Sénonais in the Thirteenth Century is Jordan's study of serfdom in medieval France in which he uses one case study of the city of Sens which involves 366 men and women who were attached to the abbey of St. Pierre-le Vif. Geoffrey de Montigny became abbot in 1240 and ruled for forty-two years, during which time he asserted lapsed rights of control over the descendants of the original serfs. Some of the 366 were now wealthy, but others would be devastated by renewed bondage.

Jordan was able to draw on archived resources in writing the study. He follows the history to its conclusion, and notes financial agreements and arrangements, and notes that those men and women of most modest means were barely able to survive for many years as they paid for their freedom. The American Historical Review's Theodore Evergates called From Servitude to Freedom "a fresh reading of an important question in medieval social history."

The French Monarchy and the Jews: From Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians is a study of the domination of the Jews by the Capetian kings over a period of a century and a half, of the use of harassment and extortion, and ultimately expulsion, which led to the wave of anti-Semitism in the early twelfth century. The crown profited from the labor of the Jews through heavy taxation, the seizure of debts, and appropriation of property, then expelled them in 1306. Malcolm Barber wrote in History: The Journal of the Historical Association that "this is a sensitive and objective study of an emotive and often painful subject."

Robert C. Stacey noted in Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies that Jordan used every piece of evidence available and resurrected new information from the national and provincial archives. He also culled data from Hebrew sources. Stacey wrote that "the effect is stunning. For the first time, we have a truly convincing account of the relationship between a high-medieval state and the Jewish minority that dwelt within it. Neither history will look quite the same again." Stacey called the book "the most consistently probing analysis I have read of the social and psychological realities that underlay the relationship between Christians and Jews in thirteenth-century France. A synthesis of political, administrative, and social history, it is a model of clarity, erudition, and sympathetic intelligence."

Jordan's Women and Credit in Pre-industrial and Developing Societies is divided into three sections. In the first, he studies the roles of both Christian and Jewish medieval European women who lent money. Christian women offered trades, extended credit, and gave cash advances to good customers, while Jewish women were the more professional moneylenders, largely because this was the profession to which Jews were then restricted. Both, however, dealt with the smallest domestic market—other women. The second section covers lending for investment in late medieval and early modern Europe, and the third addresses credit in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean during the colonial and postcolonial periods.

Elaine Kempson reviewed the book in the American Journal of Sociology, writing that for her, "the interesting question he [Jordan] leaves unanswered is why, when the rest of the credit market has changed beyond all recognition over the last six or seven hundred years, have women remained so important in small-scale lending in the domestic market?"

With The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century, Jordan studies rural and urban life during the late medieval period. The famine began in 1315 with two years of heavy rains and bitter cold that destroyed harvests and washed away soil. Animals suffering from weather-induced disease died along with crops, and the price of food skyrocketed, resulting in starvation among the masses. Jordan notes that people turned to eating plants, bark, dirt, cloth, leather, diseased animals, and even human cadavers to survive, resulting in epidemics that further reduced their numbers. The poor were the most frequent fatalities, but the wealthy did not escape untouched.

Jordan writes that the small towns were more efficient in distributing food to their citizens than were royals, but their success in obtaining food resulted in grain riots. By 1320, the effects of the famine were minimal, but Jordan suggests that children whose immune systems were compromised were the most susceptible when bubonic plague began to sweep Europe in 1348. Historian reviewer Lisa Rosner wrote that "this well-written book combines a detailed discussion of the Great Famine with some of the clearest exposition available of rural and urban life in the late middle ages."

The four-volume The Middle Ages, for which Jordan acted as editor-in-chief, contains 659 subject entries ordered alphabetically. The encyclopedia is a joint effort between the publisher, the American Council of Learned Societies, and Visual Education Corporation.

Europe in the High Middle Ages is one volume in a Penguin series and is written for the new student of the period. The various essays cover the eleventh through the fourteenth centuries. A Kirkus Reviews contributor commented that Jordan "writes elegantly and ironically . . . giving the reader a broad but not dumbed-down view of medieval society and its complexities. . . . A first-rate work in its own right."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, February, 1987, Theodore Evergates, review of From Servitude to Freedom: Manumission in the Sénonais in the Thirteenth Century, pp. 115-116; April, 1989, Charles T. Wood, review of Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership, pp. 391-404; February, 1991, Roger S. Kohn, review of The French Monarchy and the Jews: From Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians, p. 151; December, 1994, Susan Mosher Stuard, review of Women and Credit in Pre-industrial and Developing Societies, pp. 1652-1653.
American Journal of Sociology, September, 1994, Elaine Kempson, review of Women and Credit in Pre-industrial and Developing Societies, pp. 564-566.

Booklist, January 1, 2003, Brendan Driscoll, review of Europe in the High Middle Ages, p. 840.

Economist, January 19, 2002, review of Europe in theHigh Middle Ages, p. 71.

Historian, summer, 1998, Lisa Rosner, review of TheGreat Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century, p. 902.

History: The Journal of the Historical Association, June, 1991, Malcolm Barber, review of The French Monarchy and the Jews, pp. 286-287.

Journal of Ecclesiastical History, July, 2003, Colin Morris, review of Europe in the High Middle Ages, p. 542.

Journal of Economic History, September, 1994, Jane Humphries, review of Women and Credit in Pre-industrial and Developing Societies, pp. 732-733.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, autumn, 1990, John W. Baldwin, review of The French Monarchy and the Jews, pp. 323-325; summer, 1995, Kathleen Biddick, review of Women and Credit in Pre-industrial and Developing Societies, p. 85.

Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2002, review of Europe in the High Middle Ages, p. 1751.

Library Journal, February 15, 1980, Richard C. Hoffman, review of Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade, p. 502; March 15, 2003, Robert J. Andrews, review of Europe in the High Middle Ages, p. 96.

Medium Aevum, fall, 1998, James G. Clark, review of The Great Famine, p. 374.

Publishers Weekly, December 16, 2002, review of Europe in the High Middle Ages, p. 59.

RQ, winter, 1996, Betty Porter, review of The MiddleAges, p. 302.

School Library Journal, July, 2000, Andrew Medlar, review of The Middle Ages: A Watts Guide for Children, p. 118.

Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, October, 1988, Franklin J. Pegues, review of From Servitude to Freedom, pp. 948-949; July, 1991, Robert C. Stacey, review of The French Monarchy and the Jews, pp. 648-650.

Times Literary Supplement, May 17, 2002, M. T. Clanchy, review of Europe in the High Middle Ages, p. 29.