2019 Hilldale Lecture:
William Chester Jordan
Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Princeton University
The lecture sketches out the background to the call for the First Crusade, narrates a few of the major events as context for the main story of the lecture, and then concentrates on what has been and can be learned from the Hebrew and Latin sources for the Jews’ responses. It concludes by raising the question of the appropriateness of the language of trauma to categorize the European phase of the crusade and its impact on the continent’s Jews.
William Chester Jordan is Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. He is a former Director of the Program in Medieval Studies and has also been Director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies (1994 to 1999). He is the author of several books: Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership (Princeton University Press, 1979); From Servitude to Freedom: Manumission in the Sénonais in the Thirteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986); The French Monarchy and the Jews from Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial and Developing Societies (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 1996; awarded the Haskins Medal of the Medieval Academy of America); Europe in the High Middle Ages (Penguin, 2001); Unceasing Strife, Unending Fear: Jacques de Thérines and the Freedom of the Church in the Age of the Last Capetians (Princeton University Press, 2005); 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); and From England to France: Felony and Exile in the High Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2015). His most recent book is The Apple of His Eye: Converts from Islam in the Reign of Louis IX (Princeton University Press, 2019). Another book-length study, Servant of the Crown and Steward of the Church: The Career of Philippe of Cahors (d. 1281) is currently in press with Medieval Academy of America Books. Professor Jordan has also edited a one-volume encyclopedia of the Middle Ages for elementary school pupils (Franklin Watts, 1999) and a four-volume version for middle school students (Scribner’s, 1996). He was the editor-in-chief of the first supplemental volume of the Dictionary of the Middle Ages (Scribner’s, 2004). He is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His current research focuses on migrant labor in the thirteenth and early fourteenth century. From January 2009 to January 2010 Professor Jordan served as President of the American Catholic Historical Association. In 2011-2012 he served as President of the Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America, and in March 2012 and April 2013, he was elected Second Vice-President and First Vice-President of the Academy respectively. He served as President in 2014-2015. On 5 June 2019 Harvard University awarded Professor Jordan the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws.
This event is co-sponsored by the Institute for Research in the Humanities, the Department of Art History, the Medieval Studies Program, the Center for the Humanities, the Department of History, and the Hilldale Lecture Find.
Free and open to the public. A reception will be held prior to the lecture at the University Club, 4:45-5:45. Details forthcoming.