Download PDF | (Later Medieval Europe, 11) Katherine L. Jansen, Guy Geltner, Anne E. Lester (eds.) - Center and Periphery_ Studies on Power in the Medieval World in Honor of William Chester Jordan-Brill (2013).
334 Pages
FOREWORD
Jacques Le Goff
I thank my American medievalist colleagues warmly for their friendship and for the honor of inviting me to write the preface to this volume in recognition of William Chester Jordan on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday. I do not know Professor Jordan personally. I had the great pleasure of meeting him on just one occasion: at one of the famed meetings at Kalamazoo. But I have read his key works, in particular his major books; and I regard him truly as one of the greatest living medievalists. I am struck foremost by the extent of Professor Jordan’s activity and his productivity in medieval history generally.
In particular, I am interested in the themes that—within the vast field of medieval studies—have been the focus of his attention and inspired his interest. I admire as well the way in which he has combined research, teaching, and his ability to write for the general public at a high level, as reflected in the interest he has taken in younger generations, not only with regard to students, but also with respect to children and young readers as well. It seems to me that, from the beginning, what has shaped Jordan most profoundly is the fact that he is a product of Princeton University and has now become one of the great teachers of that university in turn. He received his PhD in 1973 under the direction of one of the great medievalists.
This, of course, was Joseph R. Strayer. He was also a student of Gaines Post, a historian who gave new life to medieval history in the United States. He was a student at Princeton with Teofilo Ruiz, his friend and mine, and they have published articles together and edited their own festschrift, with Bruce McNab, in honor of Strayer, Order and Innovation in the Middle Ages, which appeared in 1976. William Chester Jordan has spent his career at Princeton University: rising from his first appointment as an Assistant Professor in history in 1973 though his promotion to Full Professor in 1986, ultimately to serve as chair of the department, beginning in 2008. Beyond Princeton, he has been honored widely by major academic institutions: he was elected to the Medieval Academy of America in 1997; the American Philosophical Society in 2000, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. Reflective of Jordan’s broad interests is the breadth of his knowledge of languages going far beyond the languages necessary for a medievalist, such as Latin, to encompass not only Greek and Sanskrit, but also Old Norse and Hebrew. Among spoken languages he converses not only in French and German, but Dutch, Spanish, and Russian.
In addition to the major monographs he has written, which I will discuss below, Jordan’s bibliography of published work is extensive. First are the numerous articles he has contributed to dictionaries that have broadened American and English readers’ knowledge of the Middle Ages: he authored thirty entries in the original Dictionary of the Middle Ages, nineteen entries in Medieval France: An Encyclopedia, and another twenty-nine entries in the new Supplement to the Dictionary of the Middle Ages which he also edited, writing articles on a vast array of topics. As a medievalist Jordan is interested not only in individual states, but in Europe as a whole, which, as I have argued, was born from the Middle Ages. In this regard, I would mention the quality of his short text, Europe in the Middle Ages, published in the Penguin series The Idea of Europe. Yet among the states that Jordan has studied, the place of privilege is given to France. An interest without doubt that grew out of his special regard—as we will see—for the person and the politics of Saint Louis, an interest, which I believe has brought us together for a long time now, and for which I respect the quality and often the novelty of his work.
An example of this is his short but rich article “Saint Louis” in Viator. Let me now turn to William Chester Jordan’s major works, which in my opinion and that of numerous medievalists will certainly leave a deep impression on the history of the Middle Ages. Jordan’s first book appeared in 1979 and caught my attention because I was in the middle of writing my own book on the subject, Saint Louis. His book was titled Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade with the subtitle A Study in Rulership. The title names the two interests most dear to Jordan: King Louis IX, who was not yet Saint Louis, and the crusade, the phenomenon which has not ceased to interest Jordan. But the subtitle is, as is often the case, significant. The religious aspect of the crusades of Saint Louis had been studied. Jordan, however, examined first and foremost Louis’s departure on crusade as it shaped a medieval ruler’s manner of governing. Thus, from this first book, emerged the theme that would be fundamental for Jordan: power in the Middle Ages.
The books that followed all trace aspects of this theme. His second book appeared in 1986, From Servitude to Freedom: Manumission in the Sénonais in the Thirteenth Century. Here Jordan took up an aspect essential to the changes of power and social relations in France during the thirteenth century: the freeing of serfs, which of course changed the forms of government. The book that followed this one addressed a theme that would remain one of Jordan’s major interests, that is, the Jews and their situation in medieval Christendom. At issue is the close consideration of an important group within the Christian domain that was instrumental to the economy. Furthermore, they belonged to another religion, one from which the dominant religion, Christianity, had descended and with whom they maintained both difficult and hostile relations. This book, of course, is his study on The French Monarchy and the Jews from Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians, published in 1989. The book that followed this again extended Jordan’s field of research and reflection.
This was entitled Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial and Developing Societies. In this instance, three relatively new themes would appear. The first is women. Jordan recognized that women formed half of society and that relations between men and women, within Christianity and in a fief-holding society, have specific characteristics that also affect the power of social class and family, not to mention the presence of religious women in the Church. Jordan places women in their economic context, revealing both their power and their relation to that obsession of the medieval economy: the loan, or credit. This is an understudied field that is especially revealing of women’s place and power. But Jordan builds on this to observe two phenomena that are fundamental to the medieval period: the medieval economy was not about industry, it predates that and is thus limited to the rural and artisan economy. But it is not—as has been said before in the twentieth century—a static or sterile period, rather it is a period of social development.
Jordan thus gives to his vision of the medieval a new virtue, not progress, but development, growth, dynamism. Jordan’s Middle Ages is a period that is moving toward the future. The wonderful book that followed, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton 1996), is perhaps the principal work of Jordan’s career. In western Europe, famine was one of the three great harbingers of the Apocalypse, along with disease and war. The first part of the book seeks the causes of the famine, and a great historian like Jordan knows that for medieval men and women there are earthly causes and divine causes, which are nearly always entwined. In the case of the famine, the earthly causes were most often excessive rain (this is, thus, a contribution to environmental history) and war. On the spiritual side, God, who put in motion these harbingers did so—medieval people believed—to punish men. After examining the famine’s devastation, Jordan analyzes the economic side of the catastrophe through the evolution of prices and wages and then examines the social effects of the crisis by distinguishing between the experiences of lords and that of peasants. In the end, he shows how men and women of the fourteenth century struggled to survive this catastrophe, which revealed the weak foundations of the medieval economy.
The first two parts of the book focus on the countryside. But Jordan, as a true historian who feels the need to study all parts of society touched by the famine, devotes the third part of the book to towns and states (or in Jordan’s language, “principalities”). I consider this book one of the masterpieces of global history. Disease and war have their great medieval historians; the third monstrous horse of the Apocalypse, famine, has its own in William Chester Jordan. This tireless researcher and thinker turned next to a delicate field where historians often venture without success (as underlined in a celebrated, if a little over-stated pamphlet by Marcel Détienne): comparative history. But with his characteristic historical sense Jordan chose to compare two institutions that offered him this possibility because they were at the same time contemporaries, equivalent, and yet different. From this he produced the beautiful book, published in 2009 with Princeton University Press, A Tale of Two Monasteries: Westminster and Saint-Denis in the Thirteenth Century.
The two monasteries, each tied in their own way to the English and French monarchies, are a remarkable example, as Jordan brings to light, of the bonds unifying the principal spiritual and political powers of the Middle Ages, the Church and the two major monarchies of Christendom: the English and the French. Once more Jordan shows in this exemplary and brilliantly treated case-study the imbrication of religion and politics in the Middle Ages and the various forms of power in this time when Christendom had the luck not to be a theocracy. Those who wish to traverse the Middle Ages and try to understand its complexity, and who seek the joys of reading a text that is clear and beautifully written, will find all of this, along with the pleasure and plenitude of this period, in the work of William Chester Jordan, who I hope will continue for a long time to offer us brilliant and sparkling insights into the history of the medieval West. Abridged and translated by Anne E. Lester
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