Chester Jordan is Dayton-Stockton Professor of History and Chairman of the History Department. 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).
Jordadn 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 Senonais 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), and Unceasing Strife, Unending Fear: Jacques de Therines and the Freedom of the Church in the Age of the Last Capetians (Princeton University Press, 2005). His new book, A Tale of Two Monasteries: Westminster and Saint-Denis in the Thirteenth Century, appears this year from Princeton University Press.
He has 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). His current research focuses on church-state relations in the thirteenth and early fourteenth century, especially on the regulation of gifts to the church. In January 2009, Professor Jordan became President of the American Catholic Historical Association