“Saint Mary’s has really allowed me to step outside my comfort zone and be involved.”
William Chester Jordan
"Crusader Prologues: Preparing for War in the Gothic Age"
Click here for the video of the Christian Culture Lecture 2009**
Tuesday November 3, 2009
O'Laughlin Auditorium
Saint Mary's College
About Speaker William Chester Jordan
William Chester Jordan is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Princeton University. His many books on medieval culture include Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership (1980), The French Monarchy and the Jews from Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians (1989), Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial and Developing Societies (1993), The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (which received the Medieval Academy of America’s Haskins Medal for the outstanding book on the Middle Ages for 2000), Europe in the High Middle Ages (2001), and Unceasing Strife, Unending Fear: Jacques de Therines and the Freedom of the Church in the Age of the Last Capetians (2005). His latest book is A Tale of Two Monasteries: Westminster and Saint-Denis in the Thirteenth Century (2009). He is currently the president of the American Catholic Historical Association.
About His Talk
How did crusaders prepare themselves and those they were leaving behind psychically and spiritually for a holy war? The lecture addresses several aspects of this preparation and hopes thereby to enrich our understanding of the crusades in general.