Center and Periphery: Studies on Power in the Medieval Worls in Honor of William Chester Jordan

William Chester Jordan’s scholarship has demonstrated the complexity of negotiating power at both the center and margins of medieval society, taking us into the inner chambers of medieval power structures where kings, churchmen and courtiers dwell to the margins of society inhabited by disenfranchised peoples such as Jews, women and the poor. Center and Periphery: Studies on Power in the Medieval World in Honor of William Chester Jordan, edited by Katherine L. Jansen, G. Geltner and Anne E. Lester, honors Professor Jordan by taking up these themes and expanding them from France into Spain, Italy, the Lowlands, and the Mediterranean. The volume highlights how Jordan’s work inspired and influenced a generation of medievalists working in North America and Europe today.
Contributors are John W. Baldwin, Adam J. Davis, Jonathan Elukin, Hussein Fancy, Michelle Garceau, G. Geltner, Erica Gilles, Holly J. Grieco, Maya Soifer Irish, Katherine L. Jansen, Emily Kadens, Richard Landes, Jacques Le Goff, Anne E. Lester, Christopher MacEvitt, David Nirenberg, Mark Gregory Pegg , Jarbel Rodriguez, E.M. Rose and Teofilo Ruiz.

Katherine L. Jansen is Professor of History at the Catholic University of America. The author of The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (2000), and has recently published Medieval Italy: Texts in Translation (2009), co-edited with Joanna Drell and Frances Andrews, and Charisma and Religious Authority: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Preaching, 1200-1500 (2010), co-edited with Miri Rubin. She is at work on a new monograph entitled, The Practice of Peace in Late Medieval Italy.
G. Geltner is Professor of Medieval History and Director of the Center for Medieval Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He is author of The Medieval Prison: A Social History (2008) and The Making of Medieval Antifraternalism: Polemic, Violence, Deviance, and Remembrance (2012), among other publications.
Anne E. Lester is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is the author of Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women’s Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-Century Champagne (2011); and co-editor, with Caroline Goodson and Carol Symes, of Cities, Texts, and Social Networks: Experiences and Perceptions of Medieval Urban Space, 400-1500 (2010). She is currently writing a book on the crusades and material culture entitled, Fragments of Devotion: Relics and Remembrance in the Time of the Fourth Crusade.