Description:
This is a short and engaging study of an important and successful figure in thirteenth-century France, the radical reformer and bishop of Évreux, Philippe of Cahors.
Brief description:
William Chester Jordan is the Dayton-Stockton professor of History at Princeton University.
Review Quotes:
"William Chester Jordan draws on his vast knowledge of thirteenth-century sources to bring into the limelight another of the civil servants on whom Louis IX relied in his attempt to impose his own standards of behaviour on the restless crowd of his assorted subjects. From this study, Philippe of Cahors emerges from an undistinguished bourgeois background; Jordan's mastery of the documentation permits the reader to follow Philippe's ascent through solid patronage, his tasks as officialis in Reims, his early work as king's clerk, his duties as Keeper of the Seal, and then his episcopal preoccupations. In other words, Jordan provides a biography that allows us to appreciate the nature of the problems Philippe faced at different stages in his life, and as a consequence, the reader has a sense of getting to know Philippe more intimately than is usually possible for a thirteenth-century figure in the background of political life."
--Jean Dunbabin, St Anne's College, University of Oxford"With meticulous research, Servant of the Crown presents the entire career of a successful and important bishop in Louis IX's France. Readers will come away from this clear and concise book with a whole new level of understanding about how royal and episcopal government worked in thirteenth-century France."
--Sean L. Field, College of Arts and Sciences, The University of Vermont