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.

"Medieval Italy" gathers together an unparalleled selection of newly translated primary sources from the central and later Middle Ages, a period during which Italy was famous for its diverse cultural landscape of urban towers and fortified castles, the spirituality of Saints Francis and Clare, and the vernacular poetry of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The texts highlight the continuities with the medieval Latin West while simultaneously emphasizing the ways in which Italy was exceptional, particularly for its cities that drove Mediterranean trade, its new communal forms of government, the impact of the papacy's temporal claims on the central peninsula, and the richly textured religious life of the mainland and its islands.A unique feature of this volume is its incorporation of the southern part of the peninsula and Sicily--the glittering Norman court at Palermo, the multicultural emporium of the south, and the kingdoms of Frederick II--into a larger narrative of Italian history. Including Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Lombard sources, the documents speak in ethnically and religiously differentiated voices, while providing wider chronological and geographical coverage than previously available.Rich in interdisciplinary texts and organized to enable the reader to focus by specific region, topic, or period, this is a volume that will be an essential resource for anyone with a professional or private interest in the history, religion, literature, politics, and built environment of Italy from ca. 1000 to 1400.