More information about these sources would have been welcome. And a form letter in the Codex Dunensis designed to help monks in stricken monasteries find refuge in happier ones is fascinating, but nothing is said about what the Codex really was or when it was written. What essentially interest Jordan are analytical questions. 3 Jordan is unmoved by this updated Marxism. Jordan seems to be a centrist liberal.
Some interpretations lack nuance.
Contemporaries, Jordan says, viewed the awful event as God's punishment for sin. That is indeed what the sources say, but, as was sometimes the case among persecuted Jews during the Middle Ages, a way to bolster a badly shaken faith in God's beneficence is to blame oneself for one's own suffering. 5 Jordan often questions other writers, sometimes harshly. The French are not much better, he thinks, and only Germans seem to master the literature in languages other than their own. Again, although flattered by being listed along with Richard Smith, Rodney Hilton, and R. H. Britnell, whose monographs show that they specialize in the subject, this reviewer is himself caught out.