Dr. William Chester Jordan, Dayton-Stockton professor of history at Princeton University, will deliver the 14th Annual Emanuel Levine History Lecture at Rider University on Thursday, April 20.

Dr. Jordan will speak on “The Truth about Sanctuary in the Middle Ages,” at 7:30 p.m. in Sweigart Hall Auditorium in the College of Business Administration. His talk is free and open to the public.

Drawing upon archival research and published legal cases from the medieval period, as well as other sources, Dr. Jordan will strip away many misconceptions about the medieval right of the Catholic Church to provide sanctuary from secular authorities.

Dr. Jordan is the prize-winning author of "The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century," as well as several other books on medieval history. He is also the recipient of many honors and awards, including a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, an Annenberg Research Institute Fellowship, and the Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities. He is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy and of the American Philosophical Society.

Sponsored since 1991 by the Rider University history department, the Levine Lecture series is named in honor of the late Dr. Emmanuel Levine, professor of history at Rider for more than 30 years prior to his death in 1980. Previous speakers in the series include Josiah Ober, professor of classics at Princeton University; Michael Zuckerman, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania; James McPherson, professor emeritus of history at Princeton University; Dr. Jerome Handler, a senior research fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Dr. Dorothy Ko, professor of Chinese history at Barnard College of Columbia University, and Dr. Steven Hahn, winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in History.