Winner of the 2018 La corónica International Book Award

Philip Daileader is Professor of History in the Lyon G. Tyler Department of History at The College of William & Mary. His research focuses on the social, cultural, religious, and institutional history of the medieval Crown of Aragon and its neighbors from the twelfth through the fifteenth century. Professor Daileader is also the author of True Citizens: Violence, Memory, and Identity in the Medieval Community of Perpignan, 1162-1397 (Brill, 2000; French translation, 2004). His published articles have appeared in journals such as Speculum; Imago Temporis: Medium Aevum, published by the Universitat de Lleida; and Annales du Midi. He is currently pursuing two research projects. The first is a comparative history of Jewish expulsion in medieval Europe; the second is a study of the end of the Middle Ages in the Catalan town of Perpinyà.

In Saint Vincent Ferrer, His World and Life, Daileader provides a new, critical biography of the famous and controversial Valencian preacher. Drawing on Ferrer’s sermons both published and unpublished, as well as on canonization records, chronicles, correspondence, legislation, theological and polemical treatises, and a myriad of other materials, Saint Vincent Ferrer traces its subject’s career and follows his journeys from Valencia through France, Switzerland, Italy, Castile, and Brittany. The book reevaluates Ferrer’s work as a moral reformer, as a peacemaker, as a central figure in royal and ecclesiastical politics, as a proselytizer who inspired and worked for the wave of Jewish and Muslim conversions that swept across Castile and the Crown of Aragon in the 1410s, and as an apocalyptic preacher who maintained fervently that the end of the world was at hand. In doing so, Saint Vincent Ferrer sheds new light on the Iberian developments that would ultimately result in the fifteenth-century expulsions of Iberian Jews, as well as on the intensity of apocalyptic expectation in late medieval Spain and Europe more generally.

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