Joseph Reese Strayer (born August 20, 1904, Baltimore, Maryland, – died July 2, 1987, Princeton, New Jersey, ) was an American medievalist who taught for nearly his entire career at Princeton University and chaired the history department there for 20 years (1942-62). He is regarded as one of the most influential American medieval scholars of the 20th century, particularly in terms of the number of students he trained who went on to define the field of medieval history in the United States for many decades thereafter. His primary scholarly interests lay in the legal and administrative institutions of the kingdom of France under the Capetian monarchs, as well as England under the Norman and Angevin dynasties.
Strayer was married twice. His first wife, Lois, with whom he had one daughter, passed away in 1984. In 1986, he married another retired medievalist, Sylvia Thrupp (1903-1997), a noted scholar of English social and economic history. He died in Princeton the following year after a brief illness.[7]
Strayer inherited from Haskins a strong commitment to Wilsonianprogressivism, and viewed history through the lens of the evolution of governmental institutions and law. Strayer's primary interests in medieval feudal institutions and kingship lay in their role in shaping the emergence of later nation-states in Europe and North America. Strayer famously described feudalism as "public power in private hands"[8] and saw the centralizing activities of medieval monarchies as attempts to reverse this fragmentation and create a more stable order around the state, thereby restoring the notion of a commonwealth and the public good. Norman Cantor recognized three books as most important to Strayer's legacy:[9]Feudalism (1965), which summarized three decades of his research and thinking on the topic; On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (1970), in which he shows the relevance of medieval historical institutions to modern governmental institutions;[10] and The Reign of Philip the Fair (1980), representing over 30 years of archival research and the most comprehensive work on the topic in any language – other than Jean Favier's Philippe le Bel (1978). Strayer was editor of the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, the largest and most comprehensive encyclopedia on the subject in the English language.
Strayer was engaged in intelligence work for many years during the Cold War with the CIA as a consulting analyst with the agency's Office of National Estimates. The extent of his involvement, at a time when the CIA was running covert operations to destabilize governments around the world (Iran, Brazil, Congo, Dominican Republic, Guyana and Chile), has never been fully assessed or verified.[11]
Strayer, who had known the CIA's first director, Allen Dulles, from his undergraduate days at Princeton, never revealed any details about his activities but told colleagues that he had been recruited as a consultant because Dulles knew that a medievalist would be skilled at gleaning critical information from sparse or fragmentary sources.[12]
Administration of Normandy Under Saint Louis (1932)
The Middle Ages, 395–1500 (1942) – an extended textbook survey. Originally co-authored by Dana C. Munro in 1942, by the 1959 4th edition it was mostly all Strayer. Cantor says it is important for "its brilliant summary of European political history from about 1050 to 1350".[9]
Western Europe in the Middle Ages: a Short History (1955) – a brief version of the above, reprinted in later editions.
The Interpretation of History (1950)
The Course of Civilization (1961)
Feudalism (1965)
On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (1970)
Medieval statecraft and the perspectives of history (1971)
^"Joseph Reese Strayer," Memoirs of Fellows and Corresponding Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America, Speculum Vol. 63, No. 3 (Jul., 1988), pp. 767-69, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2852701
^Although Strayer supervised his 1957 Ph.D thesis, Cantor's relationship with Strayer came under scrutiny following the publication of Inventing the Middle Ages (1991) in which Cantor made some claims about Strayer's imperious personality, scholarly abilities, and teaching style that were rejected by others who knew him. See, e.g. the scathing review by Richard W. Pfaff in Speculum 68, 1 (Jan. 1993), pp. 122-25. A very different assessment from Cantor's of Strayer as a teacher and mentor can be found in William C. Jordan and Teofilo Ruiz, “Joseph Reese Strayer,” in Patricia Marks, ed., Luminaries: Princeton Faculty Remembered (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 297–304
^This story is cited in a number of works about Strayer, but see Patrick J. Geary, "Fragments of Words, Fragments of Bodies," in Fragmente
Der Umgang mit lückenhaften Quellenüberlieferungen in der Mittelalterforschung, ed. Christian Gastgeber, et al. (Vienna, 2010), p. 13
Cavanagh, John, Dulles Papers Reveal CIA Consulting Network, Forerunner, April 29, 1980, [1]
Homem, A. L. C.;Freitas, J. G. (1991). «On a Medievalist’s Death»: Joseph R. Strayer (1904–1987), Revista da Faculdade de Letras [Porto University]. História, II sér., VIII (1991): 439–445.
Jordan, William C. and Teofilo Ruiz, “Joseph Reese Strayer,” in Patricia Marks, ed., Luminaries: Princeton Faculty Remembered (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 297–304
