Jordan was subsequently elected Provincial of the Saxon-Thuringian Province a number of times, including one known later period from 1346 to 1351, when the plague called the Black Death was decimating the population.
By 1343 it was well known within the Order that Jordan was in search of documents that would assist him to compile a history of the sanctity of earlier members of the Order.
Possibly he hand-delivered it while there on official visitation of the Province of France in that year. This original copy, in possession of the French Government, still exists.
It contains much of what he could collect on Augustine, including his own Vita Santi Augustini (“Life of Saint Augustine”), legends about Augustine, and the pseudo-Augustinian Sermones ad fratres in eremo (“Sermons to the brothers in the hermitage") that much later was proven to be spurious.
This idea of collecting Order resources may have come to him from the example of his student days at Bolonga, where the Dominicans had a great house (convento), and where the body of Saint Dominic (died in 1222) was buried.
There is a wealth of ascetical and mystical material to be found in his three bulky collections of sermons, through which he came to exert a great influence on the sermons of the later Middle Ages and of the beginning of the modern era.
He also incorporated into these collections some of his earliest ascetic treatises (e.g., on the Lord's Prayer, virtues and vices, the articles of Faith, the Passion of Christ, etc.).
Jordan’s Meditationes de Passione Christi (“Meditations on the Passion of Christ”) are extant in 104 manuscripts in Latin text, all but two dating from the late fifteenth century, thirty-seven manuscripts of German and Dutch translations, and nine incunabala editions.
In 2002, Eric Saak, a contemporary scholar of medieval Augustinian history and theology, declared that this was the most widely disseminated work on the Passion of Christ written by an Augustinian in the later Middle Ages.
These meditations, which in the original Latin and in German translation were immensely popular and often reprinted, helped to mould the piety of the centuries that followed.
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