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An early Augustinian to whom all subsequent historians of the Augustinian Order are always grateful is Jordan of Saxony O.S.A. (c. 1299 - c. 1380).
He is sometimes also called Jordan of Quedlinburg.
His writings and the historical materials he collected provide a rare and accurate insight of the mentality of the Order before and during his lifetime.
He is not to be confused with another Jordan of Saxony from sixty years previously, who was a Dominican friar of the same name who was the second Prior General of the Dominicans, and was drowned at sea off the coast of Syria while sailing back from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the year 1237.
Both of these men attended the University of Paris, and were noted early historians of their respective religious orders.
He was called "of Saxony" because presumably that was the part of Germany where he was born no later than the year 1299, and the area where he joined the Order of Saint Augustine.
Jordan would have undertaken his novitiate year in 1314 when fourteen years old (the earliest age of entry then permitted by the Constitutions of the Order).
Even at that early age, it was noted that Jordan was exceptionally gifted intellectually.
After receiving his initial Augustinian formation locally at Erfurt in 1315-16, he was sent to the studium generale (general study house) of the Order of Saint Augustine at the famed University of Bolonga (Italy).
This was probably from 1317 to 1319, and then he went to the Augustinian studium generale (international house of study) in Paris for three additional years of education to earn the right to teach in a studium with the academic degree of Lector i.e., completion of a rigorous five years of study of philosophy, logic and theology. For reasons now unknown, Jordan did not remain in Paris longer in order to become a Master or a Doctor. (See four paragraphs below.)
By 1322 he was teacher as a Lector at the house of studies of the Augustinian Saxon-Thuringian Province at Erfurt, and in 1327 published his first book there.
As explained in 2002 by contemporary historian and medieval scholar, Eric Saak, this work was, at the request of his students, the publication of ten lectures on verses 9-13 of Chapter 6 of Matthew’s Gospel. It was entitled Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer.
Fifty-seven manuscripts of it have survived, over and above further copies of it when a little later he incorporated it into his first major sermon collection, Expositio Orationis Dominice.
(Continued on the next page.)
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