Jordan earned his PhD at Princeton, where he was a student of Joseph R. Strayer, in 1973. He was Director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies from 1994 to 1999. In 1996, he won the annual Charles Homer Haskins Medal from the Medieval Academy of America for his outstanding work on the Great Famine, published in The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century.

Jordan has shown a marked interest in pedagogy and edited single-volume and four-volume encyclopaedias on the Middle Ages, aimed at the elementary and middle-school audiences respectively. He is the editor-in-chief of the first supplemental volume of the Dictionary of the Middle Ages.

Besides being an expert on the Great Famine, Jordan has made a name in the study of the reign of Louis IX of France, especially with respect to his Crusades. His Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade is "the most comprehensive secondary source account of the seventh crusade currently available" and has been cited by Frances Gies, Malcolm Barber, and Robert Chazan.

Books

• Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership (Princeton University Press, 1980)
• From Servitude to Freedom: Manumission in the Senonais in the Thirteenth Century
• The French Monarchy and the Jews from Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians
• Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial and Developing Societies
• The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 1996)
• Europe in the High Middle Ages

Articles

• The Last Tormentor of Christ: An Image of the Jew in Ancient and Medieval Exegesis, Art, and Drama. Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series, Vol. 78, No. 1/2 (Jul.–Oct., 1987), pp. 21–47.
• The Erosion of the Stereotype of the Last Tormentor of Christ. Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series, Vol. 81, No. 1/2 (Jul.–Oct., 1990), pp. 13–44.
• Approaches to the Court Scene in The Bond Story: Equity and Mercy or Reason and Nature. Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring, 1982), pp. 49–59.
• Jews, Regalian Rights, and the Constitution in Medieval France. Association for Jewish Studies Review, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1998), pp. 1–16.