Professor Rowan Dorin (History, Stanford) Awarded MAA's John Nicholas Brown Prize

Professor Rowan Dorin (History, Stanford) has been awarded the Medieval Academy of America's 2026 John Nicholas Brown Prize for his monograph, No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe (Princeton Univ. Press, 2023). 

The John Nicholas Brown Prize, established by the Medieval Academy of America in 1978, is awarded annually for a first single-authored monograph on a medieval subject judged by the selection committee to be of outstanding quality.

"Rowan Dorin’s No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe (Princeton, 2023) combines the story of the expulsion of medieval Jews (especially from England and France) who were, rightly or wrongly, associated with usury, with the untold story of the regular expulsion of “foreign” Christian usurers, identified as Lombards or Cahorins, who came from northern Italy to northern European centers of commerce. The book is beautifully written and theoretically sophisticated, based on research in over 150 archives and a vast body of historiography. No Return represents a next step in the understanding of the Formation of a Persecuting Society by showing both how foreign usurers were expelled ,as Jews “became foreigners.” The processes and justifications for mass expulsion were incorporated into canon law, permitting Christians to square the tolerance of Jews demanded by Augustine of Hippo with expulsion. Reviewers generally note the importance of this book for Jewish history, but also for economic and legal history. No Return also provides food for thought on contemporary treatments of foreigners, religious others, wealth, and the processes of expulsion or banishment. Dorin embraces the methodologies of institutional legal and economic historians, engaging with Jewish history, the history of Canon law, and the social institutions of Christian England and France, Germany and Italy, to produce an important contribution to our understanding of how the law can be used to alienate and exclude those deemed undesirable."

Congratulations, Professor Dorin!