James Matthew Powell (1930–2011)

James Matthew Powell died on January 27, 2011, from injuries sustained in an automobile accident. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on June 9, 1930, he received his AB in 1953 and MA in 1955 from Xavier University. He began to study medieval history at the University of Cincinnati in 1955 but moved to Indiana University, Bloomington in 1957, where he received his PhD in 1959 under the guidance of Arthur Hogue. His dissertation examined the economic policies of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and was published as the monograph Medieval Monarchy and Trade: The Economic Policy of Frederick II in the Kingdom of Sicily (Spoleto, 1962). This study began his long interest in all aspects of medieval Italian history. Later he published an English translation of Frederick II’s Liber Augustalis (Syracuse, NY, 1971) and continued throughout his career to write about the “Stupor mundi’s” world with a variety of essays on diverse topics from Frederick’s knowledge of Greek to his environmental policies.

He began his teaching career at Kent State University in 1959, transferred to the University of Illinois in 1961, and became an assistant professor of medieval history at Syracuse University in 1965. He was promoted to associate professor in 1967 and full professor in 1972. He taught in Florence on Syracuse’s Semester Abroad Program during 1970–71, where he also was director of the program. He was acting chair of the History Department in 1972. He became an emeritus at Syracuse when he retired in 1997.

Prof. Powell held a number of positions in national and international associations. Most recently, he was the president of the American Catholic Historical Association in 2007, having joined the association in 1954 and become a life member. Before then, he had been general secretary of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East, 1989–95. In 1998 he became a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He was the president of the Society for Italian Historical Studies from 1993–95. He spent the academic year 1989–90 as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and spring 1970 as a research fellow at the Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies in Toronto.

His interests and horizons expanded as his career progressed. He began to study the crusading movement and published a prize-winning book, Anatomy of a Crusade, 1213–1221 (Philadelphia, 1986) that was awarded the ACHA’s John Gilmary Shea Prize in 1987. His collected essays on the crusades appeared as The Crusades, the Kingdom of Sicily, and the Mediterranean (Burlington, VT, 2007).

Prof. Powell delved into the history of the Church during the 1980s and published a number of studies devoted to Pope Innocent III and Pope Honorius III and translated the most important medieval history of Pope Innocent III’s pontificate, The Deeds of Pope Innocent III (Washington, DC, 2004). His study of Albertanus of Brescia’s life and sermons, Albertanus of Brescia: The Pursuit of Happiness in the Early Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1992), gained many admirers, especially in Brescia, where he was invited to lecture frequently.

Prof. Powell was a bookman with a lifelong love of books and libraries. In 1977 he was a co-principal recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to catalogue the library of Leopold von Ranke, the great nineteenth-century German historian, which had come to Syracuse University in 1888 after Ranke’s death. With this grant the “Father of Scientific History’s” library was properly catalogued under his direction, and Ranke’s manuscripts were finally analyzed, described, and published by Edward Muir (then of Syracuse University, now Northwestern). Prof. Powell did much to publicize the rich resources of the Ranke library. With grants from various foundations, he hosted an international conference devoted to Ranke at Syracuse University in 1986. He edited the proceedings of the conference with Georg G. Iggers and published the essays in Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline (Syracuse, NY, 1989).

Prof. Powell rendered homage to Ranke, but he also was devoted to the education of young...