After high school in Châtellerault and higher in Poitiers, Jean Verdon obtains the aggregation of history in 1963. From 1963 to 1968 he teaches in Poitiers (preparatory classes for the Grandes Ecoles). In 1968 he was appointed to the University of Limoges. Her thesis of state supported in 1974 is titled "The woman in France in the tenth and eleventh centuries". He won two awards from the French Academy in 1992 for Les Françaises during the Hundred Years War and in 2003 for Drinking in the Middle Ages.