Reading Cecilia Gaposchkin's elegant book, one has to be impressed by the care and erudition displayed in this undertaking. Years of research and writing must have been necessary for such mastery over a wide range of sources, many of them hitherto neglected by the copious scholarship on St Louis. Beyond her prodigious research skills and incisive writing, one must also admire the considerable courage that it takes to tackle St Louis, a subject well mined by many scholars in the last decade and the subject of a massive biography by the incomparable Jacques Le Goff. Yet, Gaposchkin has produced a novel, scholarly and engaging book that sets very high standards for the use of hagiographical and liturgical texts. Her topic is not St Louis himself but the multi-level construction of his sanctity and cult after the king's canonisation in 1297. Through a ‘thick description’ of the sources and the canonisation process, chapters i and ii focus upon how Louis ix became a saint. This is followed by a discussion of the formative years in the making of the cult of St Louis, which Philip iv and the Dominicans played a leading role in fostering. Relics, liturgical offices, shrines and the like provided the material signposts for the veneration of the saintly king. Gaposchkin then turns to a series of interrelated themes. One is a fascinating excursus on liturgy; another offers a careful study of the relationship between St Louis's sanctity and sacral kingship. Here, once again, Philip the Fair and the Dominicans held a central role. Since the cult of the king was a multi-faceted enterprise, we see the manner in which Cistercians, the monks at St Denis. Franciscans and, finally, Joinville's influential Life of St Louis created a series of different St Louis. A final chapter offers illuminating insights into the overlapping issues of private worship, crusade and royal lineage. As Gaposchkin indicates, St Louis was the last king to be canonised in the Middle Ages. This raises important questions. His Castilian cousin, Ferdinand iii (d.1252 and not in 1272 as indicated in the text), enjoyed a widespread reputation for saintliness, had succeeded in defeating Islam where St Louis failed, yet was not canonised until the late seventeenth century. Why? What separated France and the late Capetians from their Castilian counterparts? Gaposchkin provides abundant evidence for the political aspects of saint-making. Yet the relative conditions of both realms may help to explain the canonisation of one king and the neglect of the other. This brief aside does not diminish at all the extraordinary accomplishments of this book. Gaposchkin's meticulous care, insightful reading, conclusions and mastery of the material rewards the reader with new and unknown perspectives onto one of the most important late medieval kings. This is a work to place alongside the master-works on the subject.