King Louis IX of France (1226–1270) became Saint Louis in 1297, when he was canonized at the urging of his grandson Philip IV—becoming the final medieval king to be declared a saint. One might think that with Louis's canonization, over a generation after his death, his story had come to an end. As Cecelia Gaposchkin argues, however, his story was just beginning.
This book is not a history of Louis IX himself but rather of the ways that he was perceived and his memory used, especially in the years after 1297 when the French monarchy treated him as legitimating their authority, even against the papacy. The image of the sainted king was variously employed by other groups as well to support their own version of spirituality and their politics. Gaposchkin's work thus focuses on how a useful past could be constructed, an approach that has become central to medieval studies in the past fifteen years.
At the end of the thirteenth century even a king like Louis, personally virtuous and just, the leader of two crusades—on the second of which he died—did not express the prevailing version of sanctity as found in radical poverty and humility, exemplified by Francis of Assisi. And yet even the Franciscans, as well as other religious orders, found in this sainted king someone they could use. The example of the Old Testament kings and indeed the image of Christ as King of Kings suggested that royalty and sacrality were not incompatible; the only question was how to bring them together. Louis thus provides an excellent focus for an examination of the contested nature of late medieval sanctity. Different values and ideologies were invoked by all the different constituencies who sought to make Louis their own.
Previous studies of Louis have generally examined his actual life and deeds, sometimes in an effort to debunk the mythology that grew up around him, but Gaposchkin begins with his death. She thus builds on the work of such previous scholars as William Chester Jordan, Jacques LeGoff, and Robert Folz without having to cover the same ground that they did. She makes especial use of such underutilized hagiographic materials as miracle stories, liturgical offices, and artistic representations of the sainted king, all of which she argues would have been better known in the fourteenth century than the biography by Joinville now so familiar to scholars and students. A brief but helpful excursus in the middle of the book spells out the nature of the liturgical office for those not familiar with the form. Extensive appendices analyze late medieval liturgical observances and sermons for Saint Louis, based on dozens of manuscripts. A number of illustrations show how Louis was represented visually, including in books of hours and in the now destroyed stained glass windows at Saint-Denis.
Gaposchkin begins with the nearly forty years between Louis's death and his canonization, a period during which his memory was both constructed and disputed. He did not match older models of royal sanctity, in which a king typically demonstrated his holiness either by renouncing the throne or else by being martyred, so a new version of sanctity had to be created, stressing his personal piety, his charity, and his resistance to favoritism. His crusades were re-conceptualized, not as military adventures, but as an opportunity for Louis to die for the faith. Next, Gaposchkin examines closely the canonization process in the early stages of the extended conflict between Philip IV and Pope Boniface VIII. The final three-quarters of the book is then devoted to perceptions and uses of the saint in the fourteenth century, when the foundations were laid for representing Louis as a principal repository of French identity, but when he was also claimed by monks and by friars as supporting their own positions. The Franciscans, for example, remembered and celebrated his humility and suffering while on crusade, while the Cistercians dwelt on his generosity to houses of their order and on his vigorous defense of the faith.
While closely analyzing texts and images, Gaposchkin also offers many intriguing details of the cult of Saint Louis, such as the efforts by Philip IV to get his grandfather's bones out of Saint-Denis and into the Sainte-Chapelle next to the royal palace, where they would better support Capetian kingship; the monks long resisted these efforts, but Philip eventually obtained most of Louis's skull. Beggars and the poor from Paris were among the first to claim that Louis worked miracles, and they were invited to give testimony at the canonization proceedings. Louis's younger brother, King Charles I of Sicily, used his sainted brother to suggest that his entire family was holy, an effort that eventually led to the canonization of Charles's grandson, also named Louis.
This is a highly original and clearly organized book, a real delight to read. Footnotes are at the bottom of the page where they belong. The analysis demonstrates clarity of thought and a level of assurance unusual in a first book. I look forward to Gaposchkin's next one.
