Blessed Louis, the Most Glorious of Kings: Texts Relating to the Cult of Saint Louis of France

Introduction

Introduction Louis IX of France (b. 1214, r. 1226, d. 1270) was canonized in 1297, twenty-seven years after his death in Tunisia while on crusade. Louis was undoubtedly one of the most significant kings of his era, the only king canonized in the thirteenth century and the last saint-king of the Middle Ages. He represents the crystallization of the medieval idea of the saint-king, which went back to the beginnings of Christian rule, and also the paradox of how the later Middle Ages made a strong king into a saint at a time when sanctity was chiefly defined through poverty , humility, and renunciation. The move to have him canonized was begun shortly after his death. In 1282–1283, formal proceedings were held at the Benedictine Monastery of St.-Denis, where Louis had been buried and where miracles had occurred, and two vitae were written in the process of advocating Louis’sainthood, by two court Dominicans, Geoffrey of Beaulieu, O.P., and William of Chartres, O.P. Today, we know Saint Louis best through Jean of Joinville’s Vie nostre saint roy Loöys, written by 1308. Joinville’s vivid and compelling narrative, readily available in multiple translations and routinely assigned in the classroom, has primarily shaped the modern understanding of the saint king and his sanctity. But this reliance on Joinville misrepresents the Saint Louis of the later Middle Ages, since Joinville’s text was virtually unknown beyond the royal court before it was first printed in the sixteenth century.1 For what medieval people knew of Louis, for how the medieval devout made sense of his sanctity and interacted with him as a saint and intercessor, we are better served by more traditional hagiographic and liturgical texts of the type presented here. The aim of this volume is to make available to modern readers Saint Louis as he was known to 1. Boureau,“Les Enseignements absolutistes de Saint Louis.” 1 the Middle Ages, by presenting some of the texts that were involved in the construction of Louis’ saintly persona and in the formation and propagation of his cult. The composition of a number of lives and liturgies honoring Louis is witness to the flush of enthusiasm following his canonization. In addition to Joinville’s account, these included the works of the Franciscan William of Saint-Pathus, based on the records of the canonization proceedings and finished by 1303; two works by historians at St.-Denis (William of Nangis and Yves of St.-Denis); and a short vita that the Dominican, Bernard Gui, included as part of his enormous Speculum sanctorale (a series of saints’ lives that followed the Dominican calendar ). With the exception of Gui’s text, which remains unedited, these have long been available to historians, in part because they were published in volume 20 of the Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France (1840). Serious students of Louis’life and cult have routinely consulted these texts, but they are still available only in Latin. This phase of early memorialization also included the composition of two other vitae: Gloriosissimi regis and Beatus Ludovicus, which are published here for the first time.2 Gloriosissimi regis and Beatus Ludovicus are ideal witnesses to the development of the cult of Louis and his construction as a saint in the period immediately following his canonization . They represent an important stage in both the textual and the hagiographical development of, in Jacques LeGoff’s words, the “production of royal memory.”3 They demonstrate the image of Louis that emerged from the canonization proceedings—an image made to conform to the shifting patterns and expectations of sanctity in the later Middle Ages, a sanctity predicated, above all, on the ideals of renunciation and active charity that characterize the century of Saint Francis. These two vitae also offer several new details about Louis, and they help clarify the process by which his cult was propagated in the 2 Introduction 2. The two vitae were known to the compilers of the Bibliotheca hagiographica latina (BHL nos. 5047, 5042, and 5043b). 3. LeGoff, Saint Louis (Paris: Fayard, 1996). English edition, Saint Louis, trans. Gareth Evan Gollrad (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009).“The production of royal memory”was the name LeGoff gave to the second of the three“parts” of his extensive biography. Citations of page numbers throughout are from the English edition. Middle Ages. Above all, they...