The Writings of Agnes of Harcourt. The Life of Isabelle of France and the Letter on Louis IX and Longchamp ed. by Sean L. Field (review)

REVIEWS 315 The Writings of Agnes of Harcourt. The Life of Isabelle of France and the Letter on Louis IX and Longchamp, intro., ed., and trans. Sean L. Field (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press 2003) x + 106 pp. In 1282–1283, largely as a result of the persistence of Charles d’Anjou, king of Sicily, a formal enquiry into the sanctity of Charles’s brother, the French king Louis IX, opened a few miles north of Paris. The aim of the enquiry, held at the abbey of Saint-Denis, was to receive depositions concerning Louis’s life and the miracles he was alleged to have performed both before and after his death in 1270. Once compiled, the dossier, the original of which has long since been lost, was to be sent to Rome where the papacy would employ it in judging Louis’s suitability for canonization. While Louis was finally proclaimed a saint in 1297, it is in the context of this initial enquiry into his sanctity that the two thirteenth-century Old French documents edited by Sean Field in this slim but undoubtedly valuable volume almost certainly have their origins. The first, and shorter, of the two documents edited in this collection—entitled by Field the Letter on Louis IX and Longchamp—is dated 4 December 1282. Reviving a theory last aired by Le Nain de Tillemont in the seventeenth century, Field convincingly argues that this letter represents the deposition made to the Saint-Denis commission of enquiry by the abbess of Longchamp, Agnes of Harcourt. The main purpose of Agnes’s letter is to emphasize Louis’s role as a benefactor and to chart the king’s relationship with the abbey of Longchamp . As Field notes in his introduction, “at every turn the subject of the letter is Louis ...” (12). According to Guillaume de Saint-Pathus, one of Louis’s hagiographers and our main source for the bulk of the now disappeared SaintDenis dossier, in the course of delivering his own deposition Charles d’Anjou noted that not only should his brother be made a saint, but a large part of his immediate family ought also to be canonized for their exceptional qualities. As Field argues, it was almost certainly to this end that Charles commissioned the same Agnes to prepare the second, much longer, work edited in this collection, the Life of Charles’s sister Isabelle of France, the most important patron, and indeed the founder, of Agnes’s abbey of Longchamp. Isabelle of France is certainly a fascinating, if minor, character on the thirteenth -century stage and Field’s excellent introduction to this volume suggests that her biographer was a no less interesting figure. The majority of what is known of Isabelle comes from Agnes’s work and, although Field does not remark upon it, the extent to which the events of her life are portrayed by Agnes as paralleling those of her brother’s, the king, is striking (and, perhaps, intentional ): Like many accounts of Louis’s life, Isabelle’s begins with an account of the holiness of her mother. Like Louis, her character is seen to undergo a fundamental change after a period of intense illness. And like her brother, Isabelle spent her life strongly associated with the mendicant orders without actually entering one. It is without doubt that Field is to be congratulated for both his initial decision to produce editions of these two much-neglected texts and the skill with which he carries out a difficult task. The preparation of a medieval text for a modern audience is challenging at the best of times; it is more challenging still when the editor lacks medieval manuscripts to work from. Field goes to commendable lengths to explain the process by which he prepared his editions. Establishing a text of the Life of REVIEWS 316 Isabelle of France was doubtless the more painstaking task of the two. This is not simply a reflection of the fact that the Life is rather longer than the letter concerning Louis. We possess several detailed descriptions of a thirteenthcentury manuscript of the Life once kept at the abbey of Longchamp, possibly the autograph itself, but, unfortunately, this manuscript...