Saint Louis
"Armed with the considerable resources of the nouvel historien, Jacques Le Goff mines existing materials about Saint Louis to forge a new historical biography of the king. Part of his ambitious project is to reconstruct the mental universe of the thirteenth century: Le Goff describes the scholastic and intellectual background of Louis' reign and, most importantly, he discusses methodology and the interpretation of written sources - their composition, provenance, and reliability." "Questioning whether Saint Louis was merely the invention of his eulogists, Le Goff penetrates beyond the literary and hagiographical evidence to the human behind the legend. He brilliantly analyzes Louis' progress toward his unique self-creation and its subsequent mythologizing. In the third part, Le Goff highlights the contradictions within Louis and his historical image that previous chroniclers have elided or overlooked. In the end, he leaves us with the saint, rather than the king, with all the paradoxes embedded in that role."--Jacket
Print Book, English, ©2009
English language ed View all formats and editions
University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Ind., ©2009
collective biographies
xxxii, 947 pages : maps ; 25 cm
9780268033811, 0268033811
229020955
The life of Saint Louis. From birth to marriage (1214-1234) ; From marriage to the Crusade(1234-1248) ; The Crusade and the stay in the Holy Land (1248-1254) ; From one Crusade to the next and death (1254-1270) ; Toward sainthood : from death to canonization (1270-1297)
The production of royal memory: did Saint Louis exist? The king from the documents ; The king of the mendicant hagiographers: a saint king of resurgent Christendom ; The king of Saint-Denis: a dynastic and "national" saint king
The king of the Exempla ; Prefigurations of Saint Louis in the Old Testament ; The king of the mirrors of the princes ; The king of the foreign chroniclers ; The king of commonplace ideas: did Saint Louis exist? ; The 'real' Louis IX of Joinville ; Saint Louis : between the model and the individual
Saint Louis, the unique and ideal king. Saint Louis in space and time ; Words and images ; Words and gestures: the Prud'homme ; The king's three functions ; Saint Louis: feudal king or modern king? ; Saint Louis and his family ; Saint Louis' religion ; Conflicts and criticisms ; Saint Louis, sacred king, thaumaturge, and saint ; The suffering king, the Christ king