Book Alert / The Making of Saint Louis

The Making of Saint Louis -- Kingship, Sanctity, and Crusade in the Later Middle Ages by M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, Cornell UP '08, 331 pages, ISBN #0801445507. Index, bibliography, four appendices, b&w images sprinkled through text.

It's clear that King Louis IX, who ruled France for 44 years in the 1200's, meant different things to different people. In the words of one reviewer of this informative new book, "Franciscans remembered his charity and humility; Cistercians remembered his asceticism and defense of the faith. Capetian, Angevin and Valois kings drew on Louis's memory to legitimize their own power." Together, the collective praise was enough to merit beatification.

M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, a Dartmouth adjunct assistant professor, reconstructs Louis IX's life and legend. To do so, she draws on hagiography, sermons, and liturgical evidence to show how Louis's various constituencies "used commemoration of the saint-king to sanctify their own politics and notions of identity and religious virtue."

Once a saint, the author writes, "Louis became the centerpiece of an ideological program that buttressed the ongoing political consolidation of France and underscored Capetian claims of sacred kingship."