Making of Saint Louis

Canonized in 1297 as Saint Louis, King Louis IX of France (r. 1226–1270) was one of the most important kings of medieval history and also one of the foremost saints of the later Middle Ages. As a saint, Louis became the centerpiece of an ideological program that buttressed the ongoing political consolidation of France and underscored Capetian claims of sacred kingship.M. Cecilia Gaposchkin reconstructs and analyzes the process that led to the monarch's canonization and the consolidation and spread of his cult. Differing political and religious ideals produced competing images of the sanctity of Louis in late-thirteenth and early fourteenth-century France. Drawing on hagiography, sermons, and liturgical evidence—the latter a rich but little-explored historical source—Gaposchkin shows how various groups (including Dominicans, Cistercians, and Franciscans) and individuals (such as Philip the Fair and Joinville) used commemoration of the saint-king to sanctify their own politics and notions of identity and religious virtue. Louis' cult was disseminated to a wider, nonelite public through sermons in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and then revived by the Bourbon kings in the seventeenth century.In deepening our knowledge of this royal saint, this elegantly written book opens the curtain on the religious sensibilities and secular politics of a transitional period in European history.

Reading Cecilia Gaposchkin's elegant book, one has to be impressed by the care and erudition displayed in this undertaking. Years of research and writing must have been necessary for such mastery over a wide range of sources, many of them hitherto neglected by the copious scholarship on St. Louis.... Gaposchkin has produced a novel, scholarly, and engaging book that sets very high standards for the use of hagiographical and liturgical texts. Her topic is not St. Louis himself but the multi-level construction of his sanctity and cult after the king’s canonization in 1297.... Her meticulous care, insightful reading, conclusions, and mastery of the material reward the reader with new and unknown perspectives onto one of the most important late medieval kings. This is a work to place alongside the master-works on the subject., The splendid new study of 'the posthumous Louis' by M. Cecelia Gaposchkin... breaks new ground in using a rich array of unpublished liturgical texts and feast-day sermons for Saint Louis, which until now have largely been neglected by scholars. Gaposchkin uses these sources alongside better-known hagiographical texts to trace Louis’s evolution from king to saint following his death in 1270. This is the first book to fully explain how commemorations of Louis reconciled the paradox of his saintly and royal identities.... This elegant and thoroughly researched book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of late medieval sanctity, the relationship between sanctity and kingship, and the way that sermons, liturgy, and hagiography shaped the construction of memory., This is a beautifully written, well researched, comprehensive, and insightful work on the cult of St. Louis, King Louis IX (1226-70) of France. M. Cecilia Gaposchkin focuses on the formative years of Louis's cult, from his death to the early decades of the fourteenth century when his image as saint was codified, and considers in turn the various groups responsible for crafting this holy identity. She employs a range of documents, masterfully analyzed: canonization documents, sermons, liturgical texts (Offices, prayers, hymns), medieval biographies, and manuscript illustrations. Scholars and students working in the fields of medieval history, art history, hagiography, and religion will find Gaposchkin's book an invaluable resource for its content, illustrations, and bibliography.

M. Cecilia Gaposchkin is Assistant Dean of Faculty for Pre-Major Advising and Adjunct Assistant Professor of History at Dartmouth College.