ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by outlining how the study of liturgical sources intersects with the production and study of memory. It follows with interpretations of selected texts from three traditions the Cistercian tradition, the royal and courtly tradition and the Franciscan tradition to offer, as it were, a case study in how liturgical commemoration contributed to what Jacques Le Goff called the production of royal memory'. The multi-faceted liturgical memorialization of Louis offers a view into the multiple and competing ideals of religious and political virtue that animated late medieval culture. Liturgical texts are at root memorializing. Known in the Middle Ages as the historia the saint's story a liturgical office advanced a focused interpretation of a saint's life, a crystallized summary and interpretation of a saint's vita and most potent attributes. The offices of Saint Louis offer a forceful example of just how liturgical commemoration did the work of shaping and directing memory.
