ABSTRACT
Louis IX – Saint Louis 1 – is without a doubt one of Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire that fed notions of French history and identity throughout the late medieval and early modern period. 2 We know him best through Jean de Joinville as the hapless though valiant crusader, as the moralizing king who asked Joinville himself if he would rather be a leper or be in mortal sin. But Joinville’s Louis was not the Louis of the Middle Ages, since Joinville’s text was not available in any real sense until the middle of the sixteenth century. 3 Instead, one of the most important ways that Louis was memorialized, that his sanctity was constructed, that his memory was propagated, was through liturgical texts. Unlike Joinville’s vie or the other hagiographical texts through which today we primarily know Louis, the liturgy defined Louis’s sanctity as people participated in it on a daily basis, as part of the lived and ritualized experience of devotion. It also functioned to construct a communal memory of Louis within a particular institutional and devotional context, creating a legitimizing canon that nourished institutional identity. Individual institutions commissioned or composed their own liturgical offices for Louis’s feast day that remembered Louis in individualized ways and, through these, we can see how memory recorded in this way reveals a dynamic process in which Louis’s sanctity was variously constructed according to the fractured ideals of the later Middle Ages. In this sense, 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.
