It is a sign, perhaps, of how far things have come since the heyday of annaliste and post-Geertzian anthropological history that this new study of royal sanctity begins with a detailed political and diplomatic account of the events surrounding the canonisation of a king. Tracing the canonisation of Louis IX of France (1226–70) in 1297 and the construction and dissemination of his cult, it illuminates in brilliant detail the ideological struggles and political manoeuvrings which shaped both. It also demonstrates, with great originality, the potential of liturgical texts as evidence for the history of ideology and of political thought. The Making of Saint Louis is an important and original contribution both to the literature on royal sanctity and to the history of the Capetian dynasty. In part, the approach of the study is determined by the subject. Louis IX was, as Gaposchkin points out, anomalous among Europe's saint kings. He was the first ruler to be canonised for more than a century, and the last to be so in the middle ages; the context and political dynamics of the late thirteenth century were also utterly different from those of the world of the well-studied pre-Gregorian royal saints of the early medieval conversion period. Nevertheless, the methods developed here mark an important and original contribution to the wider literature on royal sanctity. The book sets out to demonstrate how the different and often contradictory images of Louis’ sanctity articulated competing ideological positions, and to show how the cult was used to advance different political agendas. These ‘images’ were deliberately and consciously formulated in the different liturgical offices for Louis which were created in the years after the canonisation. A close comparative study of these texts, examining their mutual borrowings, their omissions, their manipulation both of general hagiographical conventions and of the traditions specific to Louis, and the textual relationships between them, forms the core of the study.
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