medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
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Best,
John Dillon
(and a happy feast of St. Louis IX to all!)
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It may not surprise anyone that I must weigh in here.
We are in the midst of a week of Capetian events. Louis of Toulouse on the
19th, Louis of France today, and next week, Isabelle of France (on whom I
dare not presume to write, since I know Sean Field is on our list) on the
31st.
On August 25, 1270, Louis IX of France died, probably of dysentery, outside
Tunis, while beseiging the city on his second attempt at crusade. There was
quite quickly a move afoot to have him canonized. This was prompted by the
wishes of the royal family, but Pope Gregory X, who'd known Louis before he
was pope, essentially started the canonization process when he asked, in
1272, Louis' dominican confessor, Geoffrey of Beaulieu, to write a vie.
Elite churchmen in France pressed for the canonization in 1275 in a series
of letters that made the claim that Louis was a martyr for the faith -- an
idea that they must surely have known did not meet canonical requirements of
martyrdom but which seemed to have wide appeal. The royal family -
particularly Louis' son and grandson, pressed for the canonization, which
kept being delayed for one reason or another, though a 14 month-long
canonization inquest was held in 1282 and 83 at Saint Denis, where Louis was
buried and where miracles were occurring. During the first phase of the
conflict between Louis' son, Philip the Fair, and Boniface VIII, the pope
sought to mend fences with the French king, who'd proven himself to be
rather more able to interfere with the smooth operations of papal finance
than Boniface had first assumed, and the pope did this by canonizing the
king's grandson. This was of note, since no king had been canonized for
well over a century -- and not one since Francis had hit the scene and
defined sanctity in ways that fit ill with power. The canonization was
political in one sense, but the evidence that people thought it was only
political is very slim indeed, since there was a widespread sense that Louis
had achieved sanctity and certainly merited papal recognition of this fact
through canonization. But this didn't mean that the canonization itself
wasn't political, and it may well not have happened had politics not eased
the weight of the the many burdens of the technical, procedural and
institutional impediments that existed to snappy canonization. Boniface
duly canonized Louis -- he'd used the promise and the threat not to in
earlier negotiations with the king -- and while he praised Louis (I have
suggested elsewhere), he used this praise to subtly dig at Philip. This was
fine with the king, really, since once canonized Philip could couch
everything he did within the tradition of his saintly forebears, which he
did.
Far more to say, of course, but I will leave it there. For iconography,
there was a great deal more than there is now -- frescos, glass, mss,
altars, and so forth, that we know of existing that we have lost. But for
the two principal strands of representation, one might want to look at the
Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux (at the Clositers) which shows Louis as a saint of
service, and compare it to the Hours of Jeanne de Navarre (at the BN) which
shows Louis above all as a sacral king. The Evreux cycle is easily
available on the web. Jeanne de Navarre's Hours less so, but there are good
publications of it.
Cheers to Saint Louis, to whom I wil give a toast with my glass of wine this
evening, since, among other things (such as putting the French kingdom on
solid foundation, trying to go crusading, and building the most beautiful
building in the world (as I tell my students), the Ste.-Chapelle), he also
gave me my present research agenda.
All best,
Cecilia Gaposchkin
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