Saint Louis /

In a massive piece of scholarship, Le Goff, doyen of French medievalists, plays the sleuth whose work results in more contradictions than clarity in the search for an integration of the three personae--king, saint, and man--of Louis IX (1214-1270). Part 1 is biography proper, whose resulting complexities of memory and history are deconstructed in part 2. Here, biography gives way to a deep source-based meditation on the difficulties of doing history. Charting a delicate course between the naive positivism of the past and the contemporary temptation to retreat into a relativistic rejection of historicism, Le Goff (L'D'Ecole des Hautes D'Etudes en Sciences Sociales) ultimately finds resolution in part 3 through a depiction of Louis as concurrently an actual family man and a representation of the ideal saint-king. Resolving to live with an inherently unstable and distorted historical figure hovering somewhere between memory, history, and legend, Le Goff thereby raises important questions about defining historical authenticity. Gollrad's translation nicely preserves the lively and intimate prose of the French original (1996). M. Cecelia Gaposchkin has subsequently further explored Louis's instability as an historical figure in The Making of Saint Louis: Kingship, Sanctity, and Crusade in the Later Middle Ages (CH, Jun'09, 46-5834). Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. J. P. Huffman Messiah College

More than simply a biography of Louis IX of France, this magisterial work by a member of the Annales School of historiography is an examination of the historian's craft. After treating in detail Louis's life, Le Goff (formerly director of studies, L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris; Saint Francis of Assisi) looks closely at the sources to determine what we can know of the real Louis, then considers particular topics--such as his relationship to his family, his religion--in more depth. Le Goff argues convincingly that Louis, while still a medieval figure, was also one of the first moderns. He provides the scholarly apparatus lacking in Jean Richard's Saint Louis, the Crusading King of France. While W.C. Jordan's Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership or Margaret W. Labarge's Saint Louis: The Life of Louis IX of France would be more accessible for general readers, Le Goff's book is highly recommended for academic and larger public libraries.--Augustine J. Curley, Newark Abbey, NJ (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.