The English Historical Review Advance Access originally published online on October 16, 2009
The English Historical Review 2009 CXXIV(511):1471-1473; doi:10.1093/ehr/cep296
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
© Oxford University Press 2009, all rights reserved.
Saint Louis
Merton College, Oxford
Saint Louis, by Jacques Le Goff (tr. Gareth Evan Gollrad) (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame U.P., 2009; pp. xxxii + 947. $75).
It is now thirteen years since Jacques Le Goff's biography of Louis IX was first published in French: it was, and still is, surprising to find one of the foremost members of the Annales School turning his hand to historical biography, but Le Goff employs the methodological subtlety of his training to achieve a nuanced exposition of the interaction between thirteenth-century structures, both real and representational, and the person of the king.
The three sections of book provide, first, a traditionally chronological account of Louis’ reign; secondly, a discussion of the value and constructed nature of the various sources for the reign, which implicitly deconstructs the first section; and, lastly, a series of essays on aspects of Louis, whether construct or person, which recall many of the anthropological categories favoured by the Annalistes. In a sense, despite Le Gof f's determination to write a history of Saint Louis rather than his milieu, the work provides him with the opportunity not only to use Louis as a prism through which many of the distinctive features of the thirteenth-century habitus can shine, but also to synthesise much of his earlier work on topics as diverse as space and time, the individual and the self, word and gesture, and so on. With this attention to the mental, cultural and ideological structures which shaped the reign, the man, and his representation, Le Goff interweaves insightful and illuminating reflections on Louis’ personality. So, for example, in his musings on the role of the sea in Louis’ experience, the text moves seamlessly between evoking the structural importance of the sea, militarily and economically; its connotations in devotional thought; and Louis’ own reaction to his fear of the sea, shaped both by these wider discourses, and by his personal phobia. The exposition of the role of Blanche de France avoids superficial psychologising to provide a helpful portrait of the tension facing Louis in responding to his overbearing mother, failing in the eyes of many as an attentive husband, and his longing for Jerusalem, ‘a distant princess [...] no doubt Blanche of Castile's greatest rival’ (p. 130).
This interweaving of person, structures and representation takes Le Goff beyond the established historiography of Louis IX, most notably the well-researched and comprehensive account by Jean Richard and the seminal work of William Chester Jordan which stresses the centrality of crusading ideology in Louis’ actions.1 Le Goff demonstrates how the historical biographer can legitimately evoke personality and psychology in a wider account of structures and discourses.
However, the most far-reaching aspect of Le Gof f's work is, without doubt, his nuanced use of sources. While he relies on a rather narrow range of chronicle and hagiographical evidence, his exposition of how such representations constructed the figure we know as ‘Saint Louis’ has been deeply influential. Indeed, in analysing this process, Le Goff is even moved to ask ‘Did Saint Louis exist?’ (p. 735). And yet his argument is more subtle than to suggest reductively that Saint Louis was just a product of hagiographers and enthusiastic biographers. The question is a complex mixture of the genuine and the rhetorical, just as the earlier question ‘Did Saint Louis even eat?’ (p. 518) following a discussion of his dietary habits invites us, of course, to answer ‘yes’, but to acknowledge the interactions between Louis’ actual existence, and the web of representation surrounding him. Le Goff shows that the relationship between reality and representation was a dialectical one: portrayals of Louis constructed an ideal type, but also drew on Louis’ actual behaviour; just as Louis’ own behaviour was shaped by the commonplaces of kingship, and the discourses which purported to describe him.
The impact of Le Gof f's book has, at first sight, been limited: his picture of the Christlike, patiently suffering Louis has become its own commonplace; but this image owes as much to Richard and Jordan as to Le Goff. This book includes no dramatic revisionism of the reign, no new documentation, and the line of historians following Joseph Strayer retain their former preoccupations with developments in kingship and state-building, and seem to be more influenced by Jordan's version of the reign than that of Le Goff. However, Le Goff's musings on the nature of biography itself have proved to be far more influential. The book was translated into German already in 2000, and German reviewers were notably enthusiastic about this latter aspect of it.2 Biography has been resurrected as a reflective historical method, and recent years have seen a flourishing of the genre. Furthermore, historians have become increasingly alert to the ways in which historical figures may be constructed, even created, through the texts which portrayed them. Indeed, this process has become not just a caveat for historians seeking to uncover the ‘real’ figure behind myths, but a productive area of study in itself, as is well demonstrated by M. Cecilia Gaposchkin's stimulating The Making of Saint Louis: Kingship, Sanctity and Crusade in the Later Middle Ages (2008; rev. supra, 934–5).
It will be interesting to see whether Anglophone historiography reacts more strongly to Le Goff now that the work is available in English. The translation eloquently reproduces Le Goff's elegant and chatty style. It is marred only by some strange renderings (e.g. ‘It is first of all hard to escape making some kind of confidence to one's readers’ [p. 725]), and some surprising and inconsistent decisions, such as the failure to translate ‘Gand’ as ‘Ghent’; or the rendering of the gros tournois sometimes as ‘the big tournois’, sometimes as ‘the large tournois’ and sometimes in the original French, which is surely most appropriate. Moreover, the book is repetitive, and the translation would have provided an excellent opportunity for some judicious editing. Nevertheless, it is a seminal text, and this welcome translation will render it available to a wider audience.
 |
Notes |
|---|
 Top Notes |
|---|
1 J. Richard, Saint Louis, roi d’une France féodale, soutien de la Terre Sainte (1983; rev. ante, ci [1986], 217–18); W.C. Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade (1979; rev. ante, xcvii [1982], 403–4).
2 Ludwig der Heilige, trans. G. Osterwald (2000).
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||