International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2007 Abstracts

Louis IX – Saint Louis – is without a doubt one of the lieux de memoire that fed notions of French history and identity throughout the late medieval and early modern period.  One of the ways that Louis was memorialized and that his sanctity was constructed was through the liturgical texts that commemorated him as saint. Unlike the hagiographical texts and chronicles through which historians primarily know Louis, the liturgy defined how his sanctity was experienced on a daily basis, as part of the lived experience of devotion.  It also functioned to construct a communal memory of Louis within a particular institutional and devotional context, feeding institutional identity.  Memory constructed in this way demonstrates a dynamic process in which Louis was remembered in different ways, and how that memory was sacralized through the perennial ritual form of the opus dei (work of God). The Dominicans helped the court construct an image of Louis as the court wanted him remembered – as sacral king. Cistercians in contrast remembered Louis as a quasi-monk, for a series of conservative spiritual ideals. The memory of Saint Francis molded the ways in which Louis was memorialized among the Franciscans, who used Francis as the typological model for Louis to formulate a treatment of Louis’ failed crusades.  Among descendents of Louis whose memory of him was informed through the prayers dictated in books of hours, Louis was remembered as a sustainer of the poor, infirm, and weak. The liturgy at St.-Denis emphasized the fact of a Capetian king-saint, buried in their church, who performed miracles, thus celebrating various aspects of St.-Denis own institutional identity and as a site of pilgrimage. This paper will discuss how the liturgical memory of Saint Louis constructed a memory of the saint king within different contexts and towards various politicized and devotional ends.