This is the 30th title in the very popular, award-winning series of Vision Books on the lives of saints and heroes for youth 9 - 15 years old. Louis IX of France, who took the throne in 1226, had one aim in life - to be a good king. Guided by the advice of his mother, he ruled well and was beloved by his people. At the age of twenty-eight he took the cross of the crusade and, with his army, set out for Egypt to defeat the Saracens, the most energetic enemies of the Holy Land. Instead, the Saracens charged to victory and imprisoned Louis, whose saintly conduct while in prison shamed his captors. Released, and after another miserable failure in Palestine, he returned to France broken in health but still fired with the desire to liberate the Holy Land. And so again, St. Louis led his men out from France, this time on the last crusade.

This is an English-language edition of Jean Richard's acclaimed study of Saint Louis (1214-70), firmly established as the classic modern life of one of the greatest figures in medieval history. It is, however, more than simply a biography. Saint Louis consists essentially of a skillful interweaving of personal details, French history, Capetian dynastic history, international relations within the West, and relations between the West and the Near East (with Louis' crusades as focal points). Jean Richard's canvas is thus a broad one, as it has to be if the impact and role of Saint Louis are to be appreciated, precisely because the range and scope of his actions were themselves so braod. Saint Louis is also a splendid evocation of the way in which contemporary politics were perceived and conducted, its analysis carefully rooted in the material substance and ideological persuasions which underlay them. Jean Richard offers a sustained exploration of many of the crucial components of the thirteenth-century world, with much to say about the emergence of the territorial unity of the French state under authority of the Capetian dynasty, the extension of that dynasty's influence into the Mediterranean, the history of the Latin East and the crusade--the preparations for, and experience of which, conditioned so much of Louis' thought and practical actions. Indeed the crusade is inseparable from his royal persona, just as the history of the crusading movements in the thirteenth century is inseparable from him. This English-language edition has been translated by Jean Birrell, and adapted for anglophone readers by Simon Lloyd, who has also provided a supplementary bibliography of English-language works. Saint Louis is a figure of perennial interest, and the appearance of this acclaimed study in this accessible format will enable large numbers of both specialist and non-specialist readers to engage at first hand with one of the great lives of medieval history.

The reign of Louis IX of France is widely recognized as one of the most important in the history of medieval France. Art and the Crusade in the Age of Saint Louis examines the art patronage of the French king during the formative period of his reign, with special focus on the interaction between the art of Gothic Paris and that of the Crusader Holy Land.

M. Cecilia Gaposchkin reconstructs and analyzes the process that led to King Louis IX of France's canonization in 1297 and the consolidation and spread of his cult.

Louis IX of France reigned as king from 1226 to 1270 and was widely considered an exemplary Christian ruler, renowned for his piety, justice, and charity toward the poor. After his death on crusade, he was proclaimed a saint in 1297, and today Saint Louis is regarded as one of the central figures of early French history and the High Middle Ages. In The Sanctity of Louis IX, Larry F. Field offers the first English-language translations of two of the earliest and most important accounts of the king’s life: one composed by Geoffrey of Beaulieu, the king’s long-time Dominican confessor, and the other by William of Chartres, a secular clerk in Louis’s household who eventually joined the Dominican Order himself. Written shortly after Louis’s death, these accounts are rich with details and firsthand observations absent from other works, most notably Jean of Joinville’s well-known narrative The introduction by M. Cecilia Gaposchkin and Sean L. Field provides background information on Louis IX and his two biographers, analysis of the historical context of the 1270s, and a thematic introduction to the texts. An appendix traces their manuscript and early printing histories. The Sanctity of Louis IX also features translations of Boniface VIII’s bull canonizing Louis and of three shorter letters associated with the earliest push for his canonization. It also contains the most detailed analysis of these texts, their authors, and their manuscript traditions currently available.