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Reviews

Louis lives and walks through these pages. What Le Goff has given us is more than a biography; it is a work of literature. . . . Given the length of this book, many will be intimidated and will not take up its challenge. That is a pity, for Le Goff has much to offer here. There is no chapter that does not contain information and ideas that deserve to be discussed further. --<b><i>The Catholic Historical Review</i></b></p>

. . . a warm and largely admiring portrait of a king in whom power and goodness do indeed form two sides of the same coin. . . . Le Goff's Louis is cheerful, ardent, devout, intelligent but unintellectual, skillful yet uncomplicated, a man in tune with his age but able to transcend at least some of its limitations . . . this is a rich and generous book, crammed with a lifetime's learning. --The New York Review of Books . . . Le Goff interweaves insightful and illuminating reflections on Louis' personality. This interweaving of person, structures and representation takes Le Goff beyond the established historiography of Louis IX . . . [and] demonstrates how the historical biographer can legitimately evoke personality and psychology in a wider account of structures and discourses. . . it is a seminal text, and this welcome translation will render it available to a wider audience. --English Historical Review 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). . . . 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). --Choice 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. . . . 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 . . . highly recommended for academic and larger public libraries. --Library Journal Jacques Le Goff's brilliant biography, Saint Louis, came out in French in 1996, and is now published in a readable English translation. Its publication gives Anglophones a book to set beside W.C. Jordan's Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade (1979) and Jean Richard's Saint Louis (1983, translated in 1992). . . . Le Goff excels in his knowledge of the biographical sources, which he subjects to close analysis, against the background--Le Goff's home territory--of European mentalit s. --London Review of Books

<p> Louis lives and walks through these pages. What Le Goff has given us is more than a biography; it is a work of literature. . . . Given the length of this book, many will be intimidated and will not take up its challenge. That is a pity, for Le Goff has much to offer here. There is no chapter that does not contain information and ideas that deserve to be discussed further. -- The Catholic Historical Review

Louis lives and walks through these pages. What Le Goff has given us is more than a biography; it is a work of literature. . . . Given the length of this book, many will be intimidated and will not take up its challenge. That is a pity, for Le Goff has much to offer here. There is no chapter that does not contain information and ideas that deserve to be discussed further. The Catholic Historical Review

Louis lives and walks through these pages. What Le Goff has given us is more than a biography; it is a work of literature. . . . Given the length of this book, many will be intimidated and will not take up its challenge. That is a pity, for Le Goff has much to offer here. There is no chapter that does not contain information and ideas that deserve to be discussed further. <b><i>The Catholic Historical Review</i></b></p>

Author Information

Gareth Evan Gollrad received his Ph.D. in French Literature from the University of Chicago. He has translated a number of literary, critical, and philosophical works from French into English. Jacques Le Goff (1924–) is the former director of studies at L'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is the author and coauthor of a number of books, including History and Memory, Medieval Civilization 400–1500, and Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages.

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