Saint Louis Jacques Le Goff Canonized in 1297 as Saint Louis, King Louis IX of France (1214-1270) was the central figure of Christendom in the thirteenth century. He ruled when France was at the height of power; he commanded the largest army in Europe and controlled the wealthiest kingdom. Renowned for his patronage of the arts, Louis was equally famous for his decision to imitate the suffering Christ as a humbly attired, bearded penitent. Armed with the considerable resources of the nouvel historien, Jacques Le Goff mines existing materials about Saint Louis to forge a new historical biography of the king. Part of his ambitious project is to reconstruct the mental universe of the thirteenth century: Le Goff describes the scholastic and intellectual background of Louis' reign and, most importantly, he discusses methodology and the interpretation of written sources - their composition, provenance, and reliability. Le Goff divides his unconventional biography into three parts. In the first, he gives us the contours of Louis' life from birth to death in the usual context of family dynamics and genealogy, courtly and regional politics, and shifts in economic, social, and cultural life. In sifting through the historical accounts of the king's life, Le Goff determines that it is Louis IX's profound sense of moral and religious purpose - his desire to become the ideal Christian ruler - that colors his every action from boyhood on; it is also, for Le Goff, what renders contemporary accounts problematic and what necessitates further scrutiny. […] Jacques Le Goff (1924- ) is the former director of studies at L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes 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