Medieval France
(1225–1317). Joinville’s Vie de saint Louis, a French prose memoir by a powerful aristocrat, is one of our most valuable accounts of noble society in the 13th century. Joinville’s father was seneschal of Champagne, an office he inherited. In 1248, he decided to take part in the Seventh Crusade and thus met St. Louis, becoming a close friend. The two endured captivity together, then Joinville served as royal steward at Acre (1250–54) before returning to France. Joinville began his memoirs of the king in 1272, just after Louis’s death, but undertook the second part (composed 1298–1309) when Jeanne of Navarre, wife of Philip IV, requested it.
Joinville’s narrative has many virtues. As an important noble, he advised the king during the crusade; as a warrior, he fought in it. Although a close friend, Joinville, unlike other biographers of Louis, respected but was not overawed by the king and sometimes disapproved of his actions, particularly when Louis’s saintliness conflicted with what Joinville perceived to be his duties as king, aristocrat, and layman. Louis’s decision to go on crusade in 1270 was one such occasion, but there were others.
Joinville felt free at the time to speak his mind and records a number of salty interchanges between himself and his ruler. He was also candid about his own prejudices; he defended aristocratic privileges and was contemptuous of bourgeois upstarts. His observations are vivid, and his frankness makes the Vie delightful reading.
Joinville’s work was overshadowed in his own day by Guillaume de Nangis’s biography of Louis; of the three extant manuscripts, only one is medieval, a copy of the presentation manuscript of 1309.
Leah Shopkow
[See also: BIOGRAPHY; HISTORIOGRAPHY]
Joinville, Jean de. La vie de saint Louis, ed. Noel L.Corbett. Sherbrooke: Naaman, 1977.
——and Villehardouin. Chronicles of the Crusades, trans. Margaret R.B.Shaw. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.
Billson, Marcus K. “Joinville’s Histoire de Saint-Louis: Hagiography, History and Memoir.” American Benedictine Review 31 (1980):418–42.
Perret, Michèle. “‘A la fin de sa vie ne fuz-je mie’: Joinville’s Vie de Saint-Louis.” Revue des sciences humaines 183 (1981): 16–37.
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