SOURCE: An Introduction to Myth, Man, and Sovereign Saint: King Louis IX in Jean de Joinville's Sources, Peter Lang, 1985, pp. 1–31.

In the following essay, Slattery offers an overview of the dating controversy surrounding Joinville's Vie de Saint Louis and discusses the structure of the work, the sources from which Joinville may have drawn, the history of the early manuscripts, and the purpose of the work.

The Critical Tradition on Joinville

Few would care to contest Bacon's observation that the invention of printing, gunpowder and the compass changed the form of civilization. But many of our medieval sources have been studied as if they had been written after the invention of the printing press. The majority of studies on Joinville's “Mémoires”, as most historians persist in calling them, have succumbed to the magic of printing.¹ Depending on an historical method of a Langlois and Seignobos or even a...