Louis VII and His World (original) (raw)

2018, Louis VII and His World

Within both popular and academic culture, the twelfth century stands as one of the best known and loved medieval centuries. After all, it was the era in which the so-called twelfth-century renaissance occurred, when the genre of Romance was born, historical writing went through a "golden age," chivalry began to coalesce as a secular ideal, scholasticism developed and cathedral schools grew far beyond their intended purpose. It was a grand age of crusading as well as the development of the idea of crusade. Land clearing and reclamation, a "commercial revolution" and territorial expansion in the Baltic and on the Iberian Peninsula all suggest a century of European energy and dynamism. The century is likewise replete with colorful, larger-than-life personalities, especially in the Anglo-Norman world. Among the most famous are King Henry II of England, his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine and their famous (or infamous) sons, Richard and John. Hidden away, and most definitely understudied by Anglophone scholars are their continental counterparts and overlords, the Capetian kings of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. There are, of course, exceptions to this scholarly oversight on the Capetians, including works that focus upon the dynasty in relation to such entities such as the Papacy, the Gallic episcopacy and specific religious communities, and most recently, the Capetians in relation to crusading.1 As individual monarchs the Capetians have certainly not garnered the avalanche of scholarship the Anglo-Normans have. Louis VII is perhaps the most neglected of all Capetian monarchs between 1108 and the fourteenth century,