Isabelle of France

The neglect of Isabelle of France by modern scholarship would have made any new work welcome. Sean Field's admirable study, however, does far more than merely fill a gap. It is doubly welcome, both for its careful and rigorous evaluation of Isabelle and her legacy, and also for its approach to the problems of writing biography for the medieval period. Isabelle of France (?1225–1270), daughter of Louis VIII and Blanche of Castille, and sister of Saint Louis, has been the subject of much devotional and hagiographical writing down to the twentieth century, but of strikingly little scholarly work. The combination of this strong devotional tradition, an uncritical reliance by many earlier writers on hagiographical narrative sources full of later interpolations, and the neglect or ignorance of other types of source material, have left an image of Isabelle as a figure of simple piety. After the failure, by 1244, of the last of a series of marriage negotiations, Isabelle was allowed to dedicate herself to a life of virginity and religious devotion, later founding the community of Longchamp, where she retired and eventually died. It is even generally forgotten that Isabelle herself never became a nun. In place of this confused and misleading tradition, Field provides a critical analysis of all of the relevant sources, a life story shorn of later accretions, and a balanced and convincing evaluation of her political and religious legacy

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