The Hell of Holy War

The Hell of Holy War reads Jean de Joinville's famous account of King Louis IX and his Seventh Crusade as a powerful and unique representation of war, memory, and loss during the Middle Ages. In 1248, Joinville, a French nobleman, set out for the Holy Land, having taken the Cross and vowed to follow King Louis IX—Saint Louis (d. 1270)—across the Mediterranean. It would be more than six years before he returned home, having survived devastating military defeat; capture, imprisonment, and ransom; disease and perilous sea voyages. Later, Joinville wrote a riveting, first-person account of the king he admired, the war he survived, and the people he encountered.

Usually read as a hagiography of Saint Louis and a founding myth of the French nation, Joinville's memoir, Irit Kleiman argues, is also a raw, even brutal, meditation on what it means to go to war, survive combat and illness, witness the deaths of almost all of one's companions, then return home again. In a series of capacious, lyrical, and historically grounded close readings, The Hell of Holy War reframes our understanding of Joinville's narrative as one that addresses the hubris of invasion, the friendship between men at arms, and the economic, ecological, and moral violence of war.