Joinville: a hagiographic story about oneself and about the other

The article deals with a Mediaeval hagiographic text dating from 1309, Joinville's work Histoire de Saint Louis. The text is a hagiography or sacred biography, a legal testimony that served in the canonisation process of Louis IX, but, at the same time, also the chronicle of a crusader expedition, that is, the story of a journey which was both an expedition and a pilgrimage. Finally, the text is also an autobiography, since Joinville also inserted elements from his own life in the discourse about the saint. The article elaborates the frameworks of hagiography in relation to historiography and the conception and formation of the Other (the non-Christian) in the context of the late Western Middle Ages.