William of Chartres (Dominican)

Three sermon's preached by William are preserved. These were preached on 2 February 1273 at Saint-Leufroy and on 12 and 19 February at La Madeleine. They are found in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), MS lat. 16481.[11] Pierre Daunou considered them poor sermons and not worth publishing.[2] They are still unedited.[11] In the Archives Nationales, carton J 1030, document no. 59 is the autograph of William's letter to his brother-in-law.[14]

On the Life and Deeds of Louis, King of the Franks of Famous Memory, and on the Miracles That Declare His Sanctity, William's Latin biography of Louis IX, is preserved alongside Geoffrey of Beaulieu's in a single manuscript, BnF, MS lat. 13778, at folios 41v–64v.[15] William's work was never as widely cited as Geoffrey's.[16] It is also shorter and lacks chapter headings.[17] Both works are hagiography, intended to demonstrate Louis's sainthood.[18] Geoffrey's was the first and William's the second biography of Louis IX and both texts have often been printed together.[5][15]

William wrote his work as a companion piece of Geoffrey's. He enumerated four areas where he intended to complete Geoffrey's biography: "the good days of [Louis's] rule", his imprisonment, his death and the miracles that had occurred at his tomb and through his intercession. It is in the first of these areas that William's biography is most interesting to modern historians.[19] In recounting the justness of Louis's administration—e.g., his suppression of private warfare and trial by battle—On the Life and Deeds reads at times like a mirror of princes.[5] It is the only eyewitness account of Louis's captivity.[20]

Like standard hagiographies of the time, On the Life and Deeds consists of two basic parts: the life (vita) proper and the miracles (miracula).[5] Paragraphs 1–3 of contain metaphors comparing Louis to the sun among stars and the Biblical king Josiah. He also describes Geoffrey's biography and his own purpose and method. Paragraph 4 is a description of Louis's institution of an annual procession of the relic of the crown of thorns at Sainte-Chapelle.[21] Paragraph 5 describes how the king kept the Sabbath (Sunday).[22] Most of the remainder of the work keeps to the themes neglected by Geoffrey. Paragraphs 6–10 cover the Seventh Crusade and Louis's captivity in Egypt; Louis's government of France is covered in paragraphs 12–27; his illness and death in 37–42; and seventeen posthumous miracles in 43–60 (with an introductory paragraph and one paragraph per miracle). William breaks with his declared themes at paragraph 11, where he tells how Louis had predicted that he would become a Dominican, and paragraphs 28–36, which describe Louis's various acts of religious devotion: footwashing, fasting, almsgiving, caring for lepers, building hospitals for the poor and endowing friaries and churches.[21]

William's seventeen miracles form the earliest collection of miracles attributed to Louis. All took place between October 1270 and August 1271.[23] William presents all the miracles as properly authenticated, usually dated, and apparently collected many of the accounts himself.[24][5] He may have had access to the list of miracles kept at Saint-Denis by Thomas Hauxton on Philip III's orders.[24] All seventeen recorded by William were later included in the Beatus Ludovicus, which assured them a wider audience than On the Life and Deeds received.[16]