Sean L. Field, Courting Sanctity: Holy Women and the Capetians. Ithaca, NY, and London Cornell University Press, 2019, pp. 266

Abstract

In Courting Sanctity, Sean Field delivers a comprehensible, and at times, remarkably complex portrait of the relationship between the French dynasty of the Capetians and female prophets and mystics of the mid-thirteenth to early fourteenth centuries. His argument and thus the purpose of the investigation are clearly established from the beginning: starting with King Louis IX (1214–1270), holy women were integral in establishing the sanctification of the crown, but as the monarchy grew in secular power or entered into periods of crisis, court officials started to target and to condemn these spiritual females as sorceresses or demonic threats.