The ethos of language acts in joinville’s vie de saint louis

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In consideration of the attention that Jean de Joinville calls to moral qualities associated with language production, the essay attempts to determine the ethical character and value attached to the language acts he and others perform in La vie de saint Louis. As used here, “language act” refers to the communicative import of language production within a defined social context and to interactions among ethical valuation, rhetoric, and culture. The acts under examination include several types of rhetorical moves and narrative modes, such as testimony, praise and blame, exempla, the narrator’s silence in places where one might expect ethical valuation, and his self-representation as a teacher of ethics and, also, a trustworthy judge of moral value, particularly of others’ words. Moral correction plays a major part in the narrative’s language acts. The manner in which Joinville points to St. Louis’s good words and deeds – and no less prominently, his own – as models indicates his will to correct the then king and kingdom’s misguided ways.