From Jean de Joinville’s Histoire de Saint Louis (c. 1305-1309) to historian Claude Ménard’s edition of Joinville in 1617, this talk will explore how literary representations of French king-turned-saint Louis IX (r. 1226-1270) evolved from the medieval to early modern periods. In so doing, I propose that looking carefully at this evolution might also give us ways to tease out French premodern understandings of race, and particularly premodern conceptions of whiteness, in representations of violence, glory, and saintliness.