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Following the death in 1276 of Louis, the oldest son of King Philip III of France, two sets of rumors were in circulation. One rumor held that the prince had been poisoned by the king’s second wife Mary of Brabant, or by someone from her retinue; the other claimed that God had taken the heir to the throne in retribution for the king’s ‘sins against nature’. First one and then both claims were attributed to the prophetic authority of Elizabeth of Spalbeek, a holy woman from the county of Loon. In four separate inquiries between September 1276 and January 1278, various representatives of the Capetian court traveled to the Low Countries to interrogate Elizabeth. This article offers short introductions to the career of Elizabeth of Spalbeek and to the political context of the French court, and then presents the first English translations of key records of the probes and the slightly later narrative sources that recount these events. These texts are fully annotated in order to facilitate future analysis by scholars and students of this curious case, still poorly understood, in which palace intrigue, fear of sexual deviance, and female prophecy intersected.
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