In the firmament of history, Joan of Arc is a massive star. Her light shines brighter than that of any other figure of her time and place. Her story is unique, and at the same time universal in its reach. She is, famously, a protean icon: a hero to nationalists, monarchists, liberals, socialists, the right, the left, Catholics, Protestants, traditionalists, feminists, Vichy and the Resistance. She is a recurring motif, a theme replayed in art, literature, music and film. And the process of recounting her story and making her myth began from the moment she stepped into public view; she was as much an object of fascination and a subject of impassioned argument during her short life as she has been ever since.
In outline, her tale is both profoundly familiar and endlessly startling. Alone in the fields at Domrémy, a peasant girl hears heavenly voices bringing a message of salvation for France, which lies broken at the hands of the invading English. Against all the odds, she reaches the dauphin Charles, the disinherited heir to the French throne, and convinces him that God has made it her mission to drive the English from his kingdom. Dressed in armour as though she were a man, with her hair cut short, she leads an army to rescue the town of Orléans from an English siege. The fortunes and the morale of the French are utterly transformed, and in a matter of weeks she pushes on, deep into English-held territory, to Reims, where she presides over the coronation of the dauphin as King Charles VII of France. But soon she is captured by allies of the English, to whom she is handed over for trial as a heretic. She defends herself with undaunted courage, but she is – of course – condemned. She is burned to death in the market square in Rouen, but her legend proves much harder to kill. Nearly five hundred years later, the Catholic Church recognises her not only as a heroine, but as a saint.
One of the reasons we know her story so well is that her life is so well documented, in a distant age when that was true of very few. In relative terms, as much ink and parchment were expended on the subject of Joan of Arc by her contemporaries as print and paper have been in the centuries that followed. There are chronicles, letters, poems, treatises, journals and account-books. Above all, there are two remarkable caches of documents: the records of her trial for heresy in 1431, including the long interrogations to which she was subjected; and the records of the ‘nullification trial’ held twenty-five years later by the French to annul the previous proceedings and rehabilitate Joan’s name. In these transcripts we hear not only the men and women who knew her, but Joan herself, speaking about her voices, her mission, her village childhood, and her extraordinary experiences after she left Domrémy. First-hand testimony, from Joan, her family and her friends: a rare survival from the medieval world. What could be more reliable or more revealing?
Yet all is not as simple as it seems. It’s not just that the official transcripts of their words were written in clerical Latin, rather than the French they actually spoke – a notarial translation alerting us to the fact that this first-hand testimony is not quite as immediate as it might initially appear. It’s also that, as befits such a star, Joan exerts a vast gravitational pull. By the time those who knew her spoke as witnesses in the nullification trial of 1456 about her childhood and her mission, they knew exactly who she had become and what she had accomplished. In recalling events and conversations from a quarter of a century earlier, they were grappling with the vagaries of long-treasured memories and telling stories that were deeply infused with hindsight – which by that stage included knowledge not only of her life and death, but also of the final defeat of the English in France between 1449 and 1453, events that served to vindicate Joan’s assertion of God’s purpose beyond anything achieved in her lifetime or for years thereafter. In many ways, then, the story of Joan of Arc as told in the nullification trial is a life told backwards.
The same could also be said of Joan’s account of herself at the ‘trial of condemnation’ of 1431. The unshakeable conviction in her cause and the extraordinary self-possession that had brought her to the dauphin’s presence at Chinon in February 1429 only grew as time went on. We call her ‘Joan of Arc’, for example – taking her father’s appellation, ‘d’Arc’, and transferring it to her – but that was a name she never used. Just a few weeks after her arrival at court, she was already referring to herself as ‘Jeanne la Pucelle’, ‘Joan the Maid’ – a title redolent with meaning, suggesting not only her youth and purity but her status as God’s chosen servant and her closeness to the Virgin, to whom she claimed a special devotion. And the sense of herself that she expressed at her trial was no ‘neutral’ account of her experiences, but a defence of her beliefs and actions in response to prolonged questioning from hostile prosecutors intent on exposing her as a liar and a heretic. As such, it’s a rich, absorbing and multilayered text, but one that is as difficult to interpret as it is invaluable.
Unsurprisingly, the effect of Joan’s gravitational field – the self-defining narrative pull of her mission – is equally apparent in historical accounts of her life. Most begin not with the story of the long and bitter war that had ravaged France since before she was born, but with Joan herself hearing voices in her village of Domrémy in the far east of the kingdom. That means that we come to the dauphin’s court at Chinon with Joan, rather than experiencing the shock of her arrival, and as a result it’s not easy to understand the full complexity of the political context into which she walked, or the nature of the responses she received. And because all our information about Joan’s life in Domrémy comes from her own statements and those of her friends and family in the two trials, historical narratives which start there are infused from the very beginning with the same hindsight that permeates their testimony.
Distortion, then, is one risk; but, beyond that, what lies at the centre of this gravitational field is immensely difficult to read. On closer investigation it can seem, unnervingly, as though Joan’s star might collapse into a black hole. When we go back to the trial transcripts, at almost every point in her story there are discrepancies between the accounts of different witnesses – and sometimes within the testimony of a single witness, including that of Joan herself – about the detail of events, their timing and their interpretation. The accounts we have, in other words, don’t straightforwardly build into a coherent and internally compatible whole. That’s hardly surprising: after all, eyewitness testimony can differ even about recent events and in relatively unpressured circumstances. Joan, we must remember, was interrogated over many days by prosecutors she knew were seeking to prove her guilt; and the nullification trial sought to clear her name by asking those who knew her to recall what she had said and done more than twenty-five years after the fact.
Even if they aren’t surprising, however, these inconsistencies and contradictions raise the question of how the evidence should best be understood. Sometimes, historians have picked their way through the different accounts, choosing some details to weave into a seamless story and glossing over other elements that don’t fit, without explaining why one has been preferred to another. Sometimes, too, parts of a single testimony have been accepted while others are dismissed, apparently more on the basis of perceived plausibility than anything else. (Of the information that Joan offered only at her trial, for example, her identification of her voices as those of Saints Michael, Margaret and Catherine has been taken seriously; her description of an angel appearing in the dauphin’s chamber at Chinon to present him with a crown, by contrast, has not.) And, in general, much less attention has been paid to the questions witnesses were asked than to the answers they gave, despite the extent to which the latter were shaped and defined by the former. At the heart of both trials was the question of where the dividing line lay between true faith and heresy. Witnesses, therefore, were not offered a general invitation to describe their experiences of Joan (or, in her case, her own experience), but were instead asked to respond to precise articles of investigation framed – whether the respondents understood it or not – by particular theological principles.
That’s also a difficulty for us: whether we, with the mindset of a very different age, can understand not just the finer points of late medieval theology, but the nature of faith in the world that Joan and her contemporaries inhabited. There seems little purpose, for example, in attempting to diagnose in her a physical or psychological disorder that might, to us, explain her voices, if the terms of reference we use are completely alien to the landscape of belief in which she lived. Joan and the people around her knew that it was entirely possible for otherworldly beings to communicate with men and women of sound mind; Joan was not the first or the last person in France in the first half of the fifteenth century to have visions or hear voices. The problem was not how to explain her experience of hearing something that wasn’t real; the problem was how to tell whether her voices came to her from heaven or from hell – which is why the expertise of theologians took centre stage in shaping responses to her claims.
Similarly, it might seem to us as though part of Joan’s power lay in bringing God into play within the context of war; that, by introducing the idea of a mandate from heaven into a kingdom exhausted by years of conflict, she made possible a new invigoration of French morale. But in medieval minds, war was always interpreted as an expression of divine will. The particular trauma for France in the 1420s was that its deeply internalised status as the ‘most Christian’ kingdom had been challenged by the bloodletting of civil war and overwhelming defeat by the English. How were the disaster of Azincourt (as the French knew what the English called ‘Agincourt’) and the years of suffering that followed to be explained, if not by God’s displeasure? This was the context in which Joan’s message of heaven-sent salvation was so potent, and the need to establish whether her voices were angelic or demonic in origin so overwhelmingly urgent.
And this is the reason why I have chosen to begin my history of Joan of Arc not in 1429 but fourteen years earlier, with the catastrophe of Azincourt. My aim is not to see Joan’s world only, or even principally, through her eyes. Instead, I’ve set out to tell the story of France during these tumultuous years, and to understand how a teenage girl came to play such an astonishing part within that history. Starting in 1415 has made it possible to explore the shifting perspectives of the various protagonists in the drama, both English and French – and to emphasise the fact that what it meant to be ‘French’ was profoundly contested throughout these years. Civil war threatened France’s identity geographically, politically and spiritually; and Joan’s understanding of who the French were, on whom God now intended to bestow victory through her mission, was not shared by many of her compatriots.
What follows is an attempt to tell the story of Joan’s France, and of Joan herself, forwards, not backwards, as a narrative in which human beings struggle to understand the world around them and – just like us – have no idea what’s coming next. Of course, in the process I too have had to pick my way through the evidence, choosing what to weave into a seamless story; but in the notes at the end of the book I’ve tried to give a sense of how and why I have made my choices, and where the pitfalls might lie within the sources themselves and in the testing process of translation from the Latin and French in which most of them are written. Among all the challenges presented by this mass of material, the most difficult is dealing with the trials, which were defining events in Joan’s life and afterlife at the same time as providing evidence through which to interpret them. My aim has been as much as possible to let them take place as events in Joan’s story – in other words, to allow the testimony of Joan herself and of the other, later witnesses unfold as it was given and recorded, rather than to read their memories and interpretations backwards into the earlier events they were describing.
The result is a history of Joan of Arc that is a little different from the one we all know: a tale in which Joan herself doesn’t appear for the first fourteen years, and one in which we learn about her family and childhood at the end of the story, not the beginning. Many historians have taken, and will undoubtedly take, a different view of how best to use these remarkable sources for the life of a truly remarkable woman. But for me, this was the only way to understand Joan within her own world – the combination of character and circumstance, of religious faith and political machination, that made her a unique exception to the rules that governed the lives of other women.
It is an extraordinary story; and, at the end of it, her star still shines.