“Have you not heard the prophecy that France was to be ruined by a woman and restored by a virgin from the marshes of Lorraine?”
By the time Joan of Arc proclaimed herself La Pucelle, the virgin sent by God to deliver France from its enemies, the English, she had been obeying the counsel of angels for five years. The voices Joan heard, speaking from over her right shoulder and accompanied by a great light, had been hers alone, a rapturous secret. But when, in 1429, they announced that the time had come for Joan to undertake the quest for which they had been preparing her, they transformed a seemingly undistinguished peasant girl into a visionary heroine who defied every limitation placed on a woman of the late Middle Ages.
Expected by those who raised her to assume nothing more than the workaday cloak of a provincial female, Joan told her family nothing of what her voices asked, lest her parents try to prevent her from fulfilling what she embraced as her destiny: foretold, ordained, inescapable. Seventeen years old, Joan dressed herself in male attire at the command of her heavenly father. She sheared off her hair, put on armor, and took up the sword her angels provided. She was frightened of the enormity of what God had asked of her, and she was feverish in her determination to succeed at what was by anyone’s measure a preposterous mission.
As Joan protested to her voices, she “knew not how to ride or lead in war,” and yet she roused an exhausted, under-equipped, and impotent army into a fervor that carried it from one unlikely victory to the next. In fact, outside her unshakable faith—or because of that faith—Joan of Arc was characterized above all by paradox. An illiterate peasant’s daughter from the hinterlands, Joan moved purposefully among nobles, bishops, and royalty, unimpressed by mortal measures of authority. She had a battle cry that drove her legions forward into the fray; her voice was described as gentle, womanly. So intent on vanquishing the enemy that she threatened her own men with violence, promising to cut off the head of any who should fail to heed her command, she recoiled at the idea of taking a life, and to avoid having to use her sword, she led her army carrying a twelve-foot banner that depicted Christ sitting in judgment, holding the world in his right hand, and flanked by angels. In the aftermath of combat, Joan didn’t celebrate victory but mourned the casualties; her men remembered her on her knees weeping as she held the head of a dying enemy soldier, urging him to confess his sins.
A mortal whose blood flowed red and real from battle wounds, she had eyes that beheld angels, winged and crowned. When she fell to her knees to embrace their legs, she felt their flesh solid in her arms. Her courage outstripped that of seasoned men-at-arms; her tears flowed as readily as did any other teenage girl’s. Not only a virgin, but also an ascetic who held herself beyond the reach of sensual pleasure, she wept in shock and rage when an English captain called her a whore. Yet, living as a warrior among warriors, she betrayed no prudery when time came to bivouac, undressing and sleeping among lustful young knights who remembered the beauty of a body none dared approach—not even after Joan chased off any prostitute foolish enough to tramp after an army whose leader’s claim to power was indivisible from her chastity. Under the exigencies of warfare, she didn’t allow her men the small sin of blasphemy; coveting victory above all else, she righteously seized an advantage falling on a holy day. She knew God’s wishes; she followed his direction; she questioned nothing. Her quest, revealed to her alone, allowed her privileges no pope would claim. On trial for her life and unfamiliar with the fine points of Catholic doctrine, she nimbly sidestepped the rhetorical traps of Sorbonne-trained doctors of the Church bent on proving her a witch and a heretic. The least likely of commanding officers, she changed the course of the Hundred Years War, and that of history.
The life of Joan of Arc is as impossible as that of only one other, who also heard God speak: Jesus of Nazareth, prince of paradox as much as peace, a god who suffered and died a mortal, a prophet whose parables were intended to confound, that those who“seeing may not see, and hearing may not understand,” a messenger of forgiveness and love who came bearing a sword, inspiring millennia of judgment and violence—the blood of his “new and everlasting covenant” extracted from those who refused his heavenly rule. More than that of any other Catholic martyr, Joan of Arc’s career aligns with Christ’s, hers “the most noble life that was ever born into this world save only One,” Mark Twain wrote. Her birth was prophesied: a virgin warrior would arise to save her people. She had power over the natural world, not walking on water, but commanding the direction of the wind. She foretold the future. If she wasn’t transfigured while preaching on a mount, she was, eyewitnesses said, luminous in battle, light not flaring off her armor so much as radiating from the girl within. The English spoke of a cloud of white butterflies unfurling from her banner—proof of sorcery, they called it. Her touch raised the dead. Her feats, which continue six centuries after her birth to frustrate ever more modern and enlightened efforts to rationalize and reduce to human proportions, won the allegiance of tens of wonder-struck thousands and made her as many ardent enemies. The single thing she feared, she said, was treachery.
Captured, Joan was sold to the English and abandoned to her fate by the king to whom she had delivered the French crown. Her passion unfolded in a prison cell rather than a garden, but like Jesus she suffered lonely agonies. Tried by dozens of mostly corrupt clerics, Joan refused to satisfy the ultimatums of Church doctors who demanded she abjure the God she knew and renounce the voices that guided her as the devil’s deceit. When she would not, she was condemned to death and burned as a heretic, the stake to which she was bound raised above throngs of jeering onlookers curious to see what fire might do to a witch. She was only nineteen, and her charred body was displayed for anyone who cared to examine it. Had she been a man after all, and if she were, did it explain any of what she’d accomplished?
A sophisticated few of Joan of Arc’s contemporaries might have understood the idea of salvation at the hands of a virgin from the marshes of Lorraine as a communal prayer—more a wish for rescue than a prophecy. Probably, most took the idea at face value, some giving it credence, others dismissing it. But only one, a girl who claimed she knew little beyond what she’d learned spinning and sewing and taking her turn to watch over the villagers’ livestock, heard it as a vocation. The self-proclaimed agent of God’s will, Joan of Arc wasn’t immortalized so much as she entered the collective imagination as a living myth, exalted by the angelic company she kept and the powers with which it endowed her.
The woman who “ruined” France was Isabeau of Bavaria, a ruination accomplished by disinheriting her son the dauphin Charles, to whom Joan would restore France’s throne, and allowing his paternity to be called into question. It was a credible doubt that might have been cast on any of Isabeau’s eight children, as she was notoriously unfaithful to her husband, the mad (we would call him schizophrenic) Charles VI. Bastardy, though it invited dynastic squabbles among opposing crowns with shared ancestry, wasn’t a cause for shame among the nobility but was announced if not advertised, a brisure, or “bar sinister,” added to the coat of arms worn by sons conceived outside a family patriarch’s official marriage.*1 In fact, it was an illustrious bastard’s invasion of England in 1066 that precipitated the centuries of turf wars between the French and the English. As Duke of Normandy, William the Conqueror claimed England’s throne for his own but remained a vassal of the French king, as did those who ruled after him. The arrangement guaranteed centuries of dynastic turmoil, and the house of Valois*2 had the misfortune of presiding over the Hundred Years War, at the beginning of which France had everything to lose. Centuries of crusades following the Norman conquests had established the livre as the currency of international trade, and France’s wealth purchased its preeminence among nations. French was not used for purposes of haggling alone but was the lingua franca of Europe, the language in which Marco Polo’s Travels was published.
Punctuated by periods of exhausted stalemates, occasional famine, and the arrival, in 1348, of the bubonic plague, the Hundred Years War ground on until the population of France was halved. When Joan set out on her divine mission, England had taken control of almost all of France north of the Loire River. By the time Isabeau revealed the dauphin’s questionable ancestry, effectively barring him from the French throne, portents of salvation by a virgin from the marshes of Lorraine had been circulating for decades, multiplying with the woes that inspired them, the putative historic reach of prophecies concerning Joan’s advent reaching ever further back in time as her fame spread. Joan’s contemporary the poet and historian Christine de Pizan reported that on the occasion of Joan’s first formal ecclesiastical examination—a cautionary investigation the French ministers considered necessary before the dauphin placed his trust in an otherwise untested visionary—she was embraced as a messiah whose coming had been predicted by Merlin, the Sibyl, and the Venerable Bede.*3 The widowed Christine supported herself and her children by composing love poems for wealthy patrons, but the work for which she would be remembered is The Book of the City of Ladies, an allegorical gathering of history’s most illustrious and influential women. As the daughter of the court astrologer and physician to Charles V, whose vast royal archives had provided her the education universities denied her sex, Christine made it her purpose to challenge the misogyny that characterized late medieval thought and literature, and she welcomed Joan as a citizen of her utopian vision. “In preference to all the brave men of times past, this woman must wear the crown!” the poet exclaimed. Her Ditié de Jehanne (Song of Joan) was the first popular work about the girl who would be remembered as France’s savior, an epic ballad she composed at the height of Joan’s glory, about a “young maiden, to whom God gives the strength and power to be the champion.”
If a prediction made by a magician who was himself a myth strikes the present-day reader as suspect if not worthless, the medieval mind, preoccupied with sorcery and tales of chivalry and untroubled by the future scholarly detective work that would exhume the sources of the Arthurian legend, gave Merlin’s presumed words credence, the Sibyl and the Bede joining him as remote mystical buttresses to the more precise predictions made around the time of Joan’s birth. Once Joan had announced herself as the vehicle of God’s salvation, her initial examiners turned to prophecy as a means of retroactively validating a declaration they desperately wanted to be true, and during the late Middle Ages, Merlin, the Sibyl, and the Bede were typically summoned as a trio, each associated with pronouncements at once mysterious and archetypal. “A virgin ascends the backs of the archers / and hides the flower of her virginity,” was Merlin’s contribution. Copied from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain, which introduced the Arthurian legend to continental Europe, it invited a broad spectrum of interpretations, as must any lasting prediction. Applied to Joan, it sanctioned her authority to lead men in war and underscored her celibacy, protected by male attire and armor. The Church, whose reflexive revisionism cannibalized any myth that might distract from its doctrine, had long ago consumed and rehabilitated the Sibyl, a legendary seer traced as far back as the fifth century BC and often referred to in the plural. Whether one or many, having left no recorded oracle, the Sibyl could be summoned to reinforce any appeal. The Venerable Bede’s presentiment of Joan’s saving France was harvested from an Anglo-Saxon poem written six centuries after Bede’s death and rested on a single sentence:“Behold, battles resound, the maid carries banners.”
Jesus’s advent was similarly legitimized. The evangelists applied messianic prophecies as generic as “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder” to the coming of Christ and revised what they knew of Jesus’s life to fit specific predictions made by the prophets Isaiah, Daniel, and Hosea. More significant, Jesus consistently presented himself as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, for example, deliberately staging his Palm Sunday entrance to Jerusalem according to the six-hundred-year-old direction of Zechariah. “Lo your king comes to you,” the prophet wrote of the Messiah, “triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on an ass.” This wasn’t prophecy fulfilled so much as a public announcement resting on biblical scholarship, for Jesus was, if nothing else, a Jew who knew his Scripture, knew it as well as did the high priests who called for his death in response to the presumption of his claim of divinity. “All this has taken place,” he said to his disciples, “that the Scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled.” He was, Jesus told the temple elders, the Messiah whom Isaiah promised would come to “set at liberty those who are oppressed.”
Like Jesus, Joan recognized herself in Scripture, but from the New rather than the Old Testament. “I was sent for the consolation of the poor and destitute,” she proclaimed, borrowing her lines from Gospel accounts of a career that, like hers, convinced by means of miracle, spectacle, and prophecy fulfilled.
Of the handful Joan would have heard growing up, the only prophecy she is known to have identified with her mission was particular to her place of birth: France was to be ruined by a woman and restored by a virgin from the marshes of Lorraine. As Old and New Testaments illustrate, prophecy has always been a political medium, broadcasts from a jealous god who distributes land grants to nations worthy of reward. In 1398, when France’s national oracle, Marie Robine, foresaw the desolation of her homeland, she came directly to the court in Paris to describe it in full. A recluse of humble origins embraced by the poor and the exalted alike, Marie derived her authority from the attention popes paid her apocalyptic Book of Revelations. Refused an audience with Charles VI, who was likely in a state of mental confusion, the seer warned that “great sufferings” would arrive. One vision presented Marie with armor, which frightened her. “But she was told to fear nothing, and that it was not she who would have to wear this armor, but that a Maid who would come after her would wear it and deliver the kingdom of France from its enemies.” While witnesses remembered Joan speaking only of the prophecy specific to Lorraine, she undoubtedly knew the content of Marie’s visions. Not only were they common lore, but they illustrated her vocation and validated her wearing armor.
At the time of Joan of Arc’s birth, in January 1412, France had not only endured seventy-five years of enemy occupation but also devolved into civil war, as the pragmatic Burgundians, assuming the inevitability of English rule, had allied themselves with their presumptive conquerors. The blight of foreign occupation descended on a populace already halved by the previous century’s periodic crop failures and famines, as well as the bubonic plague that still smoldered wherever cramped living conditions encouraged the spread of disease. After decades of pillaging the land they coveted, the English found themselves rulers of ghost towns, vineyards and fields of grain reduced to ash, homes and churches to rubble, livestock slaughtered and carcasses left to rot. The French despaired of ever recapturing the land they had lost, served by forces that were unpaid and ill-equipped by their bankrupt government, and the more dire their predicament, the more desperately they redirected hope onto a higher power—the very one from which they believed they needed rescuing. Punishments endured for as long as anyone could remember suggested that God, were God even listening to their petitions, found the French unworthy of salvation. For what, other than the kind of widespread iniquity that had required his smiting a Sodom or a Gomorrah, could explain such unrelieved misery?
When few among the living hadn’t seen a putrefying corpse, both high art and popular culture trained a lush and lingering focus on the most gruesome aspects of disease and decay. As the great medievalist Johan Huizinga wrote of the late Middle Ages, it was considered “bad form to praise the world and life openly.” The fashion was “to see only its suffering and misery, to discover everywhere signs of decadence and of the near end—in short to condemn the times or to despise them … For the true future is the Last Judgment, and that is near at hand.” From the masterworks of Brueghel, Bosch, and Holbein to the crude woodcuts illustrating popular chapbooks, the danse macabre set the tempo for an accelerated arrival at Judgment Day. Plague made manifest what aristocrats’ sumptuary laws tried to obscure. Death was democratic; the great equalizer visited princes and paupers alike and, for those who took comfort in Church doctrine, rewarded the righteous and punished the wicked.
Fifteenth-century Europe was wholly in thrall to the Judeo-Christian reflex that insists on humankind’s base nature and God’s impulse to destroy transgressors, just as were the Israelites, or eighteenth-century Americans during the Great Awakening, or any contemporary iteration of fundamentalism that explains mortal suffering as the result of sin, especially that of a sexual nature. Without science to provide the countervailing wisdom that weather patterns explain drought and famine, for example, or identifyXenopsylla cheopis, the Oriental rat flea, as the disease vector of bubonic plague, the Church commanded an unquestioned—and, during the Inquisition, unquestionable—authority for a people whose religious education stressed “Death by Eve, life by Mary”*4 as the formula for understanding affliction. To equate female sexuality with disobedience and pollution and judge women exclusively on the basis of their sexual conduct is a cornerstone of Judeo-Christian tradition, a structural and thus indelible doctrine; it is an apologia for misogyny. Saint Bridget of Sweden’s Celestial Revelations, which she began to record in 1346 and which was subsequently published and given credence across Europe, identified sin as the source of France’s devastation. Joan, who showcased her virginity as both proof and symbol of her virtue, believed God had punished the French because “it was his will to suffer them to be beaten for their sins.”
A solitary Job might bow his head under the caprices of a deity with a penchant for testing the faith of his followers, but an entire society steeped in the shame and fear of having fallen not only from grace but so far beyond the care of God as to have become a target of his indefinite wrath could imagine only one means of salvation: the emergence of an unpolluted intercessor. If sexual transgression brought death, its inverse, the purity of abstinence, would restore life to a dying nation.
Isabeau, the unchaste queen, had fulfilled the first half of a prophecy that underscored the stain of her promiscuity; the other half would require a virgin immune to temptation.
The phrase l’âge de raison, or “the age of understanding,” appears several times in Joan’s testimony about a girlhood that ended at twelve, when the guidance she received from her angels delivered her to “understanding” and removed her from the company of her peers, whose carefree games she joined “as little as possible,” dismissing them as irrelevant to what she considered the real story of her life, a narrative she was as careful to preserve from the enthusiastic embellishment of her supporters as she was from the slander of her enemies. When Joan’s advocates exaggerated and amplified her minimal contribution to the care of her father’s sheep to secure her place among Jesus and the shepherds who paid homage to his nativity, as well as the Old Testament prophets Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah, she was quick to correct any misapprehension, purposeful or not, that she had ever been a shepherdess. But Joan could only protect her story for so long, and the motif of the shepherdess proved impossible to dismiss in a narrative tradition that had chosen the shepherd as an avatar of God a thousand years before the birth of Christ. “The Lord is my shepherd,” King David sang, “I shall not want.” Five centuries after Joan’s birth and two millennia after King David’s, Cecil B. DeMille’s first epic, Joan the Woman, released in 1916, immediately establishes the director’s intensely symbolic vision. Joan emerges onto the screen, Christlike in the company of her sheep, walking toward the audience through a landscape of preternatural light that ultimately gathers around her into a radiant nimbus, a halo enveloping her whole body (Fig. 5). Even Georges Duby, the preeminent twentieth-century historian of the French Middle Ages, with limitless access to documented fact, lumped Joan in among the herd of simple shepherdesses.
Of course, there are many stories of Joan’s life. She left her own insofar as an autobiography can be assembled from the answers to a set of hostile questions, many repeated over and over in the attempt to wear down her resistance and trick her into perjuring herself. Truth was never what her judges sought, but in this case it couldn’t be hidden. Joan’s poise under fire demonstrated what she couldn’t by herself, even had she been erudite as well as literate. It’s one thing to assemble and polish a portrait of oneself, as did Saint Augustine, a professor of philosophy and rhetoric, and another to demonstrate at nineteen an integrity that a chorus of scheming pedants couldn’t dismantle, their sophistry displaying Joan’s virtues as she could not have done for herself. Few trial transcripts make good reading; only one preserves the voice of Joan of Arc. While the words of the judges are forgettable—all despots sound alike—Joan’s transcend the constraints of interrogation. Even threatened with torture and assaulted by prison guards attempting her rape, she could not be forced to assume the outline her judges drew for her. That was their script, their story of Joan’s life, and, unlike other such medieval documents, it was reproduced, bound, and distributed by her persecutors with the ironic purpose of establishing their punctiliousness in serving the laws of canon.
The nullification process, undertaken twenty-five years after Joan’s death with the purpose of vindicating her, provides a second official narrative, told by 115 witnesses who testified on her behalf: the defense she was denied while living. Beyond these two transcripts, there are contemporaneous chronicles such as the king’s counselor Guillaume Cousinot’s Chronique de la Pucelle, the French poet Alain Chartier’s Epistola de Puella, and the anonymously authored Journal du siège d’Orléans and Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris; letters, both those dictated by Joan herself and those written about her by kings, clerics, friends, and foes; poems; theological analyses; and eulogies, biographies, and passion plays undertaken immediately upon her death. Joan was the reluctant object of veneration even before she died, her execution the final and necessary act of a drama that had unfolded before a rapt audience across all of Europe, an audience that consumed every rumor and report of her remarkable life and wove it into narrative.
Like all sacred figures whose extraordinary earthly existence separates them from the broad mass of humanity—including the lives of gods themselves, Allah, Christ—a saint is a story, and Joan of Arc’s is like no other. At the time of her birth, the Catholic Church was both center and substance of European culture. Medieval music and art were almost exclusively devotional and found their highest expression within the walls of a cathedral, whose Gothic architecture emphasized light’s origin from above, the clerestory showering the faithful gathered under its roof with a spray of heavenly beams, its spires directing the eye upward to the source of that grace, even as they reminded humankind of God’s omniscient scrutiny. Each of the hundreds of cathedrals built during the Middle Ages was a great act of propitiation, one city competing with another for the favor of God’s grace. So completely did the Church pervade and control the attention of the people that “even cooking instructions called for boiling an egg ‘during the length of time wherein you can say a Miserere.’ ” Far from being separated from government, the Church was the state. Rule was by divine right; only an archbishop representing Christ on earth could anoint a king. All across Europe—in Cambridge, Oxford, Bologna, Padua, Naples, Salamanca, Valladolid, Paris, Montpellier, Toulouse, and Orléans—the great centers of thought originated in religious communities.
For the wealthy, patronage of education and art was a means of buying the favor of a deity who, at the approach of a rich man, narrowed the gates of heaven to the size of a needle’s eye. For the illiterate poor, the Church offered religious education in the form of allegory and illustration of the Gospels: altarpieces, stained-glass windows, stations of the cross, chapbooks. When academics were paid by the Church, education necessarily reflected its biases and interests, and all medieval culture, from highest to lowest, was permeated by the same anxieties. The underclass in particular focused on the afterlife as a corrective to the endless tribulations of their mortal existence, and stories told around the hearth offered as much religious indoctrination as they did entertainment. Though folktales that would have been familiar to Joan predated—some by millennia—the birth of Christ, they shared themes and symbols with Christianity, the workings of magic taking on the role of divine intervention. The equivalent of the beatitudes’ promise that virtue is rewarded by heavenly blessings drove plots forward to judgment and just deserts. The moral of “Cinderella,” for example, might well be “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” the heroine’s innate goodness and obedience rewarded by a supernatural adjustment that doesn’t so much create as unveil her true radiance, freeing her from servitude and delivering her to happily-ever-after in the arms of the king’s son. Sleeping Beauty, too, arrives at union with an exalted beloved, woken from sleep at the touch of a prince who cuts through a thicket of thorns to apply a redemptive kiss. Guileless Snow White bites into an apple, a fruit laden with the knowledge of good and evil, proffered by a wicked queen who steps in for the serpent. The incorruptible girl falls dead, beyond the reach of human influence, and waits for the arrival of a prince who, Christlike, resurrects her and bears her off to his kingdom. The fairy-tale forest is Eden’s dark inverse, a sunlit garden overgrown by shadow, concealing sin. When Little Red Cap forgets her mother’s warning and strays from the path of obedience, she meets the animal that has come to symbolize sexual predation, a wolf. As a narrative genre, hagiography is suspended between biography and fiction, borrowing freely from the second to enhance a truth that may or may not be historical. Some tales of the saints poach not only motifs but also plots directly from folklore, the story of Donkey-skin, for example, revised as that of Saint Dymphna, each pursued by a father who, grieving the death of his wife, tries to take his daughter as his bride. Donkey-skin ends up in the arms of an earthly prince; Dymphna, decapitated when she refuses her father’s incestuous advances, gets the heavenly version. Chivalry, too, was permeated by Christianity; the ideal knight served God above any other lord. Galahad never made it back to the Round Table with the Holy Grail before he ascended to heaven in a state of rapture so intense he chose to die in its embrace. Two centuries later, Cervantes’s spoof of the chivalric quest cannot escape the Messiah’s trajectory. Don Quixote descends into the Cave of Montesinos, which “went down into the abyss”—the underworld—where he remained among the dead for three days before rising.
For centuries, no matter who told the story of Joan of Arc, he or she knew each recorded moment of Jesus’s life, knew it so well and from such an early age that it was natural to organize the trajectory of her short life to align with his—just as natural as it was for Joan, a girl Galahad, as she saw herself, to tread his messianic path toward her martyrdom. If her career wasn’t predicted in the Scriptures, its outline is there to be found, prefigured by the Gospel narratives that inspired it.
Prophecy, annunciation, virginity. A hidden sword, an angel bearing a crown of jewels. An army of knights, a cloud of butterflies, a phallic arrow that missed its mark. A tower cell, an evil bishop, a king’s betrayal. A heart that would not burn, a dove that flew from the flames that failed to dispatch that immortal heart. In Joan, fate, or God, or the gods, or random meaningless chance provided a real-life heroine whose short time on earth struck richly symbolic notes during a period whose limited media relied heavily on symbol. The story of Joan of Arc not only fulfilled a collective dream but also transfigured it, elevating it from the hearth to the heavens. Confounding in its facts, a biography like Joan’s invites invention; its provenance is the unconscious; its logic apart from reason. Too, like all good yarns, Joan’s spread by mouth, subject to additions and subtractions at the whim of the teller. But while many versions of her life bear a patina of loving details added by the faithful—not so much lying as regarding her through a worshipful lens—it unfolded in public. Witnessed by thousands, its lineaments weren’t imagined but known and safeguarded by hard documentation. Her earliest biographers told a story swept into the realm of myth even as it unfolded, one that would demonstrate immunity to mythologizing by virtue of a historical record remarkable in its detail.
The tension between truth and fiction continues to quicken Joan’s biography, for a story, like a language, is alive only for as long as it changes. Latin is dead. Joan lives. She has been imagined and reimagined by Shakespeare, Voltaire, Schiller, Twain, Shaw, Brecht, Anouilh, and thousands of writers of less renown. Centuries after her death, she has been embraced by Christians, feminists, French nationalists, Mexican revolutionaries, and hairdressers, her crude cut inspiring the bob worn by flappers as a symbol of independence from patriarchal strictures. Her voices have held the attention of psychiatrists and neurologists as well as theologians. It seems Joan of Arc will never be laid to rest. Is this because stories we understand are stories we forget?
*1 “Sinister,” from the Latin for “left,” indicates a stripe moving from the lower left to the upper right quadrant of the coat of arms. À la main gauche, or “by the left hand” (of the father), is a French expression for illegitimate birth.
*2 The cadet line of the Capetian dynasty, whose kings ruled France from 1328 to 1589.
*3 The wizard from the Arthurian legend, a mythical seer, and an English monk of the late seventh and early eighth centuries, respectively.
*4 A popular medieval proverb attributed to Saint Jerome.