Joan of Arc: a history

There were saltires in the streets of Paris almost 600 years ago. They were sported by the adherents of John, the “fearless” duke of Burgundy, who took the city from the count of Armagnac in 1418. Men caught wearing Armagnac’s rival white sash were massacred and their bodies were stacked up “like sides of bacon – a dreadful thing”, in the words of a Parisian chronicler. The count himself was murdered and a sash of flesh was ripped from his body.

This was just another episode in the savage civil war that had rent France before Agincourt and was contested for decades afterwards. It allowed Henry V of England to press his claim to sovereignty over France and it provides the context for the story of Joan of Arc, or Joan the Maid, as she was known at the time.
Everyone sort-of knows Joan: the teenaged village girl who heard voices that took her to the court of Charles of Valois, the uncrowned heir of the late, mad king of France. At the head of an army, Joan won an extraordinary victory over the Anglo-Burgundian alliance at Orléans, and then another, and then another. She led Charles to Reims for his sacred coronation in 1429, but floundered against the immoveable walls of Paris, was captured at Compiègne, tried as a heretic and burned at the stake in 1431. Twenty-five years later, with the English almost completely driven from France, just as Joan had foretold, a second trial nullified the original verdict. On 16 May 1920 she was canonised: Joan the virago, Joan the heretic, Joan redux.

As Helen Castor notes, Joan’s iconic status means that she has become all things to all people, be they Catholic, Protestant, left, right, nationalist, monarchist or feminist. The sources are linguistically tricky and skewed towards competing claims. There is also the problem of what Castor calls “Joan’s gravitational field – the self-defining narrative pull of her mission”. The story is all too often infused with hindsight, anachronism and mawkishness. But Castor, a Bye Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, refuses to be sucked in. She embeds her subject firmly but sensitively in her cultural, political and religious landscape and the outstanding result is a life of Joan of Arc told “forwards not backwards”.

Numinous voices were a feature of medieval Europe, particularly France, the très-chrétien kingdom, where kings were anointed with the sacred oil of Clovis and laid to rest in the abbey of St-Denis. There had been prophets before Joan – some female, some peasant, some both. None, however, had dressed up in boys’ clothes or begged for the chance to lead an army or possessed such a crystalline vision of France reborn and reunited under Charles VII.

The girl was thoroughly examined and her integrity was scrutinised, both spiritually and physically (her virginity would be confirmed three times: at Chinon, at Poitiers and, later, by her enemy at Rouen). There were naysayers, but by 1429 Charles, who commonly heard two or three Masses a day, had little to lose from testing Joan in war’s furnace. When she actually won – and not just any town, but Orléans, the key to the Loire, a siege of six months lifted in four days – the contributing factors (the early withdrawal of the Burgundians, the stretched English line, Captain Glasdale’s fall into the river) could be explained just one way: “This deed”, the frail theologian Jean Gerson concluded from Lyon, “was done by God.”

Joan’s English and Burgundian enemies saw things differently. If Joan was a prophet, she was a false prophet, a harbinger of hell. They were much exercised by her cross-dressing, for it was forbidden in Deuteronomy. Laces and cords might stave off groping hands, but to Joan’s critics they were symbols of perversion and subversion: “a shocking and vile monstrosity”.

Joan’s zeal and the momentum of her mission led to the coronation of Charles VII at Reims Cathedral on 17 July 1429, but when the victories dwindled it became harder to discern God’s will. The illiterate teenager was no tactician, far less a politician. Faction and business threatened to overwhelm. One glorious missive, responding to a petition for advice on the papal schism, reads like an automated out-of-office email: “Joan the Maid lets you know that your messenger has reached me … I cannot reliably tell you the truth of the matter now … because I am now too much caught up in the business of war, but when you know that I am in Paris, send a messenger to me and I will then tell you clearly.”

Joan’s Armagnac allies attributed her defeat and capture at Compiègne the following year to her wilfulness: she had stopped listening to God and so divine favour had been withdrawn. Castor evokes the terror of Joan’s imprisonment and trial with great subtlety. Asked if she believed that she was in the grace of God, Joan replied: “If I’m not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God keep me in it. I would be the most wretched person in the world if I knew I was not in the grace of God.” At first sight of the scaffold, Joan recanted and agreed to put on a dress, but she soon reverted. Joan of Arc was burned in the market square of Rouen on 30 May 1431.

Three months later, Charles’ army had a new prophet in its train. But unlike William the Shepherd, Joan the Maid would not be forgotten. She had vowed to make a “war-cry” that would be remembered for ever. In taut, lucid, utterly compelling prose, Helen Castor has ensured that not only the cry, but also the voice, is still heard.