One hundred years after Joan of Arc was canonised, Mark Lawson considers the many dramatisations inspired by the life and death of the saint

The front page of The Observer newspaper for 16 May, 1920 reported that, later that day, a woman dressed in medieval armour would ride on a horse around the outside of Westminster Cathedral.

She represented Joan of Arc who, on that Sunday in Rome, would be canonised. It was 490 years after she was burned to death in the market square in Rouen, sentenced to death by pro-English nobles for her part in French resistance to the power of the English Crown. A separate dispatch on the foreign pages of The Observer recorded that 25,000 pilgrims were heading to Vatican City to see the peasant girl who became a French national heroine being further translated as St Joan.

“From Sorceress to Saint” was the headline in The New York Times coverage from Italy of the Mass, presided over by Pope Benedict XV, the alliterative nouns reflecting how far the woman had come from being condemned, by the French establishment, as an agent of Satan.

Evidence of the new saint’s global impact was that the edition’s Home pages described how “15,000 persons” had gathered at the statue of Joan of Arc at the junction of Riverside Drive and 93rd Street, where they had listened to a eulogy from Archbishop Patrick J. Hayes.