Saint Joan of Arc (Jeanne la Pucelle)

Saint Joan of Arc (1412-1431)

Item opusculum super facto Puelle et credulitate ei praestauda
("Concerning the fact of the Maid and the faith due to her")

Saint Joan of Arc called herself, Jeanne la Pucelle, meaning "Joan the Maid." Her followers called her, simply, La Pucelle. Her antagonists spitefully called her "the one who calls herself the Maid" or "Joan who calls herself the Maid."

Portion of the frieze, "The Life of Joan of Arc," at the Panthéon, Paris.

These pages present a Catholic view of Saint Joan that is consistent with the historical record. It reviews the facts of the life and accomplishments of Saint Joan of Arc, as well as their historical context. It offers commentary and criticism of historical and academic views of Joan, especially as regards the secularization and ideological contortions of her life and legacy. The verity of Joan's visions (which we will call her "Voices") is assumed here, which enables important typological and scriptural connections to Joan's life and acts. Presented here, as well, is the theory that Joan's mission was not to save France so much as to save Roman Catholicism.

This article assumes everything that Saint Joan did, experienced, and testified, according to the historical record, was real, not just to her, but objectively real.

Please note that the discussion of Saint Joan here is analysis not narrative. Although the narrative is presented, the approach here is thematic not chronological. To review a straight chronology of her life, please see the Joan of Arc Timeline or find a good narrative treatment of her from the Joan of Arc bibliography.

Background to the story of Saint Joan of Arc

Joan was likely born in January of 1412 in a village in eastern France that lay on the margin of warring French factions and the quasi-independent Duchy of Lorraine. She was about eight years old when in 1420 the French King Charles VI "the Mad", in the Treaty of Troyes, granted to Henry V of England succession to the French crown through marriage to Charles' daughter. Henry had ascended to the English crown in 1413, proclaiming himself also, as did his predecessors, King of France. He reasserted English claims on France, including former English possessions in Normandy and western France, which the French, either disunited and so unable to address it cohesively, or simply did not take seriously.

In 1415, Henry invaded Normandy, reviving the ongoing but episodic French succession conflict we now call the "Hundred Years War". At the Battle of Agincourt, Henry destroyed French forces that consisted mostly of loyalists to the House of Orléans, while its French rival, the House of Burgundy, sat it out, perhaps even by agreement with the English. Animosity continued between the French factions, further weakening the French King, Charles VI, who suffered attacks of severe mental illness. In 1419, followers of the Dauphin murdered the Duke of Burgundy, which opened the opportunity for Henry V to push for a settlement with Charles VI in the Treaty of Troyes. The Queen of France, Isabeau of Bavaria, supported the deal which, through marriage to him of her daughter, yielded succession to Henry as King of France, thus cutting off her son, the Dauphin. With the Duke of Orleans in captivity in England, the Dauphin sidelined for the murder of the Duke of Burgundy, the Treaty was largely negotiated by the Burgundians, including a Bishop who would later persecute Saint Joan. It was formally ratified by the Estates-General at Paris, where Henry V, under Burgundian endorsement and protection, arrived to sign it.

There's all kinds of messiness here, what with Charles VI bouncing between delusions and paranoias, his wife running the Court during his episodes, and rumored to have had an affair with the King's brother, who in 1407 was murdered by the Duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless who was himself murdered in 1419, perhaps on orders her son the Dauphin, who, the Burgundians claimed, was actually son of the Duke of Orleans and not of the King. The rumors of this illegitimacy served the Burgundian cause and alliance with the English, but the French loyalists, known as the Armagnacs, supported the Dauphin regardless. One the death of Charles VI, the Dauphin assumed the throne of France as Charles VII, while Henry V assumed it Henry II.

The war escalated from there, with each side took some victories, although the English secured their hold on northern France and in 1423 and 1424 inflicted two overwhelming defeats of the French and their Scottish partners. Meanwhile, the English prompted the Burgundians to wage slash and burn tactics on areas of French loyalists, including Joan's village of Domrémey, which was subjected to occasional raids and ransoms.

Around this time, at the age of thirteen Joan began to experience voices and visions. Her "Voices" instructed her to lead a Christian life and, later on, to "go to France" to save save France and crown its King, Charles VII, whom Joan knew as the Dauphin. In late 1428, Joan's Voices became urgent, telling her she must relieve the city of Orleans from an English siege that had begun that October.

So what did Joan actually do?

To save France, Joan needed to crown the Dauphin legitimate King of France; to crown the King, she needed to relieve the city of Orléans from an English siege and then clear the way to Reims for his coronation; to take the city of Orléans, she needed to lead the French army; to lead the army, she needed the support of the Dauphin and his court; to get the support of the Dauphin she needed to convince him of her divine mission; to convince him of her divine mission she had to do meet with him; to meet with him, she had to generate enthusiasm and curiosity as to who she might be; to convince people she was the fulfillment of a legend of a girl who would save France, she had to be thoroughly convinced of it herself; to convince the Dauphin's court, she had to demonstrate Catholic orthodoxy to ecclesiastical interrogators; to earn the loyalty and enthusiasm of her fellow military commanders, she had to exercise tactical brilliance and remarkable bravery.

To those ends, several things stand out:

1. She believed and obeyed her Voices;
2. So convinced, she wouldn't take no for an answer;
3. She accurately prophesized events and outcomes;
4. She generated tremendous enthusiasm from the people;
5. She breathed confidence into the French army, which had been browbeaten and self-defeated until she inspired them with her leadership and example and disciplined them through the Confessional and the Mass;
6. She exercised decisive military and political leadership, knowing when and where to attack at key moments and the crucial next steps towards formal coronation of the Charles as King of France;
7. She scared the crap out of the English;

To become a Saint, she had to suffer betrayal and martyrdom after a uniquely well-documented show trial at the hands of the English and Burgundians, the "Trial of Condemnation"; to preserve the memory of that Trial, her mother and others faithful to and believing of her had to convince the French King and the Pope to reassess her prior conviction in a similarly uniquely well-documented investigation called the "Trial of Rehabilitation."

All this, I argue, she did to save Catholicism.

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Saint Joan of Arc saved France, and doing so saved Catholicism itself, which I propose was her divine mission all along. She was canonized by the Catholic Church on May 16, 1920.

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Related pages:

• Joan of Arc Timeline
• Joan of Arc bibliography
• Kings of France and England
• Popes and antipopes
• Saint Joan of Arc Glossary for names, places & terms, as well as a flow chart of the lineage of French Kings (which can otherwise be confusing)
• The Life of Joan of Arc by Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel (with Joan of Arc series from National Gallery of Art)

Here for Saint Joan of Arc category list of related pages

Joan the Maid (Jeanne la Pucelle)

At her "Trial of Condemnation held under English authority," Joan testified as to her name, explaining,

In my own country they call me Jeannette; since I came into France I have been called Jeanne. Of my surname I know nothing.

Jeanne, or Jehanne, is feminine for John, which means "God favors," and which is echoed by the name given her in the sole literary work composed during her time, the Pucelle de Dieu ("Maid of God"). Joan may have been called Petit-Jean, by her family, after her uncle Jean. More importantly, her "voices" -- God's messengers -- called her "Daughter of God":

Before the raising of the Siege of Orleans and every day since, when they speak to me, they call me often, ‘Jeanne the Maid, Daughter of God.’

It was not until after her martyrdom that she was called "Joan of Orleans" or "the Maid of Orléans" in reference to her miraculous intervention in the Hundred Years War, the turning point of which was the relief of the city of Orléans from an English siege conducted under Joan's improbable and brilliant military command.

While we know her as Joan of Arc, neither she nor her contemporaries used the surname, "of Arc" (d'Arc), which was a 19th century invention based on her father's surname, Darc, which appeared during posthumous investigations called the Trial of Rehabilitation starting in 1452, nine years after her death. The name d'Arc arose as one of several varieties of her father's family name, Darc, Dars, Dai, Day, Darx, Dart, or d'Arc. A possibility is that her father's family had originated in the village Arc-en-Barrois, which would have made for the surname "Arc" or "d'Arc". The name Arc is derived from the French for "arrow," which would be fitting for Joan's presence and effect upon her times, and, besides, d'Arc is the coolest sounding of the batch, so perhaps that's why it stuck.

Joan testified that girls in her village did not use their paternal surname and instead used that of the mother. Hers was Romée, which makes for an interesting connection in that the name derives from "Rome," indicating a pilgrimage to Rome at some point by an ancestor. Along with a similarly possible etymological origin to her village name, Domrémy, the connection to Rome becomes interesting to us insofar as at her trial by the English Joan stood resoundingly for the Roman Pope over the schismatic antipope who had before been supported by her compatriots in France, as well as to request an audience before, like Saint Paul appealing to Caesar, the Pope in Rome.

Joan, Handmaid of the Lord

It is often observed that Joan used Pucelle, for "maid," or "maiden," to emphasize her virginity. In common usage today, the masculine puceau directly means a man who has not had sex. However, the feminine pucelle then and now means either "young girl" or "virgin," but not necessarily both, although the association may be made.

But for Joan, "maid" or "handmaid," as it could also be translated, makes a clear reference to the greatest "handmaid" of them all, Our Lady, the Mother of God. Joan was devoted to Mary, and had inscribed her name atop her battle standard along with that of the Lord: "Jhesus † Maria".

Joan, like anyone in her day, would have made that connection of the word pucelle to the words of Mary herself:

Mary said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.”

They would have known the passage from the Latin Vulgate with the term, ancilla, which is a female servant or slave and not necessarily a virgin:

dixit autem Maria ecce ancilla Domini

The Vulgate New Testament was translated from Greek, so we can go to the original Greek word in Luke 1:38, δούλη (doulē), which means "slave woman" or "female servant," both of which become in English, the traditional "handmaiden", the meaning of which is directly "female servant." In her home parish, Joan would have heard the Gospel in Latin, but if her priest ever preached the passage in a homily -- a certainty -- Joan would have heard not just the direct translation into French,

Marie dit: Je suis la servante du Seigneur

but also the reference to Mary as,

la Pucelle Maria

as "Virgin Mary" as was used commonly at the time. So "pucelle" and "servant" are distinct but both accurate references to Mary. Yet, if we think of Pucelle solely as a virgin, we are missing the larger significance in the context of Luke 1:38, of Mary's fiat,

May it be done to me according to your word.

La Pucelle is a virgin -- and Joan was -- but more importantly she is God's loyal servant who follows the instructions of the Archangel. For Mary it was the Archangel Gabriel; for Joan it was the Archangel Michael. For both, it was the Word of God.

Crazy, Saint or witch?

Joan's biographers like to present Joan with a letter she composed to the King of England, the child-king Henry VI, the day she was given authority over the French army. It's a marvelous, crazy letter, almost arrogant at first glance. A second look, though, and the letter yields instead Joan's simplicity and directness. Indeed, she is hardly arrogant: just bluntly honest:

Jhesus † Maria

King of England; and you, Duke of Bedford, who call yourself Regent of the Kingdom of France; you, William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk; John, Lord Talbot; and you, Thomas, Lord Scales, who call yourselves Lieutenants to the said Duke of Bedford: give satisfaction to the King of Heaven: give up to the Maid, who is sent hither by God, the King of Heaven, the keys of all the good towns in France which you have taken and broken into. She is come here by the order of God to reclaim the Blood Royal. She is quite ready to make peace, if you are willing to give her satisfaction, by giving and paying back to France what you have taken.

It's a useful letter for the biographer, as it tells her story perfectly. But left unexplained or unattributed to anything but "voices", as they tend rather agnostically to leave it, it makes no sense: okay, so this illiterate girl from a little village hears "voices" that tell her she will save France and crown its legitimate King. She insists on an introduction to that prince, gets the interview, somehow picking him out of a crowd, undergoes three weeks of questions by all the king's finest minds, and passing the test is given a horse, lance, and suit of armor -- and essential command of the French army, whereupon she writes a letter to the King of England demanding he surrender all his possessions in and claims upon France -- while displaying knowledge of the English political and military hierarchy.

Okay...got it.

Thank you, historians, but let's try it this way instead:

God sends Saint Michael the Archangel and Saints Margaret and Catherine to visit with a worthy young girl in a small town in eastern France. Her country is both at war and civil war. The Church is in a state of disruption, with two ongoing antipope claimants, proto-protestant rumblings, and the "conciliarism" movement against papal authority gaining strength as a result of the various papal schisms. Over three years, the Archangel and the Saints prepare the young girl spiritually for her mission, guiding her to maintain a state of Grace. In 1428, as the city of Orléans is subjected to a siege by English forces, they now tell her what she will do: save the city and crown the king in Reims, a city surrounded by the enemy. Following her divine voices, she gains an audience with the French prince, convinces him of her divine mission and is made a leader of the French army. Then, invoking God's instructions, she sends a letter to the King of England and his commanders, detailing their organizational structure and demanding surrender of his French holdings. The English refuse, so, guided by providence, she leads the French army to an improbable victory which she duplicates in a series of battles that clear the way for the French Prince to triumphantly arrive at Reims, the traditional city of coronations, where he is crowned King of France, Charles VII.

Now we can better understand her letter, which went on to explain that the English would do everyone a favor, saving them all much pain, were they to abandon Orléans and France itself according to God's will.

Her letter is astonishing.

She concluded it with a prophetic warning to the English commander,

You, Duke of Bedford, the Maid prays and enjoins you, that you do not come to grievous hurt. If you will give her satisfactory pledges, you may yet join with her, so that the French may do the fairest deed that has ever yet been done for Christendom. And answer, if you wish to make peace in the City of Orleans; if this be not done, you may be shortly reminded of it, to your very great hurt. Written this Tuesday in Holy Week, March 22nd, 1428.

At her Trial of Condemnation at Rouen under the English, this letter was presented as incriminating evidence of witchcraft.

“Do you know this letter?” “Yes, excepting three words. In place of ‘give up to the Maid,’ it should be ‘give up to the King.’ The words ‘Chieftain of war’ and ‘body for body’ were not in the letter I sent. None of the Lords ever dictated these letters to me; it was I myself alone who dictated them before sending them. Nevertheless, I always shewed them to some of my party."

Then, without any prompting or context, she continued,

"Before seven years are passed, the English will lose a greater wager than they have already done at Orlėans; they will lose everything in France. The English will have in France a greater loss than they have ever had, and that by a great victory which God will send to the French."

"How do you know this?"

"I know it well by revelation, which has been made to me, and that this will happen within seven years; and I am sore vexed that it is deferred so long. I know it by revelation, as clearly as I know that you are before me at this moment."

"When will this happen?"

"I know neither the day nor the hour."

"In what year will it happen?"

"You will not have any more. Nevertheless, I heartily wish it might be before Saint John’s Day."

The prediction came on March 1, 1431. Six years and six months later, September of 1437, Paris was delivered to the French through the Treaty of Arras, which ended the English alliance with the Duke of Burgundy and from which the English would never recover. Skeptical historians will point out the English presence in France continued for another fifteen years, which is ridiculous, as the English cause was lost with the Burgundian defection. Paris was the endgame, the "greater loss" that Joan had predicted. In 1449 the French retook Rouen, where Joan was martyred, and in 1453 the English suffered a final defeat at the Battle of Castillon, which ended three hundred years of English control of southwestern France. Those later victories were only possible with the Burgundian realignment at the Treaty of Arras, which was only made possible by Joan's military and political victories at Orléans and Rheims.

Outside of her declarations regarding Orleans and the crowning of the Dauphin, this prophesy is her most significant -- and one that no one would or could have contemplated at the time, when the English were reinvigorated by her capture and had Henry VI crowned at Paris later in the year after her execution.

Upon Joan's capture, the Duke of Burgundy issued a public acclamation of victory, announcing,

‘Very dear and well-beloved, knowing that you desire to have news of us, we signify to you that this day, the 23rd May, towards six o’clock in the afternoon, the adversaries of our Lord the King and of us, who were assembled together in great power, and entrenched in the town of Compiègne, before which we and the men of our army were quartered, have made a sally from the said town in force on the quarters of our advanced guard nearest to them, in the which sally was she whom they call the Maid, with many of their principal captains .... and by the pleasure of our blessed Creator, it had so happened and such grace had been granted to us, that the said Maid had been taken ... The which capture, as we certainly hold, will be great news everywhere; and by it will be recognized the error and foolish belief of all those who have shewn themselves well disposed and favourable to the doings of the said woman. And this thing we write for our news, hoping that in it you will have joy, comfort, and consolation, and will render thanks and praise to our Creator, Who seeth and knoweth all things, and Who by His blessed pleasure will conduct the rest of our enterprizes to the good of our said Lord the King and his kingdom, and to the relief and comfort of his good and loyal subjects.

We see just how important was Joan's capture to the English and Burgundians: if she is not of divine intervention, they reasoned, then her successes were not legitimate, including, by reference to the English King, the coronation Joan engineered of the French King. Royal legitimacy relied on faith in God's plan, so Joan's capture justified the English cause. The next year, after Joan's execution, the English king Henry VI was coronated at Paris in an elaborate ceremony as Henry II, King of France. It was not just English assertion of the Treaty of Troyes, in which Charles VI yielded the French throne to the English upon his death, it was the English declaration of victory over the Maid. Ultimately, the English-Burgundian alliance would unravel, but, meanwhile, following Joan's capture the French, too, yielded to the theory that her capture marked, for France, her loss of divine order, falling to episodic cat-and-mouse play, both militarily and diplomatically, hoping to weaken the English while luring the Burgundians to their side. At the time of Joan's death, it had yielded no results. After her death, the strategy continued, and French military actions were focused on consolidation and not advance, defense. Yet Joan's prophesy unfolded.

As the English-Burgundian alliance unwound, the English King returned home, the English leadership lost confidence, and the French under Joan's old warriors started taking more and more land, especially around Paris. In 1435, with the death of the English Duke of Bedford, the Burgundians abandoned the alliance and signed the Treaty of Arras with the French. Soon after, the citizens of Paris opened the city gates to the Bastard of Orleans and the French army. While it took another twenty years for the end of the Hundred Years War, the outcome by then was sealed, and Charles VII was able to not just consolidate his realm, but reorganize it politically and militarily, significantly contributing to the creation of the modern state in France.

At Rouen on March 1, 1431, when Joan predicted an English defeat in France, she was neither prophet nor liar to both English and French officialdom. Whatever she meant to the warring sides now, Orleans was saved and the King of France coronated. Her job was done. link=File:Treaty_of_Troyes_cropped.jpg|thumb|Path from Chinon to Rheims (wikiepdia, cropped) Having liberated Orleans and then leading the French army across France to clear the way for the Dauphin's coronation at Rheims, to both sides Joan was either a witch or a prophet -- possessed by fiends, or of God.

At Joan's presentation to the Dauphin at Chinon, the Archbishop of Embrun, Jacques Gélu, warned the Dauphin to be careful with a peasant girl from a class that is "easily seduced." After Orleans, the Bishop had a change of heart. Applying the formula of the Evangelist, "by their fruits ye shall know them," he wrote,

We piously believe her to be the Angel of the armies of the Lord.

and he advised the Dauphin,

do every day some deed particularly agreeable to God and confer about it with the maid.

Whatever reservations the French clerics had held about her before Orléans turned after the battle either to acknowledgement of her as emissary of God, such as we see from Gélu and his fellow Bishop, Jean Gerson, who immediately wrote an apologia for the Maid, or, in the case of the Archbishop of Reims and newly installed Chancellor of France, Regnault de Chartres, acquiescence to events that were beyond his control.

However, detraction is easier to sustain than faith, so the English held to their hatred of Joan longer than did the French hold confidence in her. Following the coronation of Charles VII, with Joan at the height of her popularity, the Chancellor, whose goal was ever reconciliation with the Burgundian faction, not its defeat, worked to undermine her. For him, the Maid had at best served to put the issue on the table, but most inconvenient was all this insistence on taking Paris, which was a Burgundian property.

The Chancellor did not want an attack upon Paris, which is why immediately after the coronation of Charles VII, which he administered as Archbishop of Rheims, he went to Saint Denis to negotiate a truce with the English to work around all this trouble Joan had caused. Talk of the Maid as a living Saint was most inconvenient for these purposes. Thus, upon her capture by the Burgundians in May of 1430, de Chartres was downright enthusiastic, announcing publicly to his diocese:

God had suffered that Joan the Maid be taken because she had puffed herself up with pride and because of the rich garments which she had taken it upon herself to wear, and because she had not done what God had commanded her, but had done her own will.

Gerson had died by then, so we can't know his reaction. But Gélu's diocese issued prayers for her release, including,

that the Maid kept in the prisons of the enemies may be freed without evil, and that she may complete entirely the work that You have entrusted to her.

Nevertheless, it was de Chartres who controlled French policy, and despite regular Burgundian duplicity he kept trying to negotiate a settlement. With only minor battles and outright defeats that followed the coronation, Joan's utility and legitimacy faded -- as did de Chartre's need to put up with her.

Historians have attributed Charles' treatment of Joan after his coronation to cynicism and opportunism. I'm not convinced, as he was subject to the machine as much as he was its head. He ended up playing both sides, letting Joan go forth against the English and Burgundians while withholding the resources she needed to prosecute the program. Joan's capture, which was a direct consequence of the French transition from Joan's aggression to the Chancellor's diplomacy, became the excuse to abandon her program altogether.

For their part, the English and Burgundians knew full well what this young woman had done, and the danger she still posed. Although after her capture Joan was no longer a military threat, the coronation of Charles VII was a deep wound that could be healed only by delegitimizing the event by delegitimizing its author, Joan. The Burgundian clerics centered mostly at Paris faced the same problem, and so were most happy to serve as the instrument of recovery for the English. By ingratiating themselves to the English with the needed ecclesiastic stamp of heresy upon Joan, the clerics at the University aimed to elevate themselves and the French Assembly to the level of the English Parliament. Modern historians emphasize these political machinations as the primary motive for Joan's Trial at Rouen.

One may wonder, though, that it is not possible to maintain at once personal ambition and sincere belief, especially when the two affirm one another. Thus did de Chartres justify undermining Joan; thus did the Paris clergy justify her trial; thus did the English desperately need her denunciation; thus did the English Earl of Warwick demand that, when Joan fell dangerously sick in prison, he ordered the doctors to do whatever they could to sustain her:

as the King would not for anything in the world, that she should die a natural death; she had cost too dear for that; he had bought her dear, and he did not wish her to die except by justice and the fire.”

And thus did the English Duke of Bedford, several years later, yet blame his troubles in France on Joan, writing to his King,

a greet strook upon your peuple that was assembled there [at Orleans] in grete nombre, caused in grete partie, as y trowe, of lakke of sadded believe, and of unlevefull doubte that thei hadded of a disciple and lyme of the Feende, called the Pucelle, that used fals enchauntements and sorcerie. The which strooke and discomfiture nought oonly lessed in grete partie the mobre of youre people.

Barker claims that Bedford was merely casting blame upon "the Pucelle" to excuse his own poor performance. Indeed, he submitted a "written statement he had before given to the King in defence of his conduct in the government of France", explaining:

he then recapitulates the services which he had rendered at the commencement of the wars in that kingdom after the death of King Henry the Fifth up to the time of the siege of Orleans ... and ascribes his subsequent want of success to a lack of sad belief and of unlawful doubt that the people had of a disciple and limb of the fiend called ‘the Pucelle’- that used false enchantments and sorcery; he reminds the King that he had himself come to England to explain the state of affairs in France, and used his utmost endeavours, but without success, to procure the means to carry on the war; he expresses his deep regret that that country should be lost after the great expenditure of blood and treasure which had occurred ; he advises that the revenues of the duchy of Lancaster, which had been vested in Cardinal Beaufort and others for the purpose of fulfilling the will of the late King, should be wholly employed in the defence of France...

He wasn't rationalizing that he had lost due to a witch -- this he admits -- he was asking for more money to make up for it. Bedford fully believed that Joan, who his government executed four years before, was a "fiend". Near the end of the Trial at Rouen, after reading to Joan the "Twelve Articles of Accusation" (consolidated from seventy), a priest and "celebrated Doctor in Theology," Pierre Maurice, who was deeply tied to the English, lectured Joan on the "peril" she was subjecting upon her soul:

Do not allow yourself to be separated from Our Lord Jesus Christ, Who hath created you to be a sharer in His glory ; do not choose the way of eternal damnation with the enemies of God, who daily set their wits to work to find means to trouble mankind, transforming themselves often, to this end, into the likeness of Our Lord, of Angels and of Saints, as is seen but too often in the lives of the Fathers and in the Scriptures. Therefore, if such things have appeared to you, do not believe them. The belief which you may have had in such illusions, put it away from you.

At this point in the Trial, they just wanted to do away with her, which is why they forced her into the confession and subsequent relapse upon putting back on the men's clothing. Upon that discover, the Bishop of Beauvais exclaimed to the English lord, Warwick,

She is caught this time!

The Bishop, Cauchon, was entirely compromised to the English by his ambitions, but he was convinced that Joan was of the Evil One. He probably never imagined how long the trial would go, as his frustration grew with every unexpected response and retort from Joan to the best theological traps the University of Paris' finest minds could throw at her. One of the priests there who testified at the Trial of Rehabilitation recalled that her responses were inspired:

When she spoke of the kingdom and the war, I thought she was moved by the Holy Spirit; but when she spoke of herself she feigned many things: nevertheless, I think she should not have been condemned as a heretic.

It's an interesting testimony coming amidst a politically-charged reassessment of a trial he had participated in twenty-four years before on behalf of the enemy, so his hedge that "when she spoke of herself" is interesting. His mixed statement shows either that he was putting her in as good a light as possible -- as regarded the King of France, who was under a reassessment as much as was Joan: justifying Joan meant justification for him. Nevertheless, de la Pierre was under oath, and we must take his testimony as such: Joan was inspired by the Holy Spirit.

The Rouen court had its way, and was unequivocal in its condemnation of Joan not just as a heretic, but as a witch, an "invoker of devils." It wasn't about her men's dress, and it wasn't about apostasy. It was all about her refusal to deny her Voices. To read the epithet placed upon a placard by the stake on which she was burned is to understand just how real her voices were:

Joan, self-styled the Maid, liar, pernicious, abuser of the people, soothsayer, superstitious, blasphemer of God; presumptuous, misbeliever in the faith of Jesus-Christ, boaster, idolater, cruel, dissolute, invoker of devils, apostate, schismatic and heretic.

It ought not take much faith to see straight through to the Crucifixion of the Lord himself here and the fury of his executioners, which stand for us in the Gospels as more evidence of the Lord's divinity. Uninformed by faith, the condemnation is just hyperbolic political statement. Oh no, it wasn't. They meant it, and meant it hard. Listen to Jean Massieu, Joan's escort to and from the trial,

I heard it said by Jean Fleury, clerk and writer to the sheriff, that the executioner had reported to him that once the body was burned by the fire and reduced to ashes, her heart remained intact and full of blood, and he told him to gather up the ashes and all that remained of her and to throw them into the Seine, which he did.

Or Isambart de la Pierre, a Dominican priest who witnessed the trial,

Immediately after the execution, the executioner came to me and my companion Martin Ladvenu, struck and moved to a marvellous repentance and terrible contrition, all in despair, fearing never to obtain pardon and indulgence from God for what he had done to that saintly woman; and said and affirmed this executioner that despite the oil, the sulphur and the charcoal which he had applied against Joan’s entrails and heart, nevertheless he had not by any means been able to consume nor reduce to ashes the entrails nor the heart, at which was he as greatly astonished as by a manifest miracle.

Now we're talking! So let's re-write this historian's own epithet for Joan, only with faith and love in Christ, as Joan's canonization is to be celebrated, not used as a weapon against Joan's own faith.

They believed in Joan and made her their heroine, affirmed by Mother Church with her official and glorious canonization on May 9, 1921 and followed by State declaring July 10, her Feast Day, a national holiday.

The historical problem of (Saint?) Joan of Arc

The most prominent modern biographer of Saint Joan, Régine Pernoud (1909-1998), a medieval scholar, counsels,

Among the events which [the historian] expounds are some for which no rational explanation is forthcoming, and the conscientious historian stops short at that point.

So the "conscientious historian" must contain himself to "the facts" and stick to sorting them out for description while avoiding explanation, much less inference from those facts. It's not only impossible, it's historiographically useless: I can describe the American Revolution all day long, but if I don't attributed it to a cause I have learned nothing. Same with any historical moment, from the Roman ascension to the last American election. What good is history if it just says and does not explain? (If so, the entire profession would be out of a job.) For Joan, so it is. Because her motives, actions, and outcomes are so improbable, to attribute them to anything other than divine guidance makes no sense. But since divine guidance is "ahistorical," or merely an article of faith, Joan's motives don't matter historically. Pernoud thereby dismisses them altogether, falling back upon,

The believer can no doubt be satisfied with Joan’s explanation; the unbeliever cannot.

What, then, does the "unbeliever" do with the evidence? That the "unbeliever cannot" accept Joan's own explanations is an easy out from what is plain to see. But the problem is larger. Joan did experience voices and visions. If they were not real, then how to explain their effects? Such is a core Catholic tenant, drawn from the Gospel of Matthew 12:33, in which Jesus declares to the Pharisees,

Either declare the tree good and its fruit is good, or declare the tree rotten and its fruit is rotten, for a tree is known by its fruit.

Historians have two outs here: the first is to deny the source of Joan's Voices while admitting their effects; the second is to deny their effects. To the first strategy, historians like Pernoud step around the problem by denying the sources or even reality of her Voices, but taking their effects at face value. Others follow the second and minimize Joan's historical role altogether, i.e. lesser effects. Or they use both. So we hear that it was schizophrenia or moldy bread, which at least recognize that Joan heard voices. Others who question the reality of the Voices must fall back on pseudo-psychological conjecture and sociological babble. For example, historian Ann Lelwyn Barstow argues that subjects of Joan's visions were those Saints with which she most closely identified and was most familiar:

One gets the picture of a lively Christianity informing the mind of the young Joan through legends. well-known across Europe ... That she was visited instead [of the Virgin Mary] by Michael, Catherine and Margaret attest to the potency of their legends in Lorraine, to their particular usefulness to a young patriot in time of national distress, and their appropriateness for an independent-minded woman.

The Church in Domrémy held (and apparently still holds) a statue of Saint Margaret; Saint Catherine was the patron Saint of nearby church; Saint Michael was venerated in Lorraine and was considered the defender of France; so there you have it. Given that reasoning, one may suppose that some other Saint, say, Saint Drogo, might have equally conveyed God's message to a thirteen year old in rural eastern France, as, while notoriously butt-ugly, he was from the northeast of the country and spoke French. It's nonsense. Of course, God sent the Saints that Joan already knew and trusted. To paraphrase Joan, “Do you think God has not wherewithal to select the right Saints for Joan?" If Joan's visions were real, then we have perfectly explainable historical causation, including for her flustered recantation of her Voices when threatened in public humiliation before the stake. Skeptical historians point to this moment as evidence that Joan had just made it all up, ignoring that only two weeks before this demeaning public ceremony, when threated with torture she had told the court,

Truly if you were to tear me limb from limb, and separate soul and body, I will tell you nothing more; and, if I were to say anything else, I should always afterwards declare that you made me say it by force.

But so goes the theory that, fatigued and confused, Joan gave the hostile and abusive English-backed court what it wanted and made up stories of the Saints, whom, it (incorrectly) holds, she had not before mentioned. Similarly, it holds, both supporters and detractors of Joan were just using her for their convenience, and that the historical record itself reflects that self-interest and not the truth about Joan.

To any extent they admit of Joan's role in those events, they simply cannot explain the village girl's astonishing natural and supernatural abilities.

Medieval historian Juliet Barker sees Joan's career as entirely political in terms of her own ambitions and those of those around her. As such, Barker credits the pro-French Armagnacs for using her to push their war against the English-allied Burgundians, even so as to credit the Armagnacs for having engineered not just Joan's introduction to the Dauphin but to the her ability to identify him hidden amidst the courtiers. Of course there is no evidence for such trickery, but the theory does legitimately point to the Dauphin's equivocal position between the anti-Burgundian and reconciliation factions around him. The problem with the view is that is treats the Dauphin as merely going along for a ride with the Maid just to see what might happen. As the Dauphin's advisor, Bishop Jean Gerson observed, allowing a girl to lead an army isn't a trial balloon. In his apologia for Joan written shortly after her victory at Orleans, he observed that to give an army to a woman isn't just crazy, it's dangerous:

"The king's council and the men-at-arms were led to believe the word of this Maid and to obey her in such a way that, under her command and with one heart, they exposed themselves with her to the dangers of war, trampling under foot all fear of dishonor. What a shame, indeed, if, fighting under the leadership of a woman, they had been defeated by enemies so audacious! What derision on the part of all those who would have heard of such an event!

These historians reply that the Dauphin was obsessed with prophesy, so he naturally fell to the latest seer. Or, as does Barker, the Dauphin's military situation was not as dire as Joan's "cheerleaders" have claimed, so, by implication, she wasn't the essential actor in the moment. But not even Barker claims that without Joan's involvement the French would have won at Orléans. The theory is ever insufficient to explain the events. Unlike historians, the actors of Joan's day had to to decide: either Joan acted on voices of God -- or of Satan. There was no in between. Just ask the English and Burgundians who knew full well what this young woman had done and why. The rage of the ecclesiastical Court and its English backers that condemned her is in inverse proportion to the glory of Joan's visions and the reality Joan and her people understood them to be. To read the epithet the English placed upon a placard by the stake is to understand just how real her voices were:

Joan, self-styled the Maid, liar, pernicious, abuser of the people, soothsayer, superstitious, blasphemer of God; presumptuous, misbeliever in the faith of Jesus-Christ, boaster, idolater, cruel, dissolute, invoker of devils, apostate, schismatic and heretic.

It ought not take much faith to see straight through to a typology of the crucifixion of the Lord himself and the fury of his executioners, which stand for us in the Gospels as more evidence of the Lord's divinity. Uninformed by faith, the condemnation of Joan is just hyperbolic political statement. Oh no -- they meant it, and meant it hard. Listen to Jean Massieu, Joan's escort to and from the trial,

I heard it said by Jean Fleury, clerk and writer to the sheriff, that the executioner had reported to him that once the body was burned by the fire and reduced to ashes, her heart remained intact and full of blood, and he told him to gather up the ashes and all that remained of her and to throw them into the Seine, which he did.

Or Isambart de la Pierre, a Dominican priest who witnessed the trial,

Immediately after the execution, the executioner came to me and my companion Martin Ladvenu, struck and moved to a marvellous repentance and terrible contrition, all in despair, fearing never to obtain pardon and indulgence from God for what he had done to that saintly woman; and said and affirmed this executioner that despite the oil, the sulphur and the charcoal which he had applied against Joan’s entrails and heart, nevertheless he had not by any means been able to consume nor reduce to ashes the entrails nor the heart, at which was he as greatly astonished as by a manifest miracle.

All our skeptics can do is to question the motives of these testimonies, saying that de la Pierre and Ladvenu were covering up their own shameful involvement in the Trial for heresy. Perhaps, but even if true, the testimony affirms Joan's innocence. The details, though, are hard to ignore: "her heart remained intact", "the oil, the sulphur and the charcoal" -- memory works this way, not imagination.

These historians engage in the same process as writing a book on the life of Jesus as a non-believer. You'd get caught up in denying the Lord's virgin birth, denying the miracles, denying the resurrection, and, ultimately, as some do, denying his historical presence altogether -- understandably so, as the story of Christ makes no sense without his divinity. Actually, Thomas Jefferson did just this, conducting a now obscure and theologically meaningless cut and paste job on the New Testament, from which he extracted the angels, prophesies, miracles, and the Resurrection. Accepting the historicity of Christ without the miraculous requires denying the authenticity of the Gospels and attributing them to post hoc contrivances. It gets messy and, frankly, serves merely to deny Christ rather than understand him.

And with Joan of Arc that's where our historians land. Pernoud denies that Joan was, in CS Lewis' terms, a madman, but neither was she divinely guided. So all we have left is that she was a liar -- and thus of the devil, something Pernoud, a deep admirer of Joan, never broaches, although the English put her to death for it.

Lewis prefaces his argument about Christ's divinity by noting,

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say.

The logic applied to Joan goes the same way: treating her merely as an historical character debases what she was and did. So it is that Pernoud concludes that when "confronted by Joan" all we can do is to "admire" her, as the common people have since the 15th century, for "in admiring [they] have understood her":

They canonised Joan and made her their heroine, while Church and State were taking five hundred years to reach the same conclusion.

That's as close as Pernoud will come to an historical "saint" Joan -- that she was "canonized" in the hearts of her countrymen.

While affirming Joan's popular canonization, Pernoud incorrectly claims that the "Church and State" didn't understand her until 1921, forgetting that Joan's "Rehabilitation Trial" and its declaration of her innocence was, in Pernoud's own words, "in the name of the Holy See." This historian ought to know that very few of the laity were canonized before the 20th century, including the 16th century Sir Thomas More, who wasn't canonized until 1935, and despite great hostility for it from the Anglican Church. Saint Joan's canonization underwent a similar dynamic, delayed by the intervention of the French Revolution and subsequent 19th century European anti-clericalism and anti-monarchism.

Free of having to address whether Joan's spiritual events were real or not, Pernoud's historiography leads her to this sentimentalized and historically insufficient view of Joan's contemporaries and her legacy. So we get these dumb, dull statements of Joan's legacy, such as at end of one of her books,

It remains true that, for us, Joan is above all the saint of reconciliation—the one whom, whatever be our personal convictions, we admire and love because, over-riding all partisan points of view, each one of us can find in himself a reason to love her.

That's no better than this, from the collective wisdom of contributors to the "Joan of Arc" entry at Wikipedia:

Joan's image has been used by the entire spectrum of French politics, and she is an important reference in political dialogue about French identity and unity.

So Joan is in the eye of the beholder.

My larger concern here is that a historiography that frees itself of having to address whether Joan's spiritual events were real or not leads to a misreading of the facts. We cannot comprehend the motives and choices of Joan herself, much less those of her followers and detractors without it.

But what is equally bewildering is that these historians mostly ignore the most thorough, considered, and balanced investigation into Joan, by the Vatican itself. On consideration for beatification and canonization, the Church investigates the case, and thoroughly, assigning advocates for and against the candidate. We'll get into it later, but there were serious charges against her, including waging war on a Holy Day, her disobedience to her Voices, questions about her purity, and her reluctance to be burned to death, which was considered "unsaintly."

Virgin Joan

To the modern, especially academic, audience, the matter of Joan's virginity is understood as a male obsession or instrument of the patriarchy, or whatever they say about these things. One theory holds that Joan called herself "the virgin" in order to fend off the soldiers around her, while another claims she wanted to "emphasize her unique identity". But to both Joan and her accusers at the Trial of Condemnation, the matter of her virginity presented a deadly serious theological question: if she was truly an ambassador from God then she had to be a virgin; if not, as the English-backed court tried to prove, she was a witch, for a virgin, it was understood, was incorrupt of Satan's reach.

As the 19th century French historian Jules Michelet's explained,

The archbishop of Embrun [Jacques Gélu], who had been consulted, pronounced similarly; supporting his opinion by showing how God had frequently revealed to virgins, for instance, to the sibyls, what he concealed from men; how the demon could not make a covenant with a virgin and recommending it to be ascertained whether Jehanne were a virgin.

The French and, later, the English-supported Burgundians, submitted her to the physical test conducted by ladies who affirmed her purity. The French, who first examined Joan's theological purity, questions to which she answered consistently, simply, and strenuously, concluded, "The maid is of God." They found nothing impure in her, which was important for fulfillment of the legend that Joan herself invoked, such as she told her uncle, Durand Lexart, and which had become current as she made her way to meet the prince of France, the Dauphin:

"Has it not been said that France will be lost by a woman and shall thereafter be restored by a virgin?

At the Condemnation Trial under the English at Rouen, Joan was pressed several times on her virginity, which had already been affirmed by ladies of the Burgundian court. Her accusers wouldn't let it go. Having caught on to a story about a supposed marriage when she was younger, they pressed her,

“When you promised Our Saviour to preserve your virginity, was it to Him that you spoke?”

“It would quite suffice that I give my promise to those who were sent by Him—that is to say, to Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret.”

“Who induced you to have cited a man of the town of Toul on the question of marriage?”

“I did not have him cited; it was he, on the contrary, who had me cited; and then I swore before the Judge to speak the truth. And besides, I had promised nothing to this man. From the first time I heard my Voices, I dedicated my virginity for so long as it should please God; and I was then about thirteen years of age. My Voices told me I should win my case in this town of Toul.”

Argued by Joan herself before the magistrate at Toul, the marriage claim was dismissed. She was neither bequeathed to nor married the man, and so there was no compromise of Joan for the court at Rouen to exploit. It's an odd part of her story, but one that importantly informs much about Joan. First, either her father, or some guy, or both, tried to marry her off to him. A young girl like Joan would normally have no say in the matter: instructed by her voices, she stood it down. Secondly, it's among or even the very first direct event upon which her voices guided her, and she believed and obeyed. Well convinced of her larger mission to "go to France," Joan wouldn't let this claim upon her get in her way. One wonders, even, why it happened, if not to disrupt her trajectory.

Getting no where with that topic, which had the dual purpose of accusing her of disobedience to her parents and to suggest that she was not a virgin, her persecutors at the Trial of Condemnation moved on, focusing on her use of men's clothing. But they couldn't let the matter of her virginity go. Five days later, the questions returned to,

“Was it never revealed to you that if you lost your virginity, you would lose your happiness, and that your Voices would come to you no more?”

“That has never been revealed to me.”

“If you were married, do you think your Voices would come?”

“I do not know; I wait on Our Lord.

From "Jeanne D'Arc" by Boutet de Monvel depicting Joan in her cell threatened by the English guards.

This line of questioning becomes rather sinister when Joan is later on tricked, compelled, rather, into wearing women's clothes in prison, which turned her into a target of rape by her English guards. She knew that men's clothing that she insisted on wearing kept her safe from the possibility, so the Rouen Court was playing into that situation, whereby, were she raped they could say she no longer had valid visions. But she refused to answer that question ("I wait upon Our Lord") and, thankfully, while attacked at one point by the guards, it seems she was not actually violated. It did become the very point upon which she was executed.

As for Joan's own view of her virginity, it was what and who she was, and she promised the Saints that she would stay chaste. Whatever the historians' argument that pucelle means maid or virgin or both, we can see from Joan's perspective that her virginity was essential to her mission both as sign of purity and, more importantly, selfless dedication to the Lord.

Saint Paul explains it in 1 Corinthians 7:34:

An unmarried woman or a virgin is anxious about the things of the Lord, so that she may be holy in both body and spirit.

Catholic Joan

Given most biographies and depictions of Saint Joan, it's rather hard to appreciate her Catholicism -- it is simply ignored or denied. Such historians "contextualize" her amidst a backwards, superstitious, Middle Ages Catholic world, perhaps recognizing that Joan was more devout -- to a backwards religion, apparently -- than were others. Even there, the historical snobbery ever leaks in, as if others less devout than Joan weren't actually believers, just followers of some tradition. Going through the literature, I constantly run into dismissals of or end runs around Catholicism, such as not using "Saint" before a name and "Christian hagiography". Worst of all are those histories that place Joan amidst a syncretic mysticism, a mix of "medieval Catholicism", "folk religion", and paganism, and so attribute her experiences to it.

Saint Joan of Arc -- drop the "Saint," if you will -- Joan of Arc makes no sense unless we recognize her Catholicity. She was fundamentally, authentically and thoroughly Catholic.

John Mooney's 1897 biography, written during the push for her beatification, refreshingly does not question Joan's Catholicism. In the 1919 edition, issued just after the Great War in which Joan's rallying example helped save France, and just before Joan's canonization, the Introduction by Catholic author Blanche Mary Kelly gets it right:

Without the Catholic Faith, she is inexplicable. More than on her sword, she relied on the Mass; more than bread, the sacraments were her sustenance.

Three Masses marked a good day for Joan. She was seen constantly in prayer, and asked for Confession whenever possible. Father Jean Massieu recalled that during her trial at Rouen Joan dropped to the floor at the doors of a chapel when told that a consecrated Host lay inside:

Once, when I was conducting her before the Judges, she asked me, if there were not, on her way thither, any Chapel or Church in which was the Body of Christ. I replied, that there was a certain Chapel in the Castle. She then begged me to lead her by this Chapel, that she might do reverence to God and pray, which I willingly did, permitting her to kneel and pray before the Chapel; this she did with great devotion. The Bishop of Beauvais was much displeased at this, and forbade me in future to permit her to pray there.

and,

And, besides, as I was leading Jeanne many times from her prison to the Court, and passed before the Chapel of the Castle, at Jeanne’s request, I suffered her to make her devotions in passing; and I was often reproved by the said Benedicite, the Promoter, who said to me “Traitor! what makes thee so bold as to permit this Excommunicate to approach without permission? I will have thee put in a tower where you shall see neither sun nor moon for a month, if you do so again.”

From "Jeanne D'Arc" by Boutet de Monvel depicting Joan falling to the ground upon learning that the Lord was present behind a chapel door. The Bishop of Beauvais looks upon her angrily.

The English-backed Bishop of Beauvais' anger at her prayer before the chapel was recognition of her Catholic authenticity, which it was his job to deny in order to put her to death. We can never know if he actually believed her to be a witch and a heretic, although we have plenty of evidence to demonstrate bad faith in his motives. Either way, he could not allow for her presentation as a true and faithful Catholic, which is why her worship, on learning that the Lord was present in the chapel, so angered him.

Historians say Joan was merely conforming to norms of her day. It's an interesting point that, for, even if just a social norm, Joan's Catholic devotion well-surpassed that of those around her. Not only did witnesses affirm her distinct piety, she brought them into it themselves. From her soldiers and fellow officers, to the people of France, she affirmed the faith for believers and converted many, including, most famously, one of her captains, La Hire, who became known for prayer before battle, which he learned from Joan.

The cleric Séguin de Séguin recalled,

When she heard any one taking in vain the Name of God, she was very angry; she held such blasphemies in horror: and Jeanne told La Hire, who used many oaths and swore by God, that he must swear no more, and that, when he wanted to swear by God, he should swear by his staff. And afterwards, indeed, when he was with her, La Hire never swore but by his staff.

Her enemies teach us, as well. With the evidence before us from antagonistic points of view, we can learn much about Joan from the attacks upon her. The English-backed Rouen ecclesiastical court pushed her on orthodoxy.

The formal charges against her started with a claim of authority from the court,

Article I. And first, according to Divine Law, as according to Canon and Civil Law, it is to you, the Bishop, as Judge Ordinary, and to you, the Deputy, as Inquisitor of the Faith, that it appertaineth to drive away, destroy, and cut out from the roots in your Diocese and in all the kingdom of France, heresies, witchcrafts, superstitions, and other crimes of that nature; it is to you that it appertaineth to punish, to correct and to amend heretics and all those who publish, say, profess, or in any other manner act against our Catholic Faith: to wit, sorcerers, diviners, invokers of demons, those who think ill of the Faith, all criminals of this kind, their abettors and accomplices, apprehended in your Diocese or in your jurisdiction, not only for the misdeeds they may have committed there, but even for the part of their misdeeds that they may have committed elsewhere, saving, in this respect, the power and duty of the other Judges competent to pursue them in their respective dioceses, limits, and jurisdictions. And your power as to this exists against all lay persons, whatever be their estate, sex, quality, and pre-eminence: in regard to all you are competent Judges.

The statement is a rote declaration of authority and purpose, likely not much different from any other such trial, especially the mandate to stamp out "sorcerers, diviners", etc. The problem for the court in this case is that there was no evidence of Satan's works upon Joan outside of her having defeated the English in battle. Even the matter of her clothing was theologically not difficult to dismiss, as had the bishops who had investigated her on behalf of the Dauphin at Poitiers.

The Rouen court did its homework. They sent investigators to her hometown, who came back with stories from her village of charms and fairies, from which they inferred that Joan, too, believed in them (modern courts call this "speculative" as opposed to "circumstantial" evidence). Worse for them, they were never able to pierce the consistent Catholic logic of her replies to their examinations. The worst they could find was that she had kissed the feet of Saints, who, by Church dogma, were understood not to have bodies.

This is a girl whose mother taught her to recite in Latin the Our Father, Ave Maria, and Credo prayers. Her religious upbringing was entirely orthodox. Her devoutness to it irrepressible. Her military standard read, "Jhesus Maria," and her final words were "Jesus" repeated as the flames consumed her and while staring at a cross she asked be held before her.

To Article I of the formal charges, Joan replied,

I believe surely that our Lord the Pope of Rome, the Bishops, and other Clergy, are established to guard the Christian Faith and punish those who are found wanting therein: but as for me, for my doings I submit myself only to the Heavenly Church— that is to say, to God, to the Virgin Mary, and to the Saints in Paradise. I firmly believe I have not wavered in the Christian Faith, nor would I waver.

Joan was simply and thoroughly Catholic.

Joan and the Saints

The standard modern histories go with Joan's testimony and experiences about her Voices without affirming their reality. Presented with the final indictment from the Trial of Condemnation, which denied her visions, Joan instead resoundingly affirmed them:

As firmly as I believe Our Saviour Jesus Christ suffered death to redeem us from the pains of hell, so firmly do I believe that it was Saint Michael and Saint Gabriel, Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret whom Our Saviour sent to comfort and to counsel me.

That still leaves us with the problem of the effects of the Voices, i.e. divine intervention.

Ultimately, the ecclesiastical court at Rouen condemned Joan for reneging on her vow to wear women's clothes, which was a setup. But her visions drove them crazy, and they spent much time challenging and arguing with her about her encounters with the Saints. She answered everything plainly, which, again, drove them crazy.

For a believer, what an an incredible opportunity to learn about the Saints! For example,

“Was Saint Gabriel with Saint Michael when he came to you?”

“I do not remember.”

“Since last Tuesday, have you had any converse with Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret?”

“Yes, but I do not know at what time.”

“What day?”

“Yesterday and to-day; there is never a day that I do not hear them.”

“Do you always see them in the same dress?”

“I see them always under the same form, and their heads are richly crowned. I do not speak of the rest of their clothing: I know nothing of their dresses.”

“How do you know whether the object that appears to you is male or female?”

“I know well enough. I recognize them by their voices, as they revealed themselves to me; I know nothing but by the revelation and order of God.”

“What part of their heads do you see?”

“The face.”

“These saints who shew themselves to you, have they any hair?”

“It is well to know they have.”

“Is there anything between their crowns and their hair?”

“No.”

“Is their hair long and hanging down?”

“I know nothing about it. I do not know if they have arms or other members. They speak very well and in very good language; I hear them very well.”

“How do they speak if they have no members?”

“I refer me to God. The voice is beautiful, sweet, and low; it speaks in the French tongue.”

“Does not Saint Margaret speak English?”

“Why should she speak English, when she is not on the English side?”

Just magnificent.

So where historians can simply dismiss her testimony as, well, something, taking it on face-value without affirming their reality, Joan here gives us a unique view into the experiences of a real mystic.

The English-backed court of course, was entirely antagonistic to her experiences, and reoriented her testimony and their questions constantly towards the accusations of witchcraft, such as the legend of a "Fairy Tree" at her hometown, Domrémy and mandrakes, a flowering plant which sorcerers were supposed to have used, and which were commonly kept by peasants as charms. Evidently their investigation into Joan's hometown found that mandrakes were used there, which would be affirmed by the village priest who in April 1429, after Joan had already departed, preached against them. After Joan declares,

“Do you want me to tell you what concerns the King of France? There are a number of things that do not touch on the Case. I know well that my King will regain the Kingdom of France. I know it as well as I know that you are before me, seated in judgment. I should die if this revelation did not comfort me every day.”

the questioner turns away from that rather uncomfortable, for the English and their allies, prophesy, then turns to a textbook leading question regarding the mandrakes:

What have you done with your mandrake?

Joan had no counsel, so no one was there to point out that the question assumed she owned one. But no matter for Joan, who swatted it back at them,

I never have had one. But I have heard that there is one near our home, though I have never seen it. I have heard it is a dangerous and evil thing to keep. I do not know for what it is [used].

Getting nowhere with the mandrake, the questioners turned back to the Saints:

“In what likeness did Saint Michael appear to you?”

“I did not see a crown: I know nothing of his dress.”

“Was he naked?”

“Do you think God has not wherewithal to clothe him?”

“Had he hair?”

“Why should it have been cut off? I have not seen Saint Michael since I left the Castle of Crotoy. I do not see him often. I do not know if he has hair.”

“Has he a balance?”

“I know nothing about it. It was a great joy to see him; it seemed to me, when I saw him, that I was not in mortal sin. Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret were pleased from time to time to receive my confession, each in turn. If I am in mortal sin, it is without my knowing it.”

Always deferring to another topic when the prior line of questioning got them nowhere, and seizing on any point Joan made that could be twisted or used against her, her interrogators must have nearly jumped from their seats in glee at this one:

When you confessed, did you think you were in mortal sin?

But they were up against a Saint. Joan replied,

I do not know if I am in mortal sin, and I do not believe I have done its works; and, if it please God, I will never so be; nor, please God, have I ever done or ever will do deeds which charge my soul!

The next day, they went straight at her visions. The scribe noted that she had previously testified that Saint Michael "had wings" but nothing about the forms of Saints Catherine and Margaret. The scribe noted,

Afterwards, because she had said, in previous Enquiries, that Saint Michael had wings, but had said nothing of the body and members of Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, We asked her what she wished to say thereon.

Joan responded,

“I have told you what I know; I will answer you nothing more. I saw Saint Michael and these two Saints so well that I know they are Saints of Paradise.”

“Did you see anything else of them but the face?”

“I have told you what I know; but to tell you all I know, I would rather that you made me cut my throat. All that I know touching the Trial I will tell you willingly.”

“Do you think that Saint Michael and Saint Gabriel have human heads?”

“I saw them with my eyes; and I believe it was they as firmly as I believe there is a God."

“Do you think that God made them in the form and fashion that you saw?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think that God did from the first create them in this form and fashion?”

“You will have no more at present than what I have answered.”

Time to move on, then, now to whether her voices told her she will escape, another point they used against her as she had attempted to escape from her original capture by the Burgundians. We also learn about Joan's relationship with the Saints, not just her interactions of guiding, consoling, and redirecting her. After being threatened with torture, Joan turned to them:

I asked counsel of my Voices if I ought to submit to the Church, because the Clergy were pressing me hard to submit, and they said to me: ‘If thou willest that God should come to thy help, wait on Him for all thy doings.’ I know that Our Lord hath always been the Master of all my doings, and that the Devil hath never had power over them. I asked of my Voices if I should be burned, and my Voices answered me: ‘Wait on Our Lord, He will help thee.’

Joan knew full well the consequences of condemnation for heresy, so the stake was on her mind, likely throughout the ordeal. The court brought it up to her directly, though, in the public assembly at the cemetery of St. Ouen, where she was read the documents of abjuration. After his public sermon in which he admonished Joan, the priest Érard, who was as violently against Joan as any, including the Bishop of Beauvais, read the charges that she was to abjure, adding that were she not to admit it, she'd burn. From the testimony at the Trial of Rehabilitation by the scribe, Father Jean Massieu,

To which Jeanne replied, that she did not understand what abjuring was, and that she asked advice about it. Then Érard told me to give her counsel about it. After excusing myself for doing this, I told her it meant that, if she opposed any of the said Articles, she would be burned. I advised her to refer to the Church Universal as to whether she should abjure the said Articles or not. And this she did, saying in a loud voice to Érard: “I refer me to the Church Universal, as to whether I shall abjure or not.” To this the said Érard replied: “You shall abjure at once, or you shall be burned.” And, indeed, before she left the Square, she abjured, and made a cross with a pen which I handed to her.

There is much argument as to whether or not in the abjuration Joan knowingly denied the Saints. We know she had earlier disobeyed her Voices when she leapt from captivity from the Burgundians,

About four months. When I knew that the English were come to take me, I was very angry; nevertheless, my Voices forbade me many times to leap. In the end, for fear of the English, I leaped, and commended myself to God and Our Lady. I was wounded. When I had leaped, the Voice of Saint Catherine said to me I was to be of good cheer, for those at Compiègne would have succour. I prayed always for those at Compiègne, with my Counsel.

So perhaps facing the threat of the fire -- understandably so -- she signed the papers. A few days after her abjuration, she was brought back to the Rouen court for a "relapse" trial for having put back on the men's garments. It gave the court the opportunity to not only accuse her of breaking her vow to wear women's clothes but to force her into a denial of her recantation of the Saints. Now imminently facing the stake, Joan admitted that by signing the abjuration document she had betrayed the Saints:

“They said to me: ‘God had sent me word by St. Catherine and St. Margaret of the great pity it is, this treason to which I have consented, to abjure and recant in order to save my life! I have damned myself to save my life!’ Before last Thursday, my Voices did indeed tell me what I should do and what I did on that day. When I was on the scaffold on Thursday, my Voices said to me, while the preacher was speaking: ‘Answer him boldly, this preacher!’ And in truth he is a false preacher; he reproached me with many things I never did. If I said that God had not sent me, I should damn myself, for it is true that God has sent me; my Voices have said to me since Thursday: ‘Thou hast done a great evil in declaring that what thou hast done was wrong.’ All I said and revoked, I said for fear of the fire.”

“Do you believe that your Voices are Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret?”

“Yes, I believe it, and that they come from God.”

Much has been made of this supposed recantation or betrayal of the Voices. It's rather simple, though,

All I said and revoked, I said for fear of the fire.

And now, as she knew full well, she was going to be led to the fire. There's no betrayal in that: rather a correction and support for what would follow, which would have followed, anyway, had during the sermon she had "Answer[ed] him boldly, this preacher!" Neither Joan nor her Voices had let one another down.

"The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Saint Catherine of Siena" by Ambrogio Bergognone. (wikipedia). Catherine of Sienna set important precedent for Saint Joan's affirmation of the papacy at Rome.

Saint Catherine

Joan's virginity importantly signaled her connection to Saint Catherine, the virgin martyr. As did Joan, Saint Catherine precociously presented herself to a king, in Catherine's case, the Roman Emperor Maxentius, and boldly declared God's message. As did the sitting French ruler, the Dauphin, to Joan, Maxentius ordered an inquiry into Catherine by the emperor's finest theologians and philosophers. When these smartest men in the room were confounded by Catherine's theological arguments, the emperor had her imprisoned and tortured. Joan was also submitted to another but entirely antagonistic inquiry at the British-controlled French ecclesiastical Court at Rouen that condemned her but which she confounded with marvelous simplicity and irrefutable logic.

Next for Saint Catherine, Maxentius demanded that Catherine marry him and put her to death when she refused. The parallel for Joan continues, as she was put to death after refusing a conciliatory but compromising offer from the court at Rouen, which is when she agreed to put on women's clothing, and is condemned for subsequently abandoning them for men's trousers.

If you look up Saint Catherine you will see claims that she never existed, or that the stories about her are medieval fabrications. But that's not how God works. God love types and bookends, and Saint Joan is clearly a "type" of Saint Catherine: when the Dauphin ordered the Church inquiry, no one was thinking, "My, that's just what happened to Saint Catherine!" And no such thoughts arose when the court at Rouen tried to force her into admission of heresy by showing her torture machines and then tricking her into signing a document to renounce her visions and to go back to wearing women's clothes -- at which point her guards threatened to rape her. Therein is the very typology of Saint Catherine.

Saint Margaret

She was also visited by Saint Margaret, another virgin and maiden martyr who was killed after refusing to marry a Roman governor and to renounce her faith. Historians point out that Joan may have related herself to Saint Margaret over an incident in which Joan was accused by a man from her region of having broken a vow of marriage. She successfully argued to a magistrate that there was no such betrothal, and the accusation was dismissed. The typological connection holds here, although I don't see it as significant as the betrayals she suffered from Charles VII and, especially, the English-backed court at Rouen.

Saint Margaret's typology for Joan follows more closely Saint Margaret's vows of virginity, her refusal to renounce her faith in a public trial, and enduring imprisonment and torture. (Oh, and Saint Margaret spent her youth as a shepherd.) Additionally, Saint Margaret was burned, and that unsuccessful, thrown into a vat of boiling water, escaping both unharmed, so her martyrdom came at beheading. Joan was burned, of course, but her heart would not, as testified by the English guard who oversaw her execution. Legend holds that while imprisoned, Saint Margaret was devoured by Satan in the form of a dragon, from which she was expelled due to the Cross she held. Here, again, is an important connection to Joan on the stake, as she asked that a cross be held before her and she repeated "Jesus" until she expired.

As with the accusation of engagement, Joan's visions started well before all these events, so she was not mimicking Saints Catherine and Margaret, and nor could she have anticipated those connections when she started out. Instead, she was, at their guidance, fulfilling their types.

Saint Michael the Archangel

The Archangel with the scales, from Maria zu den Ketten Church (mediawiki commons)

It ought not be necessary to point out that Michael the Archangel is God's chief warrior. Let us remind ourselves that Joan was a farm girl, and farm girls in the 15th century didn't lead armies. Of course it was Saint Michael who came to her!

No sooner had she cut her hair and donned trousers at the start of her mission at Vaucouleurs did Joan herself become a warrior. A farm life didn't prepare her for it, and neither did the festivals and children's games of Domrémy. No where does Joan say or even suggest that St. Michael or the Holy Spirit endowed her with martial skills. Yet no where does she say that it was natural to her. Military prowess in all its forms was inherent to her mission, and since her mission was given her by the Archangel, we can only conclude that those skills needed to accomplish it were also given her as a divine Grace.

Another aspect of Saint Michael is seen in his scales of judgment, as he is traditionally depicted holding. Saint Michael appears but twice in the New Testament, the Epistle of Jude and, more famously, Revelation. In Jude, the Apostle teaches,

Yet the archangel Michael, when he argued with the devil in a dispute over the body of Moses, did not venture to pronounce a reviling judgment upon him but said, “May the Lord rebuke you!”

In the Old Testament the Archangel appears as the angel "with a sword," such as in Daniel,

“Your fine lie has cost you also your head,” said Daniel; “for the angel of God waits with a sword to cut you in two so as to destroy you both.”

As the lie had already "cost" -- i.e., judged, the Archangel was the instrument of God's punishment, and not himself the judge. Joan consistently treats her mission as that of carrying out God's will and not exercising herself any reason or justification for it. At the Rouen Trial, Joan was pressed about saying blasphemies, to which she replied,

“No; sometimes I said: ‘bon gré Dieu’

meaning "by God's good will", which was Joan's way of conditionalizing insults or ill thoughts to God's will. Here we can point to Joan's statement to a friendly acquaintance in her home town whom she subjects to punishment should God will it, a story Mark Twain so enjoyed,

I knew only one Burgundian at Domremy: I should have been quite willing for them to cut off his head—always had it pleased God.

Her outburst here barely scratches her larger adherence to Saint Michael's role and example, by which Joan exercised mercy upon her enemies,

On the Sunday after the taking of the Forts of the Bridge and of Saint Loup, the English were drawn up in order of battle before the town of Orleans, at which the greater part of [our] soldiers wished to give combat, and sallied from the town. Jeanne, who was wounded, was with the soldiers, dressed in her light surcoat. She put the men in array, but forbade them to attack the English, because, she said, if it pleased God and it were His will that they wished to retire, they should be allowed to go. And at that the men-at-arms returned into Orleans.

Her numerous displays of mercy towards the enemy shocked and even revulsed her commanders, who would have otherwise slaughtered the English stragglers -- as the English would have done to them. The point is that Joan was free of vengeance, exercising God's will but not exceeding it. Were her mission but to "save France," then murdering as many English and Burgundians as possible would contribute to it. At the trial a Rouen, the court concluded that,

Jeanne hath boasted and affirmed that she did know how to discern those whom God loveth and those whom He hateth. “What have you to say on this Article?”

It's a core theological question: did Joan assume judgment upon her enemies?

“I hold by what I have already said elsewhere of the King and the Duke d’Orléans; of the others I know not; I know well that God, for their well-being, loves my King and the Duke d’Orléans better than me. I know it by revelation.”

They couldn't nail her down on this charge, and it infuriated the court. Joan stood firmly not as God's judge but his instrument for judgement. So back it went to wearing pants, which was the only charge they could hold upon her. Joan's intersection with Saint Michael ceased upon her delivery to the English at the Battle of Compiègne and her imprisonment by the Duke of Luxumbourt. She told the court at Rouen,

I have not seen Saint Michael since I left the Castle of Crotoy.

With her delivery to the English at Crotoy, the duties of the warrior Saint Michael had ceased; however, Saints Catherin and Margaret, virgin captives and martyrs took over, and guided her from there, at times reluctantly on Joan's part, to her martyrdom.

Nevertheless, Joan turned to Saint Michael just before her martyrdom, during her crisis of faith, after having signed the documents of "abjuration" (admission of guilt) and, upon the stake. Her abjuration was conducted in public, followed by a puplic Mass, in which the priest insulted Joan (and when she defended the integrity of the King of France she was told to shut up).

She afterwards prayed to the Archangel, at least twice. Pierre Lebouchier, a priest, testified that after Joan was denounced in the public by Father Érard. Joan turned to the Achangel:

I was not present at the Process; but, after the preaching at Saint-Ouen, Jeanne, with her hands joined together, said in a loud voice that she submitted to the judgment of the Church, and prayed to Saint Michael that he would direct and counsel her.

He also saw her martyrdom, before which he watched,

While they were tying her to the stake she implored and specially invoked Saint Michael.

Saint Michael was not just the warrior Angel, but also Joan's protector.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel

With histories of Joan we hear less of Saint Gabriel than of the others, although he also visited her. Joan had placed the two Archangels, Michael and Gabriel, on her battle standard to either side of the Lord who was depicted holding the world in his hands with Jhesus Maria written above. The standard was of great concern to the court at Rouen, not just for what her interrogators considered its presumptuous design, but because that standard was a key instrument in her victories over the English and was prominently displayed at the coronation of the Charles VII as King of France. To the English partisans, the standard was demonic. The formal charges included that she had been saying about her battle flags, a ring, some linens and her sword that,

... these things were very fortunate. She made thereon many execrations and conjurations...

Joan replied,

In all I have done there was never any sorcery or evil arts. As for the good luck of my banner, I refer it to the fortune sent through it by Our Lord.

To an earlier interrogation over the banner and the Saints, Joan's responses are marvelous:

“Did the two Angels painted on your standard represent Saint Michael and Saint Gabriel?”

“They were there only for the honour of Our Lord, Who was painted on the standard. I only had these two Angels represented to honour Our Lord, Who was there represented holding the world.”

“Were the two Angels represented on your standard those who guard the world? Why were there not more of them, seeing that you had been commanded by God to take this standard?”

“The standard was commanded by Our Lord, by the Voices of Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, which said to me: ‘Take the standard in the name of the King of Heaven’; and because they had said to me ‘Take the standard in the name of the King of Heaven,’ I had this figure of God and of two Angels done; I did all by their command.”

“Did you ask them if, by virtue of this standard, you would gain all the battles wherever you might find yourself, and if you would be victorious?”

“They told me to take it boldly, and that God would help me.”

“Which gave most help, you to your standard, or your standard to you?”

“The victory either to my standard or myself, it was all from Our Lord.”

“The hope of being victorious, was it founded on your standard or on yourself?”

“It was founded on Our Lord and nought else.”

“If any one but you had borne this standard, would he have been as fortunate as you in bearing it?”

“I know nothing about it: I wait on Our Lord.”

“If one of the people of your party had sent you his standard to carry, would you have had as much confidence in it as in that which had been sent to you by God? Even the standard of your King, if it had been sent to you, would you have had as much confidence in it as in your own?”

“I bore most willingly that which had been ordained for me by Our Lord; and, meanwhile, in all I waited upon Our Lord.”

This exchange informed one of the seventy-seven formal charges, which read,

Article LVIII Jeanne did cause to be painted a standard whereon are two Angels, one on each side of God holding the world in His hand, with the words “Jhésus Maria” and other designs. She said that she caused this standard to be done by the order of God, who had revealed it to her by the agency of His Angels and Saints. This standard she did place at Rheims near the Altar, during the consecration of Charles, wishing, in her pride and vain glory, that it should be peculiarly honoured. Also did she cause to be painted arms, in the which she placed two golden lilies on a field azure; between the lilies a sword argent, with a hilt and guard gilded, the point of the sword pointing upwards and surmounted with a crown, gilded. All this is display and vanity, it is not religion nor piety; to attribute such vanities to God and to the Angels, is to be wanting in respect to God and the Saints.

In that Archangel Gabriel's scriptural role is to announce or clarify God's will and offer comfort in faith in it, Joan's design and use of the standard was by no means a vanity. With Saint Michael on one side, representing execution of God's judgment, and Saint Gabriel on the other, informing God's design, the banner was for Joan a beautiful act of Christian Hope. When Joan was threatened by the torture machines it was Saint Gabriel who consoled her:

I received comfort from Saint Gabriel; I believe it was Saint Gabriel: I knew by my Voices it was he.

The theological implications therein are significant. Saint Gabriel is God's trumpet -- the announcer of God's will. The Archangel, then, was preparing her for the martyrdom to soon come. Saint Gabriel appears in the Old Testament twice, both in Daniel. Here from Daniel 8:15-17:

While I, Daniel, sought the meaning of the vision I had seen, one who looked like a man stood before me, on the Ulai I heard a human voice that cried out, “Gabriel, explain the vision to this man.” When he came near where I was standing, I fell prostrate in terror. But he said to me, “Understand, O son of man, that the vision refers to the end time.”

I can't imagine that Joan knew this passage, as it does not appear in the modern Roman Missal and likely not in hers. In Chapter 8, Gabriel is sent to Daniel to explain God's message -- something Joan may well have appreciated after being threatened with torture. In Daniel 9:21-23, he again appears to assure Daniel of God's purpose and support for him:

I was still praying, when the man, Gabriel, whom I had seen in vision before, came to me in flight at the time of the evening offering.

He instructed me in these words: “Daniel, I have now come to give you understanding.

When you began your petition, an answer was given which I have come to announce, because you are beloved. Therefore, mark the answer and understand the vision.

We can draw another connection to Daniel, again, one Joan would have been unlikely to know about, in that the Book of Daniel was written under Hellenistic oppression of Antiochus IV, the Seleucid Greek king who seized power amidst a succession crisis in which he usurped the throne from the proper heir, his brother's son. Gabriel's appearance to Daniel helped the prophet to sort out the Babylonian, and subsequently Seleucid oppressions, and focus on God's will. Joan would have been more familiar with Saint Gabriel's appearances in the New Testament in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. In Luke, Gabriel brings glad tidings, not a message that they were about to be burned on the stake, as it was for Joan. Still, Zachariah, Mary, and the shepherds needed his consolation,

Do not be afraid

Joseph, also, needs the Archangels' consolation,

Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid

A larger, less expected connection to the Archangel's appearance at this moment to Joan may be found in Daniel, "to give you understanding," as the Angel said to him in Chapter 9. The Archangel assured Daniel, as he did Zachariah, Mary and Joseph of God's purpose: thus he similarly gave Joan "comfort", as she testified. Other than Daniel, she might have known of the apocryphal Book of Enoch, 4:12, which informed Catholic traditions and the role of Gabriel to petition God to judgment:

And to Gabriel said the Lord, "Proceed against the bastards and the reprobates, and against the children of fornication and destroy the children of the Watchers from amongst men. Send them one against the other that they may destroy each other in battle, for length of days shall they not  have.

It's doubtful Joan would have known or have been thinking of that, but it definitely points to the end of the Hundred Years War, which was resolved, finally, with betrayal of the English by the Burgundians. Each side used the other, which is why they both so desperately needed Joan's removal, as she exposed their tenuous relationship in face of a resurgent France that Joan had launched.

Whatever it means, Saint Gabriel's comfort for Joan is not a side-story.

Domrémy

Maps aadapted from Domremy-la-Pucelle (Wikipedia)

Today called Domrémy-la-Pucelle, after "the Maid," Joan's home village of Domrémy lay along the upper Meuse River in northeastern France. The town itself was divided by a stream called "Three Fountains," as it was fed by springs, along one of which grew the "Fairie Tree," a beech made famous in her Trial of Condemnation as an implication of sorcery. The village was considered geographically in the general region of Lorraine, thus the later name for her, "the Maid of Lorraine," but it was politically under the Duchy of Bar, and not the Duchy of Lorraine, indicative of the transient and complex nature of medieval borders and allegiances. When Joan said that her voices told her to go to "France," it made perfect sense to everyone, as she was speaking to the distinction between these regions and territories and their various alliances. The Duchy of Bar lay across both French and Holy Roman Empire (Germany) lands, with Domrémy in the western part that was a fief of the Kingdom of France. France itself was elsewhere.

At Domrémy the Meuse was yet a small river, but significant enough to contain an island that Joan's father negotiated with its landowners to use to protect and hide the villagers and their livestock during military raids during the ongoing civil war between French factions and the overall Hundred Years War between the French and English. These raids came in the late 1420s as the English expanded control of northern France.

In the early 1400s, a lull in the ongoing war had heated up as Henry V of England took advantage of a breach in French factions, the Armagnacs, ultimately siding with the King of France under the House of Orléans, and the Burgundians, under the House of Burgundy, ultimately siding with the English. (It's more complicated, but we can see it largely under the theory that my enemy's enemy is my friend.) By 1429, the English-Burgundian alliance was the stronger. The Duke of Burgundy held Paris, Troyes, Burgundy, and Flanders (his economic base with trade to England), as well as pockets of lands and loyalties across Champagne and Bar, admist which Domrémy lay. The all-important city of Rheims, the traditional site of coronation of the king of France, while aligned with France, was surrounded by Burgundian lands, and so the city's loyalty was uncertain. Finally, starting in late 1428, the Armagnac stronghold of Orléans, which was the doorway to lower France, risked falling to the English.

France in 1429. Yellow is France, Red is English, Green is Burgundian. White is contested or unaligned. Note the small yellow section at Domrémy at the border of the Duchy of Lorraine. (Mediawiki Commons)

The people of Domrémy were loyal to the French cause, which supported the son of Charles VI, called "the Dauphin", for prince or heir to the throne. The Dauphin Charles, however, was disinherited by his father, who through marriage of his daughter to the English King Henry V, gave the royal succession to Henry and his English heirs. At the near coincidental death of both kings the title passed to Henry VI, the infant king. The Dauphin, meanwhile, asserted his claim to the throne and ruled in lands loyal to him as king of France, although through ascension not coronation.

Domrémy itself was politically and economically unimportant, but was nevertheless mixed up in the ongoing war that went on around it, on the periphery but susceptible to raids, cross-alliances, and fluid feudal land arrangements.

Across the region, a map of loyalties would look like Swiss cheese, or, to be more French, a melted Camembert, with pockets and shoots of loyalties across the various regions. The larger border dividing the English and the French was to the center-north, along the Loire River and principally at the city of the Orléans, which was under an English siege as Joan commenced her mission.

Three towns of importance to Joan's story prior to leaving the region to meet with the Dauphin (and onward to save France), Domrémy, Vaucouleurs, and Neufchâteau, were all on the margins of these opposed loyalties, which followed the path of the upper Meuse. When Joan's home village, Domrémy, was pillaged by Burgundian forces, it was part of an operation ordered by the English to take the loyalist French garrison at Vaucouleurs. During one raid, Joan's family fled to Neufchâteau and stayed at the inn of Madame la Rousse, whom the court at Rouen would intimate was a brothel-keeper and thus Joan supposedly worked there as a prostitute. As she did during her stays at Vaucouleurs, at Neufchâteau, Joan helped her hosts with domestic chores, and carried herself admirably and piously.

Joan the peasant girl

Let's next place Saint Joan's childhood within the context of the story.

Joan was a peasant girl, but not just a peasant girl. Her father, Jacques, owned about 50 acres of land for cultivation and grazing and a house large and furnished enough to lodge visitors. He served as the village doyen, which included responsibility to announce decrees of the village council, run village watch over prisoners and the village in general, collect taxes and rents, supervise weights and measures, and oversee production of bread and wine. He was not an inconsiderable man, although he was at best a big man in a very small village. Joan's mother was more formidable, coming from a modest but better off family. It was she, Isabelle Romée, who after Joan's death championed her to the Church and French government and forced the reassessment of the her condemnations and execution.

The name of the village itself, Domrémy, has an interesting connection to a possible Roman origin, Domnus Remigius, which placed it under the Archbishop of Rheims, St. Rémi, who baptized Clovis -- thus circling back to a fundamental goal of Saint Joan to coronate the King of France, Charles VII, at Rheims where, along with Clovis' baptism, Philip II, the first "King of France," was coronated, setting the precedent. Such connections may or may not mean anything, but we ought acknowledge them.

Joan grew up in this little village with daily chores on the farm and in the household, especially to spin wool. She tended the animals when she was younger but not much, she testified, after she reached "the age of understanding." She also helped with harvesting the fields, and had certainly helped move the animals around, especially when the villagers fled for protection from raids. She knew cattle, mules and horses, but more likely as a herder would, not as a scout or soldier, so her natural aptitude as a knight, which astounded all who saw her ride, including in battle gear, was informed by her childhood learning about animals.

The formal charges in the Trial of Condemnation at Rouen claimed of Joan,

In her childhood, she was not instructed in the beliefs and principles of our Faith; but by certain old women she was initiated in the science of witchcraft, divination, superstitious doings, and magical arts. Many inhabitants of these villages have been known for all time as using these kinds of witchcraft.

This, of course, ignored her own testimony during the trial such as that she had learned the basic Catholic prayers at home:

From my mother I learned my Pater, my Ave Maria, and my Credo. I believe I learned all this from my mother.

The ecclesiastical court at Rouen had sent a notary to Domrémy to inquire into her reputation with the locals. His testimony here is from the Trial of Rehabilitation, the inquiry was done before Joan was killed, so the information he gathered was perfectly contemporaneous, making it historical gold:

I was appointed... to proceed to an enquiry on the subject of Jeanne, at that time detained in prison at Rouen. Many times, in her youth, I saw Jeanne before she left her father’s house: she was a good girl, of pure life and good manners, a good Catholic who loved the Church and went often on pilgrimage to the Church of Bermont, and confessed nearly every month—as I learned from a number of the inhabitants of Domremy, whom I had to question on the subject at the time of the enquiry that I made with the Provost of Andelot. When I and the late Gerard made this enquiry, we examined twelve or fifteen witnesses.

The Bishop in charge of the trial was outraged at the exculpatory evidence and refused to pay the man for his services, which further affirms the original evidence the notary had collected on her. That Joan was an exemplary Catholic was affirmed by all who knew her at Domrémy, and no one, not even a Burgundian acquaintance of Joan's, contradicted. Her extraordinary piety that was noted by her contemporaries in the village was from after her visions started. Before then, she was like any other child:

Ever since I knew that it was necessary for me to come into France, I have given myself up as little as possible to these games and distractions. Since I was grown up, I do not remember to have danced there. I may have danced there formerly, with the other children. I have sung there more than danced.

Joan's Voices would frequently accompany the ringing of the bells, and if the bells were late, Joan would chide the boy responsible for ringing them for being inattentive. A contemporary recalled,

I saw Jeannette very often. In our childhood, we often followed together her father’s plough, and we went together with the other children of the village to the meadows or pastures. Often, when we were all at play, Jeannette would retire alone to “talk with God.” I and the others laughed at her for this. She was simple and good, frequenting the Church and Holy places. Often, when she was in the fields and heard the bells ring, she would drop on her knees.

Another aspect of her personality her contemporaries noted was her kindliness and generosity. Her father's house stood on an ancient road, and received passersby frequently, for whom Joan gave up her bed, or according to one witness from Domremy, for the poor. Later, during preparations for the march on Orléans, as related by her confessor throughout her military campaigns, an Augustinian friar named Jean Pasquerel,

She was, indeed, very pious towards God and the Blessed Mary, confessing nearly every day and communicating frequently. When she was in a neighbourhood where there was a Convent of Mendicant Friars, she told me to remind her of the day when the children of the poor received the Eucharist, so that she might receive it with them; and this she did often: when she confessed herself she wept.

And this was on the way to battle.

To summarize, the young Saint Joan was illiterate, unschooled in all but the lessons of farming, wool spinning, Church, and local lore. She seems to have had a happy childhood growing up with other children who played together, joined village festivals, went to Church every week and on occasional pilgrimages. Additionally, she was compassionate and kindly.

This description of her childhood from Butler's 1894 "Lives of Saints" is apt:

While the English were overrunning the north of France, their future conqueror, untutored in worldly wisdom, was peacefully tending her flock, and learning the wisdom of God at a wayside shrine.

It all changed when she was thirteen and was visited by the Archangel Saint Michael who told her from the beginning that she must go to "France" -- and to Church. The children noticed that she withdrew from their games and prayed constantly, and urged them all to go to Church. Joan testified,

"Since I learned that I must come into France , I took as little part as possible in games or dancing.

From then on, it was a matter of instruction and timing.

Vaucouleurs

Vaucouleurs lay along the Meuse to the north of Domrémy. The city was loyal to the French cause, but was precariously located along disputed lands between France, English-aligned Burgundy, and the neutral Holy Roman Empire. The town was fortified and held by a French garrison led by Captain Robert de Baudricourt, an exceptional commander who managed to maintain his position against the Burgundians and the English. His hold on the city was due to deft negotiations as well as the city's elaborate fortifications. By the time Baudricourt met Joan, he had already agreed to yield official control of the city to the Burgundian, Antoine de Vergy, but had not yet handed it over. Ultimately, Baudricourt never actually ceded the city, although he was forced into a a pledge of neutrality. (Don't play poker with Baudricourt.)

1415–1429  Territories controlled by Henry VI of England in red. Territories controlled by Philip III of Burgundy in purple. Territories controlled by Charles VII of France (previously the Dauphin) in blue. The dotted white line marks Joan's journey from Domrémy to Chinon, and the dotted dark blue line her raid from Orléans to Rheims in 1429. (wikipedia)

Perhaps coincidentally, or not, a similar surrender to that which Baudricourt refused to conclude was submitted by one Étienne de Vignolles, who will be known to us in the story of Saint Joan as "La Hire", one of her most loyal commanders and a key warrior in the ultimate French victory in the war. La Hire sported a, shall we say, vibrant personality, as did many of those who were attracted to and served her cause. The Burgundian official he delivered the city of Vitry to was one Pierre Cauchon, a French Bishop allied with the Burgundians and an unapologetic English-loyalist, and the very guy who orchestrated Joan's trial and execution.

These odd alignments across the rejoin conjoin to form an essential contingency for Joan's mission, especially her instruction to "go to France." Situated amidst shifting and restless alliances, Baudricourt's loyalty to the Dauphin was necessary for Joan's introduction to the Dauphin. Her voices told her to go to Vaucouleurs and that she would recognize Baudricourt once there. Additionally, it was on the dangerous ride through Burgundian territories from Vaucouleurs to the Dauphin's residence at Chinon that Joan's companions, including a knight, realized her purity, piety, and honesty, and the divine nature of her mission. Their testimonials upon arrival at Chinon played a significant role not only in Joan's introduction to the Dauphin but to the growing public enthusiasm over her arrival.

Baudricourt dismissed Joan twice before agreeing to send her to Chinon. At her first encounter, he famously instructed her uncle who had brought her to him to,

take her back to her father and to box her ears.

We can hear his annoyance in his exchanges with Joan, as related by one of Baudricourt's squires,

She told him that “she came to him in the name of her Lord; that the Dauphin must be compelled to persevere and to give battle to his enemies, that the Lord would give him succour before the middle of Lent; that the kingdom belonged not to him, the Dauphin, but to her Lord; that her Lord would have the Dauphin King and hold the kingdom in trust; that she would make him King, in spite of his enemies, and would conduct him to his coronation.” “But who is this Lord of whom you speak?” asked Robert of her. “The King of Heaven,” she replied.

He even had a priest, to whom Joan had confessed, say an exorcism prayer over her:

One day, I saw Robert de Baudricourt—then captain of Vaucouleurs—and Messire Jean Fournier, our Curé, come in to our house to visit her. After they were gone, she told me that the Priest had his stole, and that, in presence of the said captain, he adjured her, saying: “If you are an evil spirit, avaunt! If you are a good spirit, approach!” Then Jeanne drew near the Priest and threw herself at his knees: she said he was wrong to act so, for he had heard her in confession.

By her second encounter in early 1429, people had got curious about her, including two of Baudricourt's lieutenants, both of whom would later lead her to Chinon. Her steadfast witness to her mission had raised much curiosity and wonder. Word of her arrived to the Duke of Lorraine, a rather substantial figure who had ties to both the Duke of Burgundy and the Dauphin's House of Valois, although he declared himself a neutral party as the civil war arose. The Duke sent for Joan. Jean Morel testified at the Trial of Rehabilitation,

I heard it said that the Lord Charles, then Duke of Lorraine, wished to see her, and gave her a black horse.

The Duke, though, was less interested in saving France than in his own health. As Joan explained to the court at Rouen,

The Duke of Lorraine gave orders that I should be taken to him. I went there. I told him that I wished to go into France. The Duke asked me questions about his health; but I said of that I knew nothing. I spoke to him little of my journey. I told him he was to send his son with me, together with some people to conduct me to France, and that I would pray to God for his health. I had gone to him with a safe-conduct: from thence I returned to Vaucouleurs.

We see from the Duke's request just how much Joan had stirred up the region. The Duke of Lorraine was huge. His ambiguity after meeting her, expressed by the gift of a horse and some francs, lay in his disappointment that she didn't cure him and instead told him to drop the mistress and get right with God. Joan told of this encounter to court Lady at Chinon, who testified,

Jeanne told me that the Duke de Lorraine who was ill, wished to see her, that she talked with him, and told him that he was not living well, and that he would never be cured unless he amended; also she exhorted him to take back his good wife.

The Duke of Lorraine gave her a horse and four francs, and sent her back to Vaucouleurs, where she has her third encounter with Baudricourt. This time Baudricourt engages Joan, although we have few details other than that she told him,

“To-day the gentle Dauphin hath had great hurt near the town of Orleans, and yet greater will he have if you do not soon send me to him.”

That day was February 12, the day of the "Battle of the Herrings" over 200 miles away, and so when news arrived to Vaucouleurs of the French disaster, Baudricourt sent her to the Dauphin tout-de-suite, as they say in France.

Joan told the Rouen court about her meeting with Baudricourt,

The third time, he received me, and furnished me with men; the Voice had told me it would be thus.

Armagnacs v Burgundians

France during the mission of Jeanne d'Arc 1429-1430. French Royal lands are in orange-red and English held territory in yellow-green. The un-colored areas are independent duchies that gave their allegiance to one or the other. he Holy Roman Empire is to the east.

English claims on the throne of France during the 14th and 15th centuries have as bookends several scandals that led to succession crises of the French throne. Just prior to his death in 1314, French King Philip IV's daughter, Isabella of France, who was English King Edward II's wife and thus queen of England, accused the wives of Philip's three sons of adultery. One of those, Margaret of Burgundy, was the Queen to King Louis I of Navarre, who later that year became King Louis X of France. Margaret was jailed for the adultery charges, and so became Queen of France from prison.

In a further complication that reflects upon the story of Saint Joan, Louis X was unable to divorce her, as Pope Clement V died that April and the Papal See remained empty for two years over disputes between the French and Italian Cardinals (see Popes and antipopes flowchart). By the time in 1315 that Margaret either got around to dying of a bad cold from poor conditions in prison, or was helped to to not breath any more (cause of death is disputed), Louis had only one child, Joan. He quickly remarried and the queen duly got pregnant, but Louis died at her fourth month, apparently after drinking too much chilled wine (?), or perhaps wine laced with poison. On his deathbed, he named his daughter by Margaret, Joan, his heir.

The French nobility wouldn't have it, and invoked the ancient Salic Law from Clovis that barred women from inheriting the throne. So Joan became Joan II of Navarre but not Queen of France. Louis' second wife's child was a boy, but he died at four months, leaving Louis' brother, who was regent following Louis' death, to the throne. The brother ruled as Philip V from 1316 to 1322, but issued not male heirs, so the throne passed to the third brother, who had also married one of the woman who had been accused of adultery along with Margaret. Philip's wife Joan was cleared of the charges, but the wife of the third brother, who became Charles IV, was sent to prison, as well, and was divorced after he took the throne upon Philip V's death. A next wife died during a premature birth, and all but one daughter of the third wife died young. So upon the death of Charles IV, there was no male heir.

From these events eventually arose the opportunity for Edward III of England, whose mother was the very "She-Wolf of England" who had launched the series of miseries that followed the charges of adultery of her brothers wives, as well as to usurp her husband and place her son on the English throne. As the nephew of Charles IV through his mother, Edward III was the most direct heir to the French crown, but the French nobility again asserted Salic Law and so in 1328 gave the throne to Charles' paternal cousin, Philip of Valois, who as Philip VI started the House of Valois dynasty, to which the Dauphin of Joan's day belonged. Nine years and many disputes later, Edward III declared himself legitimate King of France and invaded the continent.

Charles VII, the Dauphin to Joan, was last heir standing of five older brothers. When he asserted his right to the French throne, his legitimacy was questioned, as his mother, Isabeau of Bavaria, was accused of having him through the renowned womanizer, the Duke of Orléans -- the brother of the King, Charles VI. True or not, it may have been part of the excuse for Charles VI to bypass his supposedly illegitimate son and hand the French throne over the the English King, Henry V, who descended from Edward III and his French mother (who was daughter of Philip IV and sister to the three last Capetian kings). Ostensibly, Charles VI disinherited his son Charles over the assassination of the Duke of Burgundy in 1417, which, if so, is not only petty but would defy the vengeance in the act of the early Burgundian assassination of the father of the Duke of Orléans in 1407.

It's all very complicated and, honestly, defies historical analysis, as the Charles the Dauphin did not necessarily order the death of the Duke of Burgundy -- the murder was carried out by his men, a difference without a distinction, at least to the extent to cause a long seated regret in the mind of the Dauphin. But it gets really complicated when we consider that the successor to said dead Duke of Burgundy was married to the Dauphin's sister, Michelle. Moreover the elder brother of Michelle (and of the younger brother Charles), Louis, in 1409 married Margaret of Burgundy, a name that resonates loudly from a century before with Margaret of Burgundy, married to Louis X in 1305. Meanwhile, the next in line John, had been married off to a "Low Countries" (Holland) Countess, which was never intended to be a principal alliance for the King of France. But when Louis died, John and his wife, Jacqueline, were next in line, which threw the alliances into a jumble. John died two years later in 1417, after the latest English invasion and victory at Agincourt in 1415. After Jacqueline's death in 1433, her lands passed to the Duke of Burgundy, further expanding his holdings in the north of France and the Low Countries. When Charles VI died in 1422, the claims upon his inheritance were clear and clearly contested.

>> armagnac-burgundy war

The older brother died without any male heirs ..

>> illegitimacy of Charles

>> his sister Michelle married Duke of Burgundy

>> fight wteween Orelans and Burgundy

Burgundy: >>

Robert II instituted primogeniture for his lands, thus avoiding their partitioning and strengthening subsequent Dukes of Burgundy.

The Burgundian hold of Paris and other areas of northern France was due to the English military presence, so it was an alliance that was mutually beneficial but not mutual in purpose. For example, the English needed to hold Paris to maintain their claim on the French crown, but they also needed the Burgundians to administer and defend it.

A prime actor in and beneficiary of those entanglements was the priest Pierre Cauchon who became Joan's chief persecutor at Rouen. Cauchon was allied with the Duke of Burgundy, and so where went the Duke, went Cauchon. He had participated in negotiations between the French King Charles VI and the Vatican in 1407 in an attempt to end the schism between a French-supported papal claimant (Avignon antipope) and the Pope at Rome. In 1420, after holding various positions, such as dean at the University of Paris, chaplain of the Duke of Burgundy, archdeacon of Chartres and, in 1420, Bishop of Beauvais, the position under which he would exercise jurisdiction over Joan's Trial of Condemnation. That same year, Cauchon helped negotiate the Treaty of Troyes, which granted to English King Henry V inheritance to the French throne following Charles VI. Cauchon's career took off as a primary liaison between the English and the Burgundians. He escorted the English royal claimant, Henry VI to France in 1430 and acted as Henry's personal counsellor at Rouen, the Emglsh administrative center in France.

Had the English managed to push south of Orléans, an Armagnac stronghold and seat of the normal heir to the French throne, the Duke d'Orléans (who was imprisoned in England at the time), they would have very likely taken all of France and enforced the Treaty of Troyes, which gave French succession to the English. Defending Orléans was the Duke's half brother, John the Bastard, who arrived to the city in October of 1428. He huddled the people inside the city walls, abandoning buildings and churches outside the boundaries. A deal was proposed, not by the Bastard, but by terrified citizens of Orléans, to the Duke of Burgundy that would yield the city to him while upholding its neutrality. Ordered by the English, the Duke refused it. Meanwhile within Orléans, desperation set in, especially following the French humiliation at the Battle of the Herrings on February 12 (the outcome of which Joan had predicted to Captain Baudricourt at Vaucouleurs).

Soon after the Battle of Herrings, as things seemed to be falling apart, the Bastard received news of a mysterious "maid" who was going to rescue the city of Orléans. He was curious. He had received some reinforcements, but the situation was dire. He wrote,

It is told that there had lately passed through the town of Gien a maid [une pucelle], who proclaimed that she was on her way to Chinon to the gentle Dauphin, and said that she had been sent by God to raise the siege of Orléans and take the King to his anointing at Reims.

So he sent emissaries to the King's court to see what was going on.

Saint or Servant of France?

I have a theory. I developed it before I knew anything about Saint Joan other than she led the French to defeat the English and was burnt at the stake for it all. As I have learned more about her, the theory makes more and more sense that her mission was to save Catholicism, not France.

Henry II's continental holdings in 1154 (in various shades of red), forming part of the "Angevin Empire"

What is "France"?

France, as we know it, doesn't really become "France" until Philip II, but not with national integrity and full identity until Joan of Arc. It's all rather complicated, but following the Norman Invasion of England in 1066, the Normans controlled the north of France and England. After series of power grabs, political marriages, dynastic divisions, and armed contests, by the 12th century, Henry II, who spoke French, had taken over a large part of western France, creating the Angevin Empire, which lasted until the Battle of Bouvines in 1214, in which the French defeated an English and a European coalition that opposed Philip II's conquests of France. As a result, English King John was severely weakened and was forced into signing the Magna Charta and Philip II consolidated France, effectively creating modern France. History weaves complex, indeed.

In 1328, a succession crisis arose at the death of Charles IV of France, whose closest heir was his nephew Edward III of England. Eddie, of course, claimed the throne. Rejected by the French nobles, Ed cut a deal with the Flemish who endorsed him as King of France, everything to do, of course, with the economic binds between English sheep and Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres woolen factories. In the 1340s, Eddie put together an invasion force and in 1346 took the northern city of Caen and then thoroughly humiliated the French at Crécy, largely because the French fought the same war as at Bouvines, with heavy armor, while the English brought in the next thing, the longbow, which could be fired in rapid succession (unlike the French crossbows) and could also pierce armor from distance.

It gets complicated, what with English victories in the southwest of France (remnants of the Angevin Empire) and a series of crises in France, which led to the coronation of Charles VI, "Charles the Mad," renowned today as the crazy king who thought he was made of glass. In 1420, Charles disinherited his own son, who would become the "Dauphin" (claimant to the throne of France) whom Saint Joan herself, basically, crowned as Charles VII, appoints the English King Henry V, who took advantage of the chaos in France and crippled the French army at Agincourt in 1415. After this, the English and their French allies ally, the Count of Burgundy, give or take some stumbles, ally for mutual benefit to take over France.

Most people would look upon the Hundred Years War as, and the language of the day, a war between the English and the French. Indeed, the French called their enemy the English, and the English called their enemy the French. In more than a small way they were all French, which is why the English king claimed the French throne.

In my theory, had the "English," whose rulers spoke French at home, won and reclaimed France on top of England, then both England and France, a hundred years later, would have under Henry VIII left the Catholic church. Sure, lots of conditions may have prevented that, but we can draw a straight line from the Church of England to the Church of England/France. This would not have pleased God.

Whatever the value of my theory that God meant to keep France Catholic, I am intrigued by this excerpt from Mark Twain's account of the trial of St. Joan:

And now, by order of Cauchon, an ecclesiastic named Nicholas Midi preached a sermon, wherein he explained that when a branch of the vine — which is the Church — becomes diseased and corrupt, it must be cut away or it will corrupt and destroy the whole vine.

Whereas the English partisan, Father Midi, saw the destruction of Joan the pruning of a dead branch of the Church (the vine, as Twain correctly explains), by cutting her off, he and Bishop Cauchon were instead pruning themselves from the vine of France. The dead vine cut off was England.

There is an additional

> Henry VIII

> to save France -- from what, the English who were French?

> podcast dreams of united UK/France

Vive La France

During and since Joan's time, French patriots have looked to Joan for glory of France. Until the French Revolution, however, she was a mark of glory for both the French monarchy and the Catholic Church. During the Revolution, the Jacobins suppressed any Catholic or monarchical associations, including her annual festival in Orléans that had centered around the Cathedral of Sainte-Croix, where Joan celebrated a Vespers Mass during the siege. Joan nevertheless remained useful for the Revolution as a symbol of the common people and "independence."

Napoléon renewed the celebrations that the Jacobins had halted and also restored her birthplace at Domrémy as a national monument. His embrace of Joan met several needs: French nationalism, especially anti-British French nationalism, reinforcement of the Concordat of 1801 between the French government and the Vatican that officially restored the Church in France, and legitimization of his own mission to glorify France and himself as her savior.

Further along, we see Joan's popularity arise during times of crisis or national pride, such as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, both World Wars, and French post-War nationalism under Charles de Gaulle. While modern academics have co-opted Joan for various agenda, from feminism and anti-patriarchy, to cross-dressing and "gender fluidity", seeing in Joan everything but French nationalism and the Catholic faith, which, in turn, they deplore when Joan's image is adopted by "far right" monarchists and nationalists. Nevertheless, while seemingly all things to all people, Joan remains a dominant symbol of France, and correctly so.

La vie de Jeanne d'Arc, Panthéon, Paris (wikicommons)

What goes missing is her Catholicity and sainthood. Despite depictions of her visions and divine associations such as that of a panel in La Vie de Jeanne d'Arc at the Panthéon in Paris of a Dove escaping Joan's mouth at her death, the secularization of Joan that started with Voltaire's crude and demeaning 1730s play about her continues. Voltaire ridiculed Jean Chapelain's 1656 epic poem about Joan that emphasized her divine mission, which, as one modern academic frames it, "is devoted entirely and equally to Church and monarchy." Oh, and the poem itself is "turgid." Voltaire mockery not just Chapelain, but the Maiden herself, and, of course, her virginity:

That Joan of Arc had all a lion's rage ; You'll tremble at the feats whereof you hear, And more than all the wars she used to wage, At how she kept her maidenhead — a year !

He goes on to compare Joan to the Medusa and has her riding into battle naked. But no need to get into it any further here, as Voltaire's tantrum was more about his own anti-Catholic bigotry than Joan of Arc. She was merely a useful target.

On it goes through the progression of modernity, exemplified by the 1844 work of Jules Michelet, a 19th century anti-clerical French historian. Michelet is the originator of the term "Renaissance," meant to describe the end of an abysmal and backward Medieval period marked by superstition, oppression, and the Catholic Church (especially Jesuits), replaced by a "rebirth" of enlightened antiquity. Sadly, this socialist historian has deeply influenced the modern study of history.

The term "Dark Ages" was first used in the 1300s by Petrarch, the Catholic scholar and often deemed founder of humanism. Petrarch, who lived a century before St. Joan, described the conditions in Europe following the fall of the Roman empire up to his own day as "dark." Michelet applied Petrarch's "light" of antiquity to its supposed rebirth in the "light" of the Renaissance:

Nature, and natural science, kept in check by the spirit of Christianity, were about to have their revival, (renaissance.)

All the while consigning to the dark Petrach, and thus, Dante and other early "Reniassance" figures for Michelet, there was one "dark ages" ambassador to hold on to: Joan of Arc, whom he called "The Maid of Orleans." For Michelet, Joan was a "simple Christian," that is a good Christian as opposed to the clerics around her, bad Christians all. While considering her visions mundane and common,, he presents her divinely-directed acts as if they just, well, happened. Here the historian's judgment is blinded by his prejudice, and like every secular take on her that dismisses the divine hand:

The originality of the Pucelle, the secret of her success, was not her courage or her visions, but her good sense.

Beyond that any application of "good sense" would have bound Joan to the fields of her home village, Domrémy, the only thing Michelet can do with her religiosity is to ignore it when inconvenient, exalt it when it contrasts with the hated clerics, and otherwise treat it metaphorically as just a backdrop to her true purpose, according to Michelet, ransoming France:

The Imitation of Jesus Christ, his Passion reproduced in the Pucelle -- such was the redemption of France.

I can't even begin to process the association of "redemption of France" with the "imitation" and Passion of Christ, and we're better off, as with Voltaire, just not going there. But Michelet gets even more grotesque with his impassioned, shall we say, 19th century romanticization of femininity represented by Joan:

Purity, sweetness, heroic goodness — that this supreme beauty of the soul should have centred in a daughter of France, may surprise foreigners who choose to judge of our nation by the levity of its manners alone ... old France was not styled without reason, the most Christian people. They were certainly the people of love and of grace ; and whether we understand this humanly or Christianly, in either sense it will ever hold good. The saviour of France could be no other than a woman. France herself was woman;

When the religious is replaced by the secular, the secular fills the empty space. Thus the Lincoln Memorial is a "temple" and George Washington rises to the heavens in a an "apotheosis" in the dome of the U.S. Capitol. Here Michelet transposes Joan's religiosity for France's raison d'être, claiming for France a soul that he otherwise denies in Joan. Michelet, as least, recognized in Joan a good Christian, but like scholars who have followed sees her faith as an anachronism and her visions as irrelevant at best.

Joan's mission: to save Catholicism

Saint Joan saved France, yes. But she more importantly saved Catholic France and thereby Catholicism itself, as had France fallen to what was to become English Anglican and Protestant rule, so likely would have fallen the rest of Catholic western Europe.

When, just before the Battle of Orléans, Joan warned the French commander there, the Bastard of Orléans, to quit futzing around and get busy so she could save France, she told him that it wasn't about her, it was about God:

This help comes not for love of me but from God Himself, who at the prayer of St. Louis and of St. Charlemagne has had pity on the city of Orléans.

Huh, Saints Louis and Charlemagne?

Intercession of Saints Charlemagne & Louis

When Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Imperator Romanorum (emperor of the Romans) in 800, he crowned the Frankish king Charles (Carolus, Karlus) king of western Christianity, creating what would later become the Holy Roman Empire. In submitting as vassal to the Pope, Charlemagne legitimized both his own rule and that of Roman Catholicism across his empire. Among the religious legacies of Charlemagne was the practice of the laity of memorizing and reciting the Our Father prayer and the Apostle's Creed with the filioque and the traditional singing of "Noel" at coronations in honor of Charlemagne's coronation by the Pope on Christmas Day.

Saint Louis was the French king Louis IX (reigned 1226-1270). Crowned at Rheims, he ruled as a devout and pious Christian to such extent that he was canonized not long after his death. Louis' reign was marked by consistent protection of the clergy and Church from secular rule and strict allegiance to the papacy. He is considered the quintessential "Christian" -- but more correctly, Catholic, king. As for historical context regarding Joan, in 1259 he consolidated French rule over Normandy at the Treaty of Paris with English King Henry III. Some historians attribute Louis' concession of Duchy of Guyenne to the English under French vassalage to the outbreak of the Hundred Years War, but there is no direct causality to make that connection, and even if there was any unfinished business Louis preferred settlement over continued war.

If Joan's mission was to save France, Philip II (reigned 1165-1223) would have been the better intercessor, not Charlemagne or his grandson St. Louis, for Charlemagne's empire extended across Germany, and while Saint Louis extended French sovereignty, it was Philip who created the modern France that Joan defended. Philip, in fact was the first to declare himself "King of France." Now, Philip was no Saint, as they say, so in Saints Charlemagne and Louis IX, perhaps Joan was appealing more to the Roman Catholic France than to the territorial one. Or, in that Joan's exhortation to the Bastard was about Orléans and not France, perhaps "the prayer of St. Louis and of St. Charlemagne" was just for the city. But Orléans was the key to it all, as so went Orléans, so went France -- and, ultimately, French Catholicism.

The French King Charles V (reigned 1364-1380), who considered himself the fifth "Charles" of France, promoted veneration of Charlemagne, including to dedicate a chapel to him at St. Denis with an elaborate reliquary, which treated him like a saint. The city of Rheims maintained a cult of Charlemagne and actively supported his canonization by the antipope Paschall III in 1165.

>> fix < here? >> After resolving the 12th century schism of antipopes aligned with the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick I ("Barbarossa"), Pope Alexander III annulled their papal acts, which included the canonization of Charlemagne.

We can't say that it was of regional tradition or a remnant of the revoked canonization that Joan invoked, but we do know that when referring to "Saint Charlemagne" prior to Orléans, Joan was under the guidance of her voices. She invoked their names for a reason.

The Babylonian Captivity

Joan herself was born amidst an ongoing papal schism. When she was five years old, the "Western Schism" of 1378 was finally settled with a consensus selection at Rome of Pope Martin V, although two rival claims persisted. However, the antipope from Avignon, Benedict XIII, refused to concede, and he moved to Spain under the protection of the King of Aragon who used his presence there for leverage on other issues with Rome. It was Benedict's successor, the antipope Clement VIII who twelve years later finally gave up on the project on July 26, 1429 when the King of Aragon withdrew his support for him. Note the date: Joan's triumph at Orléans was in May and the coronation of Charles VII at Rheims occurred on July 17. There is an interesting parallel to Joan in the Schism itself, precipitated by Pope Gregory XI's move from Avignon to Rome in 1377, ending the uncontested "Avignon Papacy" but prompting the schismatic, French-backed papacy back at Avignon. Known as the "Babylonian Captivity," the official Avignon papacy lasted through seven Popes across sixty-seven years. We see in these events an inversion of antagonists from that of Joan's day: Where the English provoked God's wrath in the Hundred Year's War, the French caught themselves up in less-than-holy entanglements during the Avignon period, which ended only after the intervention of another female Saint, Catherine of Sienna.

In 1289, Pope Pope Nicholas IV allowed the French King Philip IV to collect a one-time Crusades tithe from certain territories under Rudolf of Habsburg (who was not happy about it) in order to pay down Philip's war debts. With the costs of ongoing wars with Aragon, England and Flanders, Philip was up to his ears in financial gamesmanship, including debasement of the currency, bans on export of bullion, and seizure of the assets of Lombard merchants. In 1296, he imposed a severe tax upon Church lands and clergy in France, which didn't go over well with Rome. Pope Boniface VIII responded with the first of three Papal Bulls aimed at Philip denying his right to tax the Church without papal permission and generally asserting papal over secular authority.

The "Palace of the Popes" in Anagni, south of Rome, where Philip IV attacked Pope Boniface VIII (wikipedia)

The Pope compromised by allowing such a tax for emergencies only, and Philip went ahead anyway with at least some. Things escalated from there, with Philip prosecuting clerical agents from Rome in royal courts and the Pope issuing a wonderfully named Bull, Ausculta Fili ("Listen, My Son"), which Philip not only ignored but had burned in public. Boniface called the French Bishops to Rome, the assembly of which Philip preempted by convening the first Estates General in France, a council with representatives from the nobility, clergy, and commons. Boniface issued another Bull asserting Papal authority and excommunicated anyone, ahem, who prevented clerics from traveling to Rome. Philip did the obvious thing and sent a small army of sixty troops to arrest the Pope and force his abdication. The soldiers stormed the papal estate at Anagni, south of Rome, and held him for three days until residents retaliated and rescued the Pope from the French. Now Philip got an excommunication directed at him personally. Boniface, though, likely from injuries or trauma suffered from the attack, and possibly from poisoning by the French, died shortly after.

Philip's excursion to Anagni put pressure on the subsequent Papal conclave to avoid further antagonism with him. The next Pope, Benedict XI, rescinded the excommunication but not that of Philip's minister who led the attack on Boniface, thus leaving the conflict unsettled. Benedict, though, died within a year, and after a year-long impasse between French and Italian Cardinals at the ensuing Conclave, Philip had his way with selection of the Frenchman, Raymond Bertrand de Got, as Pope Clement V. Clement basically did Philip's will, which included effective rescindment of Boniface's Bulls, a posthumous inquisition into Boniface in order to discredit him (which failed), sanction of Philip's arrest of the Knights Templar, and, most importantly, move of the entire Papal court to Avignon in the south of France. This was 1309.

Return from exile: Gregory XI & Saint Catherine of Sienna

Philip's capture of the Papacy worked well for him but no so much for the Church, which, bound to French dominance, lost its legitimacy elsewhere. At first the old enemies of Philip, England and Aragon, found it convenient not to have to deal with the Italians in Rome so did not object. However, a succession crisis among Philip IV's heirs led to the English claims on the French throne and outbreak of the Hundred Years War, over which the Avignon Papacy, while maintaining neutrality and assisting in treaty settlements, leaned towards the French side. So when Gregory XI moved the papacy back to Rome in 1376, the French were furious while the English could sit on their hands and shrug, "oh well." No objection them. And no objection, either, from the Holy Roman Emperor, whose brand was quite literally diluted by the move from Rome to Avignon.

Map showing support for Avignon (red) and Rome (blue) during the Western Schism (Wikipedia)

Shortly after arriving at Rome, Gregory died. Under the threats from a Roman mob to appoint an Italian, i.e., not a French pope, and with disunity and among the French faction, as well as absence of some of the French Cardinals, the Conclave compromised on a bishop from Naples, who became Urban VI.

Two years later, with Urban refusing to return to Avignon, the French Cardinals held their own conclave south of Rome at Anagni, at invitation of the Count thereof, Onorato Caetani, who was angry at Urban VI for removing him from lands appointed to him by Gregory XI. The French Bishops selected a rather complicated man, Robert of Geneva, son of the Count of Geneva, who had studied at the Sorbonne, held a rectory in England, and earned the nickname "Butcher of Cesena" for authorizing the massacre of three to eight thousand people for the town's participation in a 1377 rebellion against the Papal States (lands directly ruled by the Pope). Now Clement VII, Caetani tried to set up shop in Naples, but was chased out of town by a mob who supported the Roman Pope, shouting, "Death to the Antichrist!" King Charles V of France, who certainly had a say in Caetani's selection, welcomed him back to Avignon as Clement VII and gathered support from various regions and countries who, for whatever reason, preferred France over England, such as the Scottish who went with whatever the English did not.

This time period crosses with that of Saint Bridget of Sweden (1303-1373) who was terribly upset at the Avignon papacy, but whose pleadings to the Church to return to Rome were ignored. In 1350, Bridget sought papal authorization for her order, the Bridgettines, but she refused to go to Avignon, and went to Rome instead where she awaited the Pope's return -- which occurred finally in 1367 when the Avignon Pope Urban V visited Rome as a symbolic gesture of a permanent return. In Rome, he ran the Holy See from the Vatican but ran into various problems with local lords who had gotten used to having things their way. Along with rebellions within the Papal States (taking advantage of the absence of Rome), Urban faced trouble with the bishops back at Avignon who demanded his return. He did grant Saint Bridget her order in 1370, but as he prepared that year to return to Avignon, Saint Bridget told him that if he left Rome he would die. He did, and three and a half months later he died.

Urban's successor, Pierre Roger de Beaufort, who became Gregory XI, had witnessed in person Bridget's prophesy to Urban V, which may have, one can imagine, at least been in the back of his mind when he privately vowed before God to return the papacy to Rome should he be selected as Pope. Whatever the intention, for the first years of his papacy there were plenty of fires to put out (or try) and reforms to institute, including, interestingly, his 1373 règle d'idiom, which instructed clergy to speak the local vernacular to their flocks outside of the liturgy, came well before the proto-Protestant heretic John Wycliffe translated the Bible into English. Gregory's attempts to reconcile the kings of France and England failed.

The Avignon papacy was not tenable. And no matter how you look at it, Saint Peter died at Rome and not Avignon. Gregory XI seemed to think so, anyway, but he only acted on the conviction at the insistence of Saint Catherine of Sienna (1347-1380). Saint Catherine had picked up where Saint Bridget had left off, dictating a series of letters to the Pope commanding him, among things, to return to Rome and in language Gregory characterized as having an “intolerably dictatorial tone, a little sweetened with expressions of her perfect Christian deference.” Not sure if it's Catherine so much as Gregory not wanting to hear it. For example, she wrote,

I have prayed, and shall pray, sweet and good Jesus that He free you from all servile fear, and that holy fear alone remain.  May ardor of charity be in you, in such wise as shall prevent you from hearing the voice of incarnate demons, and heeding the counsel of perverse counselors, settled in self-love, who, as I understand, want to alarm you, so as to prevent your return, saying, “You will die.”  Up, father, like a man!  For I tell you that you have no need to fear.

In 1376, Catherine traveled to Avignon on behalf of the Republic of Florence to negotiate a peace with the Papal States. She failed at the immediate mission but through a divine inspiration won a far more important one: when they met, she told him that she knew of his private vow to return the papacy to Rome. He so decided, but wavered in face of strenuous French objections. When Catherine heard of the indecision, she wrote,

I beg of you, on behalf of Christ crucified, that you be not a timorous child but manly. Open your mouth and swallow down the bitter for the sweet.

In January of 1377, Gregory moved the papacy back to Rome. He soon after died, and his successor Urban VI refused to return to Avignon, where the French bishops held their own conclave and selected Clement VII, the first antipope of the "Western Schism" that would last almost seventy years, and that would lay the ground for the Martin Luther and the protestant schisms that followed.

Saint Joan questioned on the Schism

By the time of Joan's Trial of Condemnation in 1431, the Western Schism had been officially settled, but the Court tried to use her views on it to discredit her or trip her up. Perhaps thinking that Joan would take the French view of things, she was asked,

What do you say of our Lord the Pope? and whom do you believe to be the true Pope?

To which Joan gave one or her sublime replies,

“Are there two of them?”

Having that one swatted down, the court continued,

Did you not receive a letter from the Count d’Armagnac, asking you which of the three Pontiffs he ought to obey?

Joan replied,

The Count did in fact write to me on this subject. I replied, among other things, that when I should be at rest, in Paris or elsewhere, I would give him an answer. I was just at that moment mounting my horse when I sent this reply.

It's a classic legal maneuver they tried ot pull on her, to lead a witness into a statement, then throw out contrary evidence, in this case, her exchange with the Count. But there was no deceit in Joan, who's testimony was entirely consistent with the evidence. What had happened is that in July 1429, Jean IV, the Count d'Armagnac, himself allied with the English, sent a letter to Joan asking her to clarify the ongoing situation. They got the copies from him. Nevertheless, we have to assume the sincerity of the original letter, as well as the Count's intent: he genuinely thought Joan would provide divine guidance on the situation. As read to the Court at Tours two years later,

My very dear Lady—I humbly commend myself to you, and pray, for God’s sake, that, considering the divisions which are at this present time in the Holy Church Universal on the question of the Popes, for there are now three contending for the Papacy—one residing at Rome, calling himself Martin V., whom all Christian Kings obey; another, living at Paniscole, in the Kingdom of Valence, who calls himself Clement VII.; the third, no one knows where he lives, unless it be the Cardinal Saint Etienne and some few people with him, but he calls himself Pope Benedict XIV. The first, who styles himself Pope Martin, was elected at Constance with the consent of all Christian nations; he who is called Clement was elected at Paniscole, after the death of Pope Benedict XIII., by three of his Cardinals; the third, who dubs himself Benedict XIV., was elected secretly at Paniscole, even by the Cardinal Saint Etienne. You will have the goodness to pray Our Saviour Jesus Christ that by His infinite Mercy He may by you declare to us which of the three named is Pope in truth, and whom it pleases Him that we should obey, now and henceforward, whether he who is called Martin, he who is called Clement, or he who is called Benedict; and in whom we are to believe, if secretly, or by any dissembling, or publicly; for we are all ready to do the will and pleasure of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Yours in all things,

Count d’Armagnac.

That outlier third, Benedick XIV was from a city within the Count's territory, so perhaps he was looking to put him down ("who dubs himself"). Or, he really wanted to know what the Maid thought on the matter. It's all very strange, as the Count wrote the letter from Sully in northeastern France, and he was opposed to Charles VII. Joan was inundated with these types of inquiries, by letter or in person.

Joan dictated a reply to the Count's messenger, which is rather clever and to which her testimony at the trial corresponded:

Jhesus Maria. Count d’Armagnac, my very good and dear friend, I, Jeanne, the Maid, acquaint you that your message has come before me, which tells me that you have sent at once to know from me which of the three Popes, mentioned in your memorial, you should believe. This thing I cannot tell you truly at present, until I am at rest in Paris or elsewhere; for I am now too much hindered by affairs of war; but when you hear that I am in Paris, send a message to me and I will inform you in truth whom you should believe, and what I shall know by the counsel of my Righteous and Sovereign Lord, the King of all the World, and of what you should do to the extent of my power. I commend you to God. May God have you in His keeping! Written at Compiègne, August 22nd.

From the trial:

Court: "Is this really the reply that you made?”

Joan: “I deem that I might have made this answer in part, but not all.”

Court: “Did you say that you might know, by the counsel of the King of Kings, what the Count should hold on this subject?”

Joan: “I know nothing about it.”

Court: “Had you any doubt about whom the Count should obey?” a

Joan: “I did not know how to inform him on this question, as to whom he should obey, because the Count himself asked to know whom God wished him to obey. But for myself, I hold and believe that we should obey our Lord the Pope who is in Rome. I told the messenger of the Count some things which are not in this copy; and, if the messenger had not gone off immediately, he would have been thrown into the water—not by me, however. As to the Count’s enquiry, desiring to know whom God wished him to obey, I answered that I did not know; but I sent him messages on several things which have not been put in writing. As for me, I believe in our Lord the Pope who is at Rome.”

Must have terribly disappointed the old boys at Rouen and Paris, as a primary reason for their siding with the English and for so vigorously pursuing Joan, as Pernoud discusses, was to affirm their power over the Papacy as well as over the French King.

The Western Schism was settled by granting to the a General Council of bishops the power to remove a Pope from office, which was done with the acquiescence of the Roman Pope, who after removal of the two other competing Popes, himself resigned to be replaced by a Pope selected by the General Council, Martin V. The exercise of power by the Council is known as "conciliarism," which may be seen as

Joan's voices didn't advise her on the issue of the papacy, so, as she said, she spoke for herself. Still, her impact on the issue was significant. A first question is if her reference to "the lord pope who is in Rome" is to Martin V or to Rome as the seat of the Papacy. It appears to be the latter, which would suggest something more than just Joan's "good sense," which the historian Michelet attributed to her authority rather than her voices. Rome had become unstable and subject to mob rule and invasion. It lay at the border of the Kingdom of Naples, which supported the Avignon papacy. Martin V's primary job was to secure and rebuild Rome itself. While subject to the General Council, by restoring the Vatican and the city around it, Martin V laid the foundation for the modern Papacy, which quickly overshadowed conciliarism, which was condemned at the Fifth Lateran Council (1512-1517).

>> here

Joan has no say in any of these affairs, but by coronating Charles VII at Rheims, she secured the necessary monarchical authority for secure Roman Catholic hold on France, be it Gallic in nature. For both Saints Catherine of Sienna and Joan of Arc, the papacy must be seated in Rome. Saint Catherine explicitly sought Christian unity, while Joan led a fight of Christian against Christian, but it was a fight Joan helped to end and not start, and she lamented the loss of life on both sides. A united France for Joan meant a united Church.

Historians correctly attribute the Western Schism to the origins of the Protestant Reformation itself. At the Council of Constance, which ended the schism, Proto-Protestant Catholic priest John Wycliff was posthumously condemned for heresy and his body ordered exhumed and burned, and his follower Jan Hus was defrocked and handed over to hostile secular authority which burned him at the stake. Both men challenged the authority of the Pope -- which brings up a larger question as to which Pope. Wycliff was active before the Western Schism, but wrote his most radical tracts after it. Wycliff would have come of age with fresh memories of previous Schism, as well as with the outbreak of the Hundred Years War. Hus, who received Holy Orders in 1400, was a clear product of the Schism, which had divided the University of Prague where he studied and became master, dean and rector in 1409. Hus' most drastic attacks on the abuses of the papacy were directed at the antipope John XIII who was using (abusing) the authority he (did not) had to collect tithes. In other words, both men were products of a fractured Church that Saints Catherine and Joan sought to repair.

>> Joan swears to Martin >> why ? Martin V, who ended the schism and who started the Univ. at Leuvain, was elected pope on St. Martin's Feast Day. Here for St. Martin: Martin of Tours - Wikipedia

> these two saints admonishsed church unity at Rome ... but the divisions had already set the larger problem that Joan had to save Franch from, Jan Hus ... or his suporters were at th Council of << that settled the 2nd avignon schism.

> Bridget predictd the reduced and exact size of the Vatican in 1922

>> note: the French king withdrew support of avignon in 1398 Antipope Benedict XIII - Wikipedia He was run out of Avignon, but returned w/ great popular support and affirmed by France, Scotland, Castille and Sicily. 1408 Chas VI declared neutrality

< he started the Univ of Glasgw )?( ... then loast France adn had to run from Avignon by 1413 ... then Constance 1415 refused, ws excommnicated in 1417 when Martin came on, ran to Aragon (Tortosa)

>> CHas VII and Pragmatic Sanction << note that a false pragmatic sanction supposedly issued by Saint Louis was circulated when Chas VII was adopting his own. It was not real.

>> councils >> get on Pernoud's obsession w/ them and warning about Joan's opposition to them

> Henry IV > only protestant king of France.. renounced protestantism at St. Denis " "Paris is well worth a mass".

>> House of Valois ended w/ two last (?) kins protesters