A Note on This History

This is a narrative history of Joan of Arc from her childhood in Domrémy to the anointing of Charles VII at Reims on 17 July 1429. It stops there on purpose. She said she had been sent to raise the siege of Orléans and to take the king to his crowning. By the evening of that Sunday both things had been done. What followed — the stall before Paris, the capture at Compiègne, the process at Rouen, the fire, the second trial, the long afterlife — is the matter of Volume II.

The method is straight narrative. I do not collage the witnesses into a mosaic and call it a life. I tell the story in order, as it unfolded for people who did not know the ending. Helen Castor has shown how much is lost when Joan is read backwards from the pyre. The men who met her in 1429 met a girl who claimed to be sent by God, not a saint and not yet a prisoner.

The stance is historical, with the Catholic reading of her mission left standing. Joan said her voices were Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret, that she saw them with her bodily eyes, and that they spoke French. That is the testimony. This book does not dissolve it into epilepsy, tuberculosis, or a political fiction invented after the fact. It also does not treat later piety as if it were a fifteenth-century source. Where a thing can be checked — a date, a march, a letter, a battle — it is checked. Where a thing rests on her word, or on the word of people remembering her twenty-five years later, the reader is told so.

What we actually have

No medieval woman, and few medieval men, left a dossier like hers. The condemnation trial of 1431 records days of interrogation, in a Latin instrument compiled by the notaries from French minutes. She was about nineteen. The questions were hostile. The answers, even through the filter of a court that meant to destroy her, still sound like a person. Daniel Hobbins’s English of that Latin record is the version cited here as Trial.1

Twenty-five years later the Church reopened the case. The nullification process of 1455–56 took sworn testimony from her mother, from neighbors at Domrémy, from men who had ridden with her, and from clerks who had sat in the Rouen chamber. Pierre Duparc’s edition is the critical text. Régine Pernoud made the witnesses readable in English. Their memories are precious and they are not innocent: they spoke under a king who had been crowned by Joan’s standard, in a France from which the English had been driven. Both trials are used. They are not the same kind of document.23

Around these sit the letters she dictated — above all the letter to the English of 22 March 1429 — and the chronicles: the Journal du siège d’Orléans, Perceval de Cagny, the Chronique de la Pucelle, Jean Chartier, Enguerrand de Monstrelet, and Christine de Pizan’s Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc, written while Joan was still in the field. Jules Quicherat gathered most of this in five volumes between 1841 and 1849. Modern narrative rests on that mountain, whether it admits it or not.4

What we do not have

The record of the Poitiers examination is lost. The precise words of the private sign she gave Charles at Chinon were never written down, and she refused to give them to Cauchon’s court. Several dates in the winter of 1428–29 cannot be fixed to a day. The Epiphany birthday so often printed — 6 January 1412 — comes from a courtly letter of 1429, not from her mother. At Rouen she said she was “nineteen or thereabout.”5

Dialogue in this book is quoted from those records, or it is not presented as speech. I have not invented conversations to make the scenes move.

Names

She called herself Jehanne, and in her country Jehannette. She took the name la Pucelle, the Maid. “Joan of Arc” is the English form of a surname her father bore as Jacques d’Arc (Darc, Tart in the papers). This history uses Joan in the narrative, Jehanne when the French of the sources is in view, and the Maid when that is what she called herself.

The man she raised to the crown is Charles VII from the day at Reims. Before that he is the dauphin, or Charles, as his own chancery still hesitated to style him king of a kingdom half in other hands.

How to read the notes

Every chapter carries its sources in numbered notes. They are not decoration. A superscript opens the note: the document, the witness, and, where it matters, the disagreement. Notes are tagged by kind — the 1431 trial, the nullification, a letter, a chronicle, a modern study — so that a rehabilitation memory is never silently dressed as a contemporary minute.

This is not a life of the saint as the Church finally declared her in 1920. It is a history of the girl who, in a ruined kingdom, said she was sent, and who in five months did what she said she had been sent to do.