On the Sources

A history of Joan of Arc is only as honest as its handling of four kinds of paper. They are not equal, and they are not interchangeable.

1. The condemnation (1431)

The official instrument is Latin, compiled after the sessions by the notaries — Guillaume Manchon first among them — from French minutes of the interrogations. It is a legal product of a court sitting in English Rouen, under Bishop Pierre Cauchon, with the University of Paris in support, and with the secular arm waiting. It is hostile. It is also, paradoxically, the closest record of her spoken person. She answers, refuses, jokes once or twice, corrects the clerk, and will not give up the names of her saints.

Daniel Hobbins’s 2005 translation is the English cited in this volume as Trial. W. P. Barrett (1932) is the older English of the same Latin. W. S. Scott translated the Orléans manuscript, a French minute that some scholars hold closer to the spoken sessions. Where the Latin and the French minute disagree, a note says so. Joan herself, confronted at trial with the March 1429 letter, confirmed the substance and denied particular phrases as scribal. That habit of hers — owning the sense, refusing the embroidery — is a model for reading the whole instrument.1

This volume uses 1431 for what she said about her childhood, her voices, the standard, the sword, and the king’s sign. It does not use 1431 for the truth of the charges. The charges are Cauchon’s. Volume II will take them apart.

2. The nullification (1455–56)

In 1450 Charles VII ordered a first inquiry. In 1455 Isabelle Romée and Joan’s brothers petitioned. In 1456, at Rouen, the original process was declared null for fraud, passion, and irregularity. The dossier is enormous: inquests at Domrémy, Vaucouleurs, Orléans, Paris; theological opinions; Jean Bréhal’s Recollectio. Two original manuscripts survive, sealed by the notaries: Paris, BnF lat. 5970 (complete) and London, British Library Stowe 84.

Pierre Duparc’s five volumes are the critical edition. Régine Pernoud’s Retrial is the English reader’s way in. The witnesses include Dunois, Alençon, d’Aulon, de Metz, Poulengy, Catherine Le Royer, and a crowd of Domrémy neighbors. They are swearing in a France from which the English have been driven, under a king Joan crowned. Memory is twenty-five years long. It is also, in the captains, the memory of professionals who still knew a boulevard from a miracle. This volume trusts them for the campaign, for the road from Vaucouleurs, and for the girlhood, and it tags their testimony so the reader can see it is 1456, not 1429.2

3. Letters and contemporary narrative

Joan dictated letters. The 22 March 1429 letter to the English exists in several copies (Journal du siège, the trial instrument, Thomassin). The Tournai letter, the Troyes letter, the Burgundy letter of 17 July: these are her public voice, through a clerk, in her lifetime. They are not interiority. They are policy.

Around them stand the chronicles. The Journal du siège d’Orléans is the civic diary of Chapters 9. Perceval de Cagny saw the Loire and the Reims march from Alençon’s household. Jean Chartier wrote for the French court. Enguerrand de Monstrelet and Jean de Wavrin write from the other obedience and are the necessary check on Valois numbers. Christine de Pizan’s Ditié, dated July 1429, is a poem, and it is a document: the first intellectual of France to read the Maid while the Maid could still have answered her.3

4. The moderns

Jules Quicherat (1841–49) gathered the mountain. Tisset–Lanhers and Duparc re-edited the two trials. Pernoud spent a career making the witnesses audible without turning them into a children’s book. Helen Castor told the war forward so that Joan arrives in a story already going on, which is how she arrived. Kelly DeVries wrote the fighting as fighting. Deborah Fraioli recovered the 1429 learned debate. M. G. A. Vale wrote Charles VII without romance. Marina Warner wrote the afterlife of the image.

This book is in their debt and in disagreement with some of them. Castor’s coolness about marvels is a discipline; it is not the last word on the voices. Warner’s symbols are real in reception; they are not the cause of the garden at Domrémy. The Catholic reading announced in the preface is a reading of Joan’s own sentences, tested by the event she named, and left standing when the event occurred.

What I have not done

I have not used Mark Twain as a source, or Michelet as a fact, or the 1920 canonization bull as a proof of 1425. I have not invented dialogue. I have not given her the modern sentence I was born to do this, which she did not say. I have not diagnosed her. I have not made her a nationalist before the nation, or a feminist before the word, or a Protestant before the Reformation. She was a Catholic girl of the Barrois who said the saints sent her, and who, in five months, did the two things she named.

Volume II will have to go into a room at Rouen where those same sentences were used to kill her. The papers will be the same kinds of paper. The reading will have to be as careful, and more so.