Saint Joan of Arc

I am out this weekend, but I am trying to write a Saturday Note ahead of time. 

The library system does not have Dinotopia: First Flight. Disappointing! On the flip side, I’ve read it approximately 10 bajillion times in middle school, as that was the only one of the books in the series that the school library had. 

We are now in the halfway month of 2024, and I feel pretty weird about that.

This Note is perhaps a bit rambling, and I didn’t get to everything I’d like (Joan’s companions/allies in the French military; Gille de Rais is infamous, of course, but seriously, look up La Hire sometime); still, I think I did on okay job?

On Saint Joan of Arc

I’m more than a bit bothered by how pop culture chooses to depict Saint Jeanne D’Arc.

Joan, you see, is a problem, even for people who are not English or allied with them in the Hundred Years War. If we talk about her at all in the modern day, we run into something like C.S. Lewis’s dilemma: either Joan was exactly who said she was (a genuine mystic who received visions from the saints), she was lying/insane, or she was something terrifying. Or, to simplify it further: either she had holy visions, or she did not.

I’ve seen some people try to dodge this question, admittedly with the best of intentions and in ignorance, by suggesting she wasn’t a real person. To that, I say: no. We have documentation. We have the records from her trial. You can read them (I was assigned to read them for undiegrad). If you’re going to suggest that Joan of Arc wasn’t a real person, there’s a long list of medieval generally-accepted-to-have-existed-by-historians that you’re also going to have mark off the historical record. That won’t stop the conspiracy theory types, I know, but accept that you’re going against rational consensus.

Because she was such an unusual figure, and because she was a young woman, there’s a tendency to try to slot her into different roles that are more palatable to the modern audience, or to fit her into a pre-established fictional framework. This is difficult to work with what we know from her actual recorded words. For instance, the Assassin’s Creed novel Heresy has her as one of the few individuals who made contact with the ancient being known as Consus, known as the Erudite God. Considering that in her own words, Joan saw visions of and heard words from saints, and one of the pieces of advice she was given was to always obey the Church, speaking to a specifically and unambiguously non-Christian entity seems… unlikely.

Plenty of people now also want to portray her as an angry, violent sociopath who fits into the ‘Insane Religious Fanatic’ pigeonhole; the Heather Dale song “Joan” has this problem (even if it still rocks, I might add). Lyrics from that song talk about how she “bloodied the Devil with steel from on High” and that she can “kill without consequence and never ask why”. Saint Joan of Arc, while she did have authority to lead soldiers, did not actually kill anyone. She ordered movements (which weren’t always obeyed, because she was a teenaged girl), and she went into the thick of battle, and was even wounded–she got a crossbow bolt to the leg at one point. But no, she did not kill, and she was not anything like a master swordsman.

[Although, I would like to imagine that she practiced sword skillz in Heaven, sparring with Saint Michael.]

I suspect this notion is a leftover of English propaganda; it was very popular for a chunk of English history to suggest that Joan was a witch, seductress, or some sort of manipulator–Shakespeare does this, in fact. Because obviously, why else would someone oppose the English domination of France, right? Even after this phase on the English literary scene, there were still some weird takes; George Bernard Shaw’s take on the story makes Joan’s accusers, the ones who burned her at the stake, into sympathetic characters.

There is a tendency to try to make her into a New Age figure; a lot of this comes from the long-debunked Witch Cult Hypothesis, claiming that throughout European history, stories of witches were actually about an underground feminist cult that patriarchal religion tried to suppress, and Joan was one of its practitioners. Again, what we do have of Saint Joan’s words paint her as being very Christian. And she was not executed as a witch, she was executed as a heretic, ultimately for wearing men’s clothing. If those overseeing her trial–who were definitely trying and struggling to come up with every bit of ammunition they could muster–found evidence that she wasn’t Christian, you would think that they would have dispensed with the heresy trial altogether and just executed her. Also! They did try her for witchcraft, and found the evidence to that charge too flimsy, so it was discarded.

How do we explain Joan of Arc? Again, either she was having true visions, or she wasn’t. Rather infamously, one scholar tried to hypothesize that her visions were brought about by drinking unpasteurized milk. A French politician responded with something like, “If a teenage girl did all of that for France on unpasteurized milk, then we should make every French citizen drink it.” We must also consider that in medieval Europe, mystics and visionaries were not uncommon. As Tomics points out, there was at least one rival mystic at the same time, who took a much more pacifistic approach and claimed This one, however, managed to not only get an audience with the heir to the French throne, but also keep his attention and have herself listened to. 

I am not saying that the non-believer cannot come up with any explanation for this figure; I am, however, saying that there’s got to be a lot more work than just “She was a singular fanatic the likes of whom we haven’t seen before or since.” Too many people seem to see Joan of Arc as just, “Empowered teenaged warrior girl who God talks to,” without actually looking further at the details. I am not against Joan of Arc being used in stories, but it’s more than a little annoying that the hard facts of her biography to try to make her into something different. It’s not even warping what’s there, it’s just ignoring things–things that aren’t difficult to look up! She wasn’t a witch, she wasn’t a serial killer, she wasn’t someone who drank some bad milk–Joan of Arc is a complex and interesting figure that writers can do a lot with, if they keep in mind who and what she was.

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