Joan of Arc: Maiden Warrior

It is not often that you can say this about a teenage peasant girl from almost 600 years ago, but there is so much scholarship about her, the google search results go on for days, there are literally hundreds of books and thousands of scholarly articles written about her. There have been countless movies and songs about her, including one that I wrote for this episode. That is pretty impressive for a teenage peasant from the 1400s who died before her 20^th birthday. Another interesting thing about Joan of Arc is that she has an incredibly broad appeal. Let’s just say, everybody seems to love Joan of Arc. So, let’s dive in and find out her story.

Joan of Arc was born in 1412, but before we meet Joan, it is important to set a little context for what was going on in the world. 75 years before she was born there was a serious conflict that was going on between France and England. So serious in fact that they now call it the 100 Years War even though it actually went for about 116 years. As you can imagine, a war that went for more than a century was very complicated, but to put it in a nutshell, the French and the English were fighting about was who had the right to legitimately rule over France. The English had been ruling over France from a distance and the French did not accept their right to rule. There were some periods of peace but, like I said, this war was going on for a very long time by the time that Joan of Arc came into the picture.

A chap called Charles VII plays a very important role in the story of Joan of Arc. By the time Joan was a teenager, the 100 Years War conflict had heated up again and there were people that believed that Charles VII should not be the legit ruler. But you know who did think that he was the rightful ruler— our teenage heroine— Joan of Arc.

Well, technically back then she pronounced it in the French way Jeanne, but for this podcast I am going to use the English pronunciation. Joan was a peasant born in a village called Domrémy, and this village happened to be located on the frontier near where one of the big battles of the 100 Years War was happening, so both her and her family’s lives would have been directly impacted by this fight for Charles VII to be the rightful King of France.

Joan was a devout Catholic and when she was 13 years old, she experienced some visions and heard voices and believed that she had been visited by Saint Margaret, Saint Catherine, and Saint Michael. These Saints told her that it was her mission to help to free France from English rule and restore Charles VII to his rightful throne. Now if a 13-year-old of today had a vision from some saints and went to a member of the ruling family insisting that they are the rightful King, it definitely wouldn’t fly, but Medieval France was a very different time and it was not unusual for people to have visions of Saints. It was also not uncommon for all of the adults to be fully on board and support these divine missions.

With that said, Joan the Maid, did have to jump through a few hoops in order to get her divine message to Charles, and she didn’t get to meet him until she was in her late teens. Modern day experts have tried to posthumously diagnose her with a neurological issue. But you can imagine, it is hard enough to diagnose someone who is alive with a neurological issue in the 2020s let alone a person who died almost 6 centuries ago with only access to flawed Middle Ages sources. So, for the sake of the story, I am going to assume that Joan 100% believed that she had visions of Saints and that many people around her also believed that had these visions.

Now that we have established that the people around her—her peasant village people—believed that she had a mission from God to restore Charles to the throne, the next move was to tell Charles himself. The first mission was to get there, and for that, she needed to be dressed a little more comfortable. Why, because it was a more than 500 km journey. So for comfort and practicality she wore men’s clothing. Now remember the fact that she was dressed like a man, because later at her trial, she was not burned at the stake for faking her visions, she was actually convicted to death for heresy which included dressing in men’s clothing.

Once she arrived at the court where Charles was, there is a bit of a legend that he put on a disguise and sent another guy to pretend to be Charles. But Joan was not fooled and she pointed out who the real Charles was. But that was only the first test, there was another test; a test of her purity. You see Joan called herself Joan the Maid, because that symbolised that she was pure and lived completely to fulfill the mission set for her by God. But in order for Charles to accept her as his profit, she needed to prove that she was in fact a virgin. These examinations—which I can only imagine were unpleasant—were conducted by Charles’ mother-in-law Queen Yolande and a group of ladies of the court. She was also subjected to another of these purity tests when she was captured and put on trial.

With her purity test out of the way, it was time to get her in some armour, get her a horse and get her down to the front lines to inspire the troops. For 5 weeks, she inspired the troops and is credited as leading them to many victories. One of the places that they captured back from the English was a place called Reims (pronounced “ranse”). Reims was important because that was the place that they would traditionally perform the coronation. This is where, in 1429, Charles VII was crowned the King of France and kneeling beside him at this coronation was none other than his mystical maiden warrior, Joan of Arc.

From here, things went downhill for Joan. She was 18 years old and she was captured by the English and then put on trial for heresy by the Catholic Church. The word heresy means that someone’s actions seriously undermine the principals of the religion. And she was grilled in an incredibly unfair trial.

What is fascinating about this trial is today we can access the records of the court proceedings. Why I say it was unfair, is that Joan was a possibly illiterate, and she was put in a court room and interrogated about her visions and heresy by a bunch of old male monks who had studied theology and the bible for their entire lives. She had no defence lawyer, she had to defend herself, often in front of an audience of 20-30 men. Reading through the transcripts, which is a little boring to be honest, it is glaringly obvious that they are trying to trick her into making an error in her recollections. All the while, she is being held in a prison cell chained to a wooden block. In fact, for the final few trial sessions, they didn’t even bother with a court room, they just conducted the proceedings in her prison cell. The trial started in January and went through to late March.  She was then convicted of heresy, but like I said earlier, the charges were not about the validity of her visions, but about her choosing to wear men’s clothing.

Joan was burned at the stake, and because they did not want anyone to worship her as a martyr, they burned her remains 3 times so there was no evidence left of her body. This is ironic considering the icon that she has become today.

But that was not the end of her story. Her family never gave up on her and 20 years later, at the request of her mother and brothers, she was given another trial. Due to the corrupt and unfair nature of the first trial, the original verdict was overturned and Joan was exonerated. But obviously, you can’t bring her back from being thrice burnt.

Still, this is not the end of the story, the year was 1920, and France had just emerged after a very harrowing and destructive war, World War One. And one way to lift the spirits of the French people, whose land had been decimated, was to make one of their very own historical figures a saint. This is when Joan of Arc, became St. Joan, the patron saint of soldiers and France.

Look, I am not the only person to write a song about Joan of Arc, in fact I will link a Spotify playlist in the show notes to show how many people have been inspired by Saint Joan! Below you will find the song that I wrote which was inspired by Joan of Arc it is called “Go Down Fighting”.