Joan of Arc

About this figure

Joan of Arc (c. 1412-1431) was a peasant girl from the village of Domremy in northeastern France who, at around the age of sixteen, told local authorities she had been receiving visions and voices instructing her to help the French crown drive out English and Burgundian forces during the Hundred Years' War. Remarkably, she was granted an audience with the uncrowned King Charles VII, convinced him and his advisors of her sincerity, and was given a small command. In 1429 she led French troops in relieving the besieged city of Orleans, a turning point in a war France had been losing for decades, and stood beside Charles at his coronation in Reims soon after.

Her military career lasted about a year. In 1430 Burgundian forces captured her outside Compiegne and sold her to their English allies, who arranged for her to be tried by a French ecclesiastical court under English influence on charges of heresy, centered largely on her claim to receive direct divine guidance and her insistence on wearing men's clothing. She left no writing of her own; what survives from her own mouth is the transcript of that trial, kept by the court's notaries - her answers, given under sustained and often hostile interrogation, to questions designed to entrap her into a confession. Convicted, she was burned at the stake in Rouen in 1431, around the age of nineteen. Twenty-five years later, with the war's outcome now favoring France, a papal inquiry annulled the verdict and declared her innocent; she was canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church in 1920.

Because the surviving record of her words was produced by men prosecuting her for her life, it should be read as testimony extracted under interrogation, not as a friendly account or an autobiography. Within those limits, it is nonetheless a rare thing: the recorded, first-person voice of a fifteenth-century peasant girl who insisted, under pressure calculated to break her, that she had told the truth.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.