Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint
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Authors: Donald Spoto
Tags: #General, #Biography & Autobiography, #of Arc, #Women, #France, #Europe, #Christian women saints, #Christian women saints - France, #Saint, #Historical, #Hundred Years' War, #Religion, #Religious, #Autobiography, #Biography, #History, #Historical - General, #1412-1431, #Joan, #1339-1453
JOAN
The Mysterious Life of the Heretic
Who Became a Saint
DONALD SPOTO
for Sue Jett
with love and devotion
Joan:
I heard voices telling me what to do. They come from God.
Robert:
They come from your imagination.
Joan:
Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us.
—George Bernard Shaw,
Saint Joan
(1923)
Contents
Epigraph
Foreword
(1412–1423)
(1424–1427)
(January 1428–February 1429)
(March–April 1429)
(April–June 1429)
(May–July 1429)
(August 1429–December 1430)
(January–February 1431)
(March 1431)
(April–May 1431)
I
n libraries and on Web sites, you can readily count hundreds of biographies of Joan of Arc published in English since the middle of the nineteenth century. You will find books for the general reader of biography and for the political and social historian; volumes for the religious and military specialist; treatments for children and for adolescents; tracts for those who have preconceived notions about what this teenage girl was or might have been or failed to be or ought to have been; tomes for those who admire and revere her; and works written for those convinced that she was a cunning charlatan, a deluded patriot, a sexually confused peasant limited by a culture of fear and superstition, or a pitiable psychotic.
This vast and diverse collection does not include a thousand books in French and other languages; nor does it take into account novels, poems, songs, hymns, essays, operas, plays, and films with her as the subject. Paintings and statues depicting Joan appear all over the world, and hundreds of churches have been named for her. She is so familiar as to have become, for many people, almost a cliché.
So far as the facts of her life are concerned, it is astonishing to learn that we have more detailed evidence about her than anyone else in the history of the world up to her time. We know far more about Joan, for example, than we do about Moses, Plato, Jesus of Nazareth, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Buddha or Muhammad. For the last two and a half years of her life, we can construct almost a day-by-day account of her whereabouts and actions. We also have several letters she dictated, three of them bearing her simple signature; there is scarcely a single contemporaneous French memoir or chronicle that does not mention Joan the Maid.
Since her death at the age of nineteen in 1431, Joan has fascinated people in many lands. An illiterate girl of remarkable and courageous ingenuity, she boldly confronted a weak and ineffectual heir to the French throne, led rude men in ferocious battles, and was abandoned by the king whose coronation she secured. For all that, her brief presence during the Hundred Years’ War turned the tide against rapacious English imperialism and enabled France to survive.
Then, in one of history’s most egregious miscarriages of justice, Joan was subjected to a bogus trial on an absurd charge of religious heresy. A rigged jury of churchmen turned her over to the English, and she was burned to death as a heretic. Yet her story does not end there. Joan is unique in that she is the only person to be condemned by a Church court for crimes against religion and faith and then later declared a saint of that same Church, worthy of universal reverence.
I
T IS TIME
for a new book and a fresh take on this extraordinary young woman. Consider, first of all, the curious nature of the historical record. Recent discoveries are begging for a new look at some key original French and Latin documents in light of modern linguistic studies. I have been researching Joan’s life and its sources for over thirty years, collecting documents and trying to keep up with the scholarly work of others, and during this period I have had to revise many of my earlier conclusions.
In the book you are holding, however, I did not wish either to engage in scholarly debate or to invite academic hairsplitting over matters of narrow historical or military interest. Instead, I was gripped by the power and relevance of Joan’s life and by her sheer, undiluted faith in the God she believed was guiding her. These are some of the issues that are significant for modern readers.
During Joan’s trial hundreds of questions were put to her by the Church court. The interrogations of ecclesiastical judges and theological inquisitors, along with her replies, were recorded each day in French by the chief notary, Guillaume Manchon, and by his two assistants, Guillaume Colles (also called Boisguillaume) and Nicholas Taquel. Every evening the three men compared, collated, and corrected their notes. The original of this document is lost to us, but notarized copies have been preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the Bibliothèque Municipale in Orléans.
The final and official register of the trial, prepared at the order of the chief judge, Bishop Pierre Cauchon, was based on Manchon’s minutes but included much more: in fact, Cauchon ordered the record deliberately falsified at crucial points in order to secure Joan’s condemnation and execution. This trial document was completed in Latin by Thomas Courcelles, who was himself one of Joan’s judges. He added all the letters from so-called experts as well as Cauchon’s instructions and those of Jean Le Maître, the deputy inquisitor for France. Also included were the statements of the faculty of the University of Paris and the opinions of other dignitaries. Five copies of this Latin version were made, and three are extant, all of them signed, notarized, and sealed by Cauchon and Le Maître. They are preserved in Paris at the Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale and the Bibliothèque Nationale.
The Courcelles manuscript and an enormous cache of authenticated and relevant documents were compiled, edited, and published in five volumes between 1841 and 1849 by French scholar Jules Quicherat, who included documents relative to the second (posthumous) procedure a quarter century after Joan’s death—the trial that reversed the condemnation. Unfortunately, Quicherat harmonized several versions of both long trials and often provided interpretations rather than precise renderings of fifteenth-century French; he also mistranslated many passages. In 1920 and 1921 Pierre Champion compounded the problems when he brought forth a compact and revised two-volume French version of Quicherat’s work. There have been two English versions of the trial based on Courcelles/Quicherat: an abridged text, rendered often roughly, by T. Douglas Murray in 1902, and another by W. P. Barrett in 1931.
In light of more recent scholarship, Quicherat’s edition was edited and newly translated into French from 1960 to 1971 by Pierre Tisset and Yvonne Lanhers, whose scholarship included reference to a crucial document at the Bibliothèque Municipale d’Orléans. Its author and precise date are unknown, but its final form probably comes to us from about 1500, and it provides Joan’s actual words at the trial. This manuscript (known simply as the “Orléans” text) essentially replaces the trial as replicated by Quicherat and is indispensable for modern study; I cite it here with my own translations. W. S. Scott’s abridged and reconstructed version (1956) was the first in English to use the Orléans manuscript, and to it almost all of my predecessors have turned. But the edition of Tisset and Lanhers deserved far more careful study.
A
T THIS POINT
serious problems emerge that I tried to remedy in this book. Little recently published material on Joan has taken into account the magisterial work of Pierre Duparc, who from 1977 to 1989 published in five volumes the original Latin and French testimonies and all documentation relevant to the nullification trial of 1455–1456, casting a bright light on the life of Joan before her brief military career and her early death. Only very short passages based on Duparc’s scholarship have so far appeared in English, and those selections are poorly edited and badly translated. I redress this imbalance at least in part by presenting my own translations of representative sections of these documents. These greatly expand our understanding of Joan’s life, mission, purpose and convictions. I was guided, of course, by the work of scholars who preceded me, not only in studying the trials but also in considering the accounts of Joan written during and immediately after her lifetime. I am grateful most of all to the International Joan of Arc Society, a group whose resources are noted at the beginning of my bibliography.
B
Y
2004 I was more than ever convinced that, in addition to providing an unbiased consideration of up-to-the-minute textual evidence, a fresh look at this extraordinary life might show the profound significance of Joan of Arc for our own time. We live in a twenty-first-century climate of international fear and suspicion, and to us this fifteenth-century European girl has something startling and important to say.
Joan fought and died to preserve the identity and particularity of a sovereign place; she dedicated herself to the unique and irreplaceable soul of a country. She did not believe that it was right for her country to be—as it had already become in part and was dangerously close to becoming completely—simply a fiefdom of the kingdom of England.
To use modern terms, she was horrified at the thought that the integrity of her country should be sacrificed to foreign empire-building. Whatever France was not yet and whatever it needed to be, she dedicated herself to its enduring existence. Joan was an unwitting architect of the idea that every nation is inviolable—that no people may be overrun, dominated, suppressed or brought to the brink of annihilation by an outside force. She stands for the injunction, later ratified by declarations, treaties and covenants signed all over the civilized world, that no nation (without direct provocation and an immediate threat to its survival) may invade, much less annihilate, another country in order to turn it into a cog in the machine of mightier people eager for economic exploitation and territorial expansion. In this regard, Joan speaks clearly to the political life of the twenty-first century.
B
UT WHAT ABOUT
the visions she claimed to see and the voices she heard, all of which she said were “from God”? Despite the problems in her telling and the apparent contradictions that becloud her statements, I believe that her spiritual experiences were profoundly valid and that they convey something of the truth. This assertion needs to be tested and challenged, however, without assuming either that her “visions” and “voices” are to be taken at literal face value or to be discounted because such phenomena do not or cannot “really” occur. The latter is little more than circular reasoning: such and such cannot happen because it does not happen. More helpful is to ask, “How do we assess the claims that it has indeed happened?”
Those who regard Joan as a saint usually assume both her veracity and the “facts” of the visions and voices. But I believe it is critical to ask what such visions and voices meant in fifteenth-century France. What did they mean to Joan, and how was she forced to adapt her speech to describe spiritual experiences that transcend ordinary language? Can some sort of validity be granted to them—however we understand them—in light of a consistent pattern of character and action in her life? This is a matter neglected by other biographers of Joan; it is a major theme of this book.
In this regard it is important to consider the nature of religious language in general, which is always inadequate, symbolic and metaphorical, never fully communicating spiritual experience. As I have tried to demonstrate, Joan’s “problem,” like that of religious visionaries throughout history, was to report an ineffable experience, to find some sort of expression within the currency of her own religious and cultural forms. Like the great Hebrew visionary prophets of antiquity, the mystics of every faith, and the great poets and lovers of history, Joan struggled with the inadequacy of human speech to express what cannot be fully expressed but that somehow must be expressed.
What about, also, her vowed virginity as a laywoman, which to some modern minds at once suggests a mental aberration or at least sexual dysfunction? We might ask, rather, what did virginity mean to European people six centuries ago? What did it mean for this girl? Answers to these questions should not be prejudicially or casually given.
Only by interpreting Joan’s life in light of her times and her language constructs can we begin to understand her. She was not a seventeenth-century Italian girl, a nineteenth-century English maiden, or a twentieth-century American teenager. The specifics of her time, place, language, religion and economy must be carefully considered if we are to gain something close to a realistic picture of her rather than one that merely reflects our own bias or fantasy or our own (also limited) twenty-first-century experience. Only by interpreting her words and gestures in light of her own time and place—only by giving them context and trying to understand what they meant for her and her contemporaries—can we come close to her. We are looking for a girl who lived in an era and a place vastly different from our own—she is Joan of Arc, not Joan of Arkansas.
Interpretation
is a word that alienates many people, as if it means falsifying, fabricating or exaggerating. But to understand, it is essential to interpret. Interpreters are those who try to find the threads of meaning woven through history and in lives—to reveal why certain happenings became events and why certain people of long ago did not vanish into obscurity.
J
OAN WAS NOT
sophisticated in matters of religion or religious language, nor did she follow a program designed by the Church in general or by a religious community in particular. Her way was not one of pious practices but one of absolute trust, of unwavering faith that God would not abandon her or the people of France. However we interpret her voices and visions, it is clear that to her spiritual sight, this world is not the sum of reality. For Joan, the realm of matter and the world of the spirit were not two hermetically sealed dimensions of reality but rather one continuum: the earth was completely interpenetrated with the things of God. Hence she knew—by intuition, not by learning—the necessary congruence of justice with love.
Neither wife nor nun, neither queen nor noblewoman, neither philosopher nor stateswoman, Joan of Arc represents something that was fresh then and is still pertinent now for anyone, and perhaps most poignantly for women. In the final analysis, her battle was not with English politicians but with the powerful of the Church. Dedicated to her faith, she was betrayed by its earthly institution; abandoned by everyone for whom she fought, she was blithely handed over to a death that was illegally maneuvered and hideously exacted. In her terror, her loneliness, and her agony she remains a figure of starkest simplicity.
