By Paul Carrier
In 1429, an illiterate teenage girl from a peasant family in Lorraine heeded what she described as angelic and saintly visions and led a French army that lifted the English siege of Orléans during the Hundred Years War. Had the city fallen, England, which already controlled the north of France, could have swept south to seize the rest of the country.
You know what followed. Joan of Arc achieved more victories on the field of battle and fulfilled her second goal: the coronation, in Notre-Dame de Reims, of the dauphin Charles VII as king of France. The Maid of Orléans was captured by Burgundians allied with the English invaders in 1430 and tried for heresy and witchcraft by a corrupt ecclesiastical court. She was burned at the stake in Rouen in 1431, but the Catholic Church nullified her conviction 25 years later, and canonized her as a saint in 1920.
The story of this improbable savior of a nation has been told countless times over the years by historians, novelists, playwrights, filmmakers and artists. Now Kathryn Harrison has added her name to the long list of Joan’s chroniclers with a biography: Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured.
Harrison’s worthy contribution is notable for several reasons, including her skills as a writer and analyst. She effectively portrays Joan as a protofeminist of sorts who stood up to the patriarchy of the French church, nobility and military. Harrison blends information from a wide range of sources, including the extensive historical record and fictional accounts by the likes of George Bernard Shaw. Her Joan is a devout mystic who dons a suit of armor and is almost impervious to pain. She handles a massive warhorse with the skill of a well-trained knight and outwits theologians during her trial. She is complex, contradictory and compelling, a living, fire-breathing force of nature, although Harrison's melding of fact and fiction may irritate some readers.
“There aren't many people in our history who have so completely surrendered themselves to a mission that they would give up their lives for it,” Harrison said in a 2014 interview posted on oprah.com. “There’s something thrilling about a teenage girl who has the internal fortitude to lead an army of men and face down a tribunal of 60 judges when standing her ground means she'll be burned at the stake.”
Harrison resists the temptation to try to decipher the source of Joan’s visions, thereby avoiding a tiresome distraction that cannot be resolved. Theories abound on that score, and there is no consensus on which is the right one. Was Joan mentally ill? Did she suffer from epilepsy? Migraines? Tuberculosis? Schizophrenia? Bovine tuberculosis from drinking unpasteurized milk? Or were her visions and voices divine, as she insisted?
“She clearly existed in a way others don't. I was determined not to cut her down—I wanted to preserve her mystery and let it shine,” Harrison said in that interview. “I’ve always been interested in the intersection between our rational and our unconscious lives. Sometimes there's a sort of tear in the veil, and there are people who live in more than one dimension.”
Harrison’s account also is singular because she has the insight (or the breathtaking audacity) to compare Joan to none other than Jesus. “More than any other Catholic martyr, Joan of Arc’s career aligns with Christ’s,” Harrison writes. It’s a bold — some would say wild — assertion, but one that has been made before. No less a literary lion than Mark Twain, who has been described as anti-Catholic and hostile toward the French, wrote that Joan was “the most noble life that was ever born into this world, save only One.”
Joan of Arc opens with an extraordinarily vivid description of its paradoxical subject.
“She had a battle cry that drove her legions forward into the fray,” Harrison writes, yet her voice was described as “gentle, womanly.” She threatened to decapitate any subordinate who failed to follow her orders, yet “she recoiled at the idea of taking a life,” and rode into battle carrying a twelve-foot banner “to avoid having to use her sword.” Her courage “outstripped that of seasoned men-at arms,” yet her tears “flowed as readily as did any other teenage girl’s.”
Joan of Arc explores the sweeping panorama of 15-century France, a land devastated by plague and famine and seemingly endless warfare. It was a time of wanton violence, bloodlust, cynicism, hypocrisy and political chicanery. Yet Harrison retains a laser-like focus on the brash, hotheaded teenager at the center of it all. Harrison’s Joan combined bravado and vanity with the zeal of a devout Catholic who sincerely believed, for whatever reason, that God had chosen her to save France.
“Before her short life was over, Joan of Arc had become one of history's few grand souls whose life stories would forever teeter between fact and fiction,” Harrison wrote in an essay posted at powells.com. “Chosen by the God who sent his angels to her and mythologized by throngs thousands strong, Joan lived with her feet on mortal ground and her head in a realm invisible to those around her.”
