Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (17 page)

Jesus wouldn’t have had to look as far back as 115 years to read his fate—only three, as it was immediately after the Romans executed John the Baptist for publicly denouncing
Herod’s incestuous marriage that Jesus assumed the Baptist’s flock and his apocalyptic message. Warnings abounded, but they weren’t warnings he needed to predict his martyrdom, as he was reported to have done in
all four of the Gospels. The Sanhedrin set spies among Jesus’s followers, spies whose livelihoods, if not their lives, depended on finding something useful, or just usable.
“For many bore false witness against him,” the Evangelist Mark wrote, adding that “their witness [testimony] did not agree.” It took so little, really, to set a man on the road to Golgotha, an abandoned quarry immediately outside Jerusalem’s city walls. Chosen for its elevation and visibility, Golgotha was a mound of barren rock the Romans forested with crucifixions, leaving the dead to hang for vultures to pick at until their bones fell to the ground for carrion beetles to polish. They served as a reminder of the cost of refusing to submit to an orthodox priesthood that asserted its exclusive right to mediate the most private among human experiences, that of the divine.

The record of Joan’s examination at Poitiers has been lost.
Once crowned, Charles might have had it destroyed because of its potential to embarrass and alienate those nobles who were identified as enemies in 1429 but had subsequently returned their allegiance to the French throne. More likely, its findings and opinions were inconvenient
enough to the Inquisition that all copies were searched out and destroyed. But there were a few witnesses and chroniclers who described the proceedings. Alain Chartier, a political commentator as well as a poet, stressed Joan’s unusual intellectual capacities—
“she appeared to have studied at University rather than cared for sheep in the fields”—and though the Poitiers record itself is lost, a document accepted as the formal conclusions of the theologians who examined Joan was copied and distributed in the spring of 1429. While the Poitiers inquiry is generally understood to have been a far less formal hearing than the Inquisition’s meticulously conducted trial at Rouen, it was undertaken by a formidable gathering of male clerics, many more than the hastily assembled Chinon tribunal, and was the third investigation into Joan’s character—or the third invasive delay Joan would endure—before she was allowed to take up her quest. The dauphin and his retinue accompanied Joan to Poitiers, the provisional capital of what was left of France and the home of its royal parliament from 1418 to 1436. Joan was by now the subject of broadcasts given by town if not royal criers. Her entourage wasn’t that of a king, handpicked from among the highest echelon of society, but it was hundreds strong, the royal party dogged by crowds of peasants following Joan to what she knew was to be a test, but not the nature of that test.
Sola cum multis, infima de summis, indocta cum doctis, foemina cum viris
, Chartier called it: one against many, lowly against exalted, illiterate against scholars, a woman against men.

In reconstructing the examination from disparate documents, historians estimate eighteen clerics assembled to question Joan, representing members of the Dominican, Carmelite, Franciscan, and Benedictine orders.
“Besides myself,” Seguin Seguin testified, “there had been summoned Master Jean Lombard, professor of theology in the University of Paris, Guillaume Le Maire, canon of Poitiers and bachelor in theology, Guillaume Aymeri, professor of theology and a Dominican, Friar Pierre Turelure, Master Jacques Madelon, and several others … We were told that we had the King’s orders to interrogate Joan and to report our opinion of her to the royal Council; and we were sent to the house of Master Jean Rabateau at Poitiers, where Joan was lodged, to examine her.” Gobert Thibault, one of the dauphin’s squires, remembered two more professors of theology who had
been called to Poitiers: “Master Pierre de Versailles, and Master Jean Érault.” In sum, they represented
“a gathering of the finest clergy in non-occupied France.” None was allowed to reserve judgment; each was obliged to either approve or disapprove of Joan’s mission.

For some time, it was assumed that
De quadam puella
(Concerning a certain young girl), an undated treatise by Jean Gerson, the éminence grise among fifteenth-century French theologians, had been composed as a resource for the Poitiers commission. Included in the first edition of Gerson’s collected writings,
De quadam puella
was probably not written by the University of Paris theologian himself; a later edition calls it the work of one of his followers. More problematically, it alludes to battles that took place under Joan’s leadership, months after she had been given her army as a result of the Poitiers findings. No matter the document’s date or author, it was Jean Gerson who established the criteria for
discretio spirituum
—the “discernment of spirits”—articulating what became the clergy’s standard method of inquiry, employed at Poitiers as it would have been anywhere else in the realm. Despite his renown, Gerson wasn’t so lofty in his erudition that he didn’t abridge his treatise
De distinctione verarum visionum a falsis
(On distinguishing true from false visions) to a handy ditty:

Ask Who, What, Why.

To Whom, What kind, From where.

“By following Holy Writ [Scripture],” Joan would have to prove herself through her judges’ “human prudence, inquiring about her life, her morals, and her intention … and through devout prayer, asking for a sign.” Joan’s
“soul must be probed as to whether it be supernatural, as sacred writ expects it to be done,” recorded the anonymous poet whose summary of the proceedings was included among the nullification trial’s records. The “probing” of her soul, according to Jean, Duke of Alençon, was harsh—enough that she sought him out, distraught to the point of tears, but certainly not cowed.
“Afterward, when she was taking her meal with me,” he testified, “Joan told me that she had been very closely examined, but that she knew more and could do more than she had told her questioners.” The poet, who is assumed to have been among the clergy present at Poitiers, bore witness to
its being just as much a witch trial as the one that ended Joan’s life in Rouen. Each time her fate lay in the hands of worldly men, with worldly ambitions. The difference would lie in their agendas, and thus their verdicts.

Scriptural guidance cited in
De quadam puella
amounted to twelve “propositions,” of which six were offered in support of La Pucelle and six against. Old Testament prophets were summoned, and Old Testament female warriors as well, furnishing precedents against which to measure Joan. Christine de Pizan would include the same exemplary members of the female sex—Deborah, Esther, and Judith—in her panegyric “The Song of Joan.” In fact, the fifth chapter of Judges, considered the
“oldest remaining considerable fragment of Hebrew literature,” is commonly referred to as the Song of Deborah, a prophetess whose militarist agenda neatly prefigures Joan’s and whose exhortations to the general of Israel’s army sound very like those Joan would use to rouse her battle-weary soldiers. Their plight mirrored that of the Israelites, who, having dependably once again done evil in the sight of the Lord, had subsequently been sold into the hands of the Canaanites. The fourth of Israel’s pre-monarchic judges, Deborah went to the leader of the Israelite army, Barak, and said to him,
“Up; for this [is] the day in which the Lord has given [the enemy general] Sisera into your hand. Does not the Lord go out before you?” The book of Esther was most likely conceived as “propaganda for the observance in Palestine of a festival brought home by Jews from the Dispersion” in the form of an origin myth for Purim, the holiday celebrating the Jews’ escape from Persia. It’s widely considered a historical novella, and its titular heroine is a Jewish orphan who marries the king of Persia and risks death to expose
“a subtly planned anti-Semitic pogrom.” An apocryphal text, Judith represents a nationalist, pragmatic religion that
equated piety with patriotism, inspiring its protagonist to seek out Holofernes, the leader of the invading Assyrian army. After ingratiating herself into Holofernes’s trust as well as his tent, Judith waits until he falls into a drunken sleep, then cuts off his head and takes it home as proof of God’s enduring love for the Israelites.

“The Lord has struck him down by the hand of a woman,” Judith tells her people when she shows them the Syrian general’s head.

But scriptural precedents meant only so much in the face of Jesus’s
warning that his followers beware false prophets.
“Many will come in my name, saying ‘I am he,’ ” Jesus said, “and they will lead many astray.” If Joan were a true prophet, the author of
De quadam puella
asserted, “she should be a person of excellent saintliness” and not a girl who was
“inclined toward a certain indecency of youths, riding on horseback while dressed in the clothes of a man,” having shorn off what, in the words of Paul—recalled as a witness for the prosecution—
“had been given to her for a covering.” It wasn’t only sumptuary laws that forbade cross-dressing; in Scripture it amounted to taboo. Once Saul, a Pharisee who persecuted early Christians, Paul served laws as old as Moses:
“A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.”

Paul was spiritually a Jew, legally a Roman, and intellectually a Greek—an ideal passport for a proselytizer—and he not only spread the word but subjected it to his own revisions, including not only a pretext for misogyny but also its applications, even in a faith that promised, as he articulated it in his letter to the Galatians,
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ.” On earth, women were subservient and ever reminded that they were the sources of pollution and death. Adam was not the one deceived, Paul wrote to his disciple Timothy.
“Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.” Paul wrote a third of the New Testament; theologians consider his thirteen of the New Testament’s twenty-seven books
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to have had more influence on Christian doctrine than the contribution of any other of its authors. Church leaders continue to cite his exhortation “Let the women learn in silence with all subjection” to validate excluding women from positions of leadership. “I permit,” Paul wrote to Timothy,
“no woman to touch or have authority over men; she is to keep silent.”

“I asked her again whether she believed in God,” Seguin Seguin reported of the girl who spoke to angels. “She answered, ‘Yes, more
than you do.’ ” The dean of the faculty of Poitiers, Seguin recalled the Dominican professor of theology Master Guillaume Aymeri’s challenge to Joan:
“You said the voice told you that God wishes to deliver the people of France from their present calamities. If He wishes to deliver them,” Aymeri said, “there is no need of soldiers.”

The response Seguin described twenty-seven years after the fact was exasperated, indignant, and hardly the words of a girl overawed by her interrogators.
“In God’s name!” Joan said. “The soldiers will fight, and God will give them the victory.” It was an application of what Joan’s comrades-in-arms remembered as her favorite aphorism: “God helps those who help themselves.” Included by Benjamin Franklin in his
Almanack
, the motto is often mistaken as a quotation from Scripture—even though it ignores or appears to discount the doctrine of grace and predates Christianity by at least six hundred years. The moral to Aesop’s “Hercules and the Waggoner,” it was used in a number of Greek tragedies, including
Philoctetes
, Sophocles’s play set during the Trojan War, memorably resolved by Odysseus’s idea to build a big horse and fill it with shock troops.
“Heaven never helps the men who will not act,” he says.

Trust in God and keep your powder dry. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. In one form or another, the motto has always appealed to soldiers—a natural call to arms from Joan’s angels, who were no less impatient than she and equally irritated by hairsplitting.

“What language do your voices speak?” Seguin asked.

“A better tongue than you do,” Joan answered. The dean testified that as he was from Languedoc, in the South of France, he spoke a vernacular heavily inflected by spoken Latin, and hence not as purely French.
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The girl who bristled at being called a simple shepherdess certainly didn’t sound like one, and the letters she would dictate to the English betray the pugnacious relish with which they were composed, as well as the oratorical flair she’d exhibit under interrogation, the
pleasure she took in being “subtle with an altogether feminine subtlety,” as one embittered Rouen judge characterized her ability to sway her listeners. In the end, the scriptural allusion that most effectively supported Joan’s cause wasn’t contributed by a Bible scholar but one she summoned herself.