Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (2 page)

Punctuated by periods of exhausted stalemates, occasional famine, and the arrival, in 1348, of the bubonic plague, the Hundred Years War ground on until the population of France was halved. When Joan set out on her divine mission, England had taken control of almost all of France north of the Loire River. By the time Isabeau revealed the dauphin’s questionable ancestry, effectively barring him from the French throne, portents of salvation by a virgin from the marshes of Lorraine had been circulating for decades, multiplying with the woes that inspired them, the putative historic reach of prophecies concerning Joan’s advent reaching ever further back in time as her fame spread. Joan’s contemporary the poet and historian Christine de Pizan reported that on the occasion of Joan’s first formal ecclesiastical examination—a cautionary investigation the French ministers considered necessary before the dauphin placed his trust in an otherwise untested visionary—she was embraced as a messiah whose coming had been predicted by Merlin, the Sibyl, and the Venerable Bede.
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The widowed Christine supported herself and her children by composing love poems for wealthy patrons, but the work for which she would be remembered is
The Book of the City of Ladies
, an allegorical gathering of history’s most illustrious and influential women. As the daughter of the court astrologer and physician to Charles V, whose vast royal archives had provided her the education universities denied her sex, Christine made it her purpose to challenge the misogyny that characterized late medieval thought and literature, and she welcomed Joan as a citizen of her utopian vision.
“In preference to all the brave men of times past, this woman must wear the crown!” the poet exclaimed.
Her
Ditié de Jehanne
(Song of Joan) was the first popular work about the girl who would be remembered as France’s savior, an epic ballad she composed at the height of Joan’s glory, about
a “young maiden, to whom God gives the strength and power to be the champion.”

If a prediction made by a magician who was himself a myth strikes the present-day reader as suspect if not worthless, the medieval mind, preoccupied with sorcery and tales of chivalry and untroubled by the future scholarly detective work that would exhume the sources of the Arthurian legend, gave Merlin’s presumed words credence, the Sibyl and the Bede joining him as remote mystical buttresses to the more precise predictions made around the time of Joan’s birth. Once Joan had announced herself as the vehicle of God’s salvation, her initial examiners turned to prophecy as a means of retroactively validating a declaration they desperately wanted to be true, and during the late Middle Ages, Merlin, the Sibyl, and the Bede were typically
summoned as a trio, each associated with pronouncements at once mysterious and archetypal. “A virgin ascends the backs of the archers / and hides the flower of her virginity,” was Merlin’s contribution. Copied from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century
History of the Kings of Britain
, which introduced the Arthurian legend to continental Europe, it invited a broad spectrum of interpretations, as must any lasting prediction. Applied to Joan, it sanctioned her authority to lead men in war and underscored her celibacy, protected by male attire and armor. The Church, whose reflexive revisionism cannibalized any myth that might distract from its doctrine, had long ago consumed and rehabilitated the Sibyl, a legendary seer traced as far back as
the fifth century
BC
and often referred to in the plural. Whether one or many, having left no recorded oracle, the Sibyl could be summoned to reinforce any appeal. The Venerable Bede’s presentiment of Joan’s saving France was harvested from an Anglo-Saxon poem written six centuries after Bede’s death and rested on a single sentence:
“Behold, battles resound, the maid carries banners.”

Jesus’s advent was similarly legitimized. The evangelists applied messianic prophecies as generic as
“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder” to the coming of Christ and revised what they knew of Jesus’s life to fit specific predictions made by the
prophets Isaiah, Daniel, and Hosea. More significant, Jesus consistently presented himself as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, for example, deliberately staging his Palm Sunday entrance to Jerusalem according to the six-hundred-year-old
direction of Zechariah. “Lo your king comes to you,” the prophet wrote of the Messiah,
“triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on an ass.” This wasn’t prophecy fulfilled so much as a public announcement resting on biblical scholarship, for Jesus was, if nothing else, a Jew who knew his Scripture, knew it as well as did the high priests who called for his death in response to the presumption of his claim of divinity.
“All this has taken place,” he said to his disciples, “that the Scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled.” He was, Jesus told the temple elders, the Messiah whom Isaiah promised would come to
“set at liberty those who are oppressed.”

Like Jesus, Joan recognized herself in Scripture, but from the New rather than the Old Testament. “I was sent for the consolation of the poor and destitute,” she proclaimed, borrowing her lines from Gospel accounts of a career that, like hers, convinced by means of miracle, spectacle, and prophecy fulfilled.

Of the handful Joan would have heard growing up, the only prophecy she is known to have identified with her mission was particular to her place of birth: France was to be ruined by a woman and restored by a virgin from the marshes of Lorraine. As Old and New Testaments illustrate, prophecy has always been a political medium, broadcasts from a jealous god who distributes land grants to nations worthy of reward. In 1398, when France’s national oracle, Marie Robine, foresaw the desolation of her homeland, she came directly to the court in Paris to describe it in full. A recluse of humble origins embraced by the poor and the exalted alike, Marie derived her authority from the attention popes paid her apocalyptic
Book of Revelations.
Refused an audience with Charles VI, who was likely in a state of mental confusion, the seer warned that
“great sufferings” would arrive. One vision presented Marie with armor, which frightened her. “But she was told to fear nothing, and that it was not she who would have to wear this armor, but that a Maid who would come after her would wear it and deliver the kingdom of France from its enemies.” While witnesses remembered Joan speaking only of the prophecy specific to Lorraine, she undoubtedly knew the content of Marie’s visions. Not only were they common lore, but they illustrated her vocation and validated her wearing armor.

At the time of Joan of Arc’s birth, in January 1412, France had not only endured seventy-five years of enemy occupation but also devolved into civil war, as the pragmatic Burgundians, assuming the inevitability of English rule, had allied themselves with their presumptive conquerors. The blight of foreign occupation descended on a populace already halved by the previous century’s periodic crop failures and famines, as well as the bubonic plague that still smoldered wherever cramped living conditions encouraged the spread of disease. After decades of pillaging the land they coveted, the English found themselves rulers of ghost towns, vineyards and fields of grain reduced to ash, homes and churches to rubble, livestock slaughtered and carcasses left to rot. The French despaired of ever recapturing the land they had lost, served by forces that were unpaid and ill-equipped by their bankrupt government, and the more dire their predicament, the more desperately they redirected hope onto a higher power—the very one from which they believed they needed rescuing. Punishments endured for as long as anyone could remember suggested that God, were God even listening to their petitions, found the French unworthy of salvation. For what, other than the kind of widespread iniquity that had required his smiting a Sodom or a Gomorrah, could explain such unrelieved misery?

When few among the living hadn’t seen a putrefying corpse, both high art and popular culture trained a lush and lingering focus on the most gruesome aspects of disease and decay. As the great medievalist Johan Huizinga wrote of the late Middle Ages, it was considered
“bad form to praise the world and life openly.” The fashion was
“to see only its suffering and misery, to discover everywhere signs of decadence and of the near end—in short to condemn the times or to despise them … For the true future is the Last Judgment, and that is near at hand.” From the masterworks of Brueghel, Bosch, and Holbein to the crude woodcuts illustrating popular chapbooks, the
danse macabre
set the tempo for an accelerated arrival at Judgment Day. Plague made manifest what aristocrats’ sumptuary laws tried to obscure. Death was democratic; the great equalizer visited princes and paupers alike and,
for those who took comfort in Church doctrine, rewarded the righteous and punished the wicked.

Fifteenth-century Europe was wholly in thrall to the Judeo-Christian reflex that insists on humankind’s base nature and God’s impulse to destroy transgressors, just as were the Israelites, or eighteenth-century Americans during the Great Awakening, or any contemporary iteration of fundamentalism that explains mortal suffering as the result of sin, especially that of a sexual nature. Without science to provide the countervailing wisdom that weather patterns explain drought and famine, for example, or identify
Xenopsylla cheopis
, the Oriental rat flea, as the disease vector of bubonic plague, the Church commanded an unquestioned—and, during the Inquisition, unquestionable—authority for a people whose religious education stressed “Death by Eve, life by Mary”
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as the formula for understanding affliction. To equate female sexuality with disobedience and pollution and judge women exclusively on the basis of their sexual conduct is a cornerstone of Judeo-Christian tradition, a structural and thus indelible doctrine; it is an apologia for misogyny. Saint Bridget of Sweden’s
Celestial Revelations
, which she began to record in 1346 and which was subsequently published and given credence across Europe, identified sin as the source of France’s devastation. Joan, who showcased her virginity as both proof and symbol of her virtue, believed God had punished the French because “it was his will to suffer them to be beaten for their sins.”

A solitary Job might bow his head under the caprices of a deity with a penchant for testing the faith of his followers, but an entire society steeped in the shame and fear of having fallen not only from grace but so far beyond the care of God as to have become a target of his indefinite wrath could imagine only one means of salvation: the emergence of an unpolluted intercessor. If sexual transgression brought death, its inverse, the purity of abstinence, would restore life to a dying nation.

Isabeau, the unchaste queen, had fulfilled the first half of a prophecy that underscored the stain of her promiscuity; the other half would require a virgin immune to temptation.

The phrase
l’âge de raison
, or “the age of understanding,” appears several times in Joan’s testimony about a girlhood that ended at twelve, when the guidance she received from her angels delivered her to “understanding” and removed her from the company of her peers, whose carefree games she joined “as little as possible,” dismissing them as irrelevant to what she considered the real story of her life, a narrative she was as careful to preserve from the enthusiastic embellishment of her supporters as she was from the slander of her enemies. When Joan’s advocates exaggerated and amplified her minimal contribution to the care of her father’s sheep to secure her place among Jesus and the shepherds who paid homage to his nativity, as well as the Old Testament prophets
Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah, she was quick to correct any misapprehension, purposeful or not, that she had ever been a shepherdess. But Joan could only protect her story for so long, and the motif of the shepherdess proved impossible to dismiss in a narrative tradition that had chosen the shepherd as an avatar of God a thousand years before the birth of Christ. “The Lord is my shepherd,” King David sang, “I shall not want.” Five centuries after Joan’s birth and two millennia after King David’s, Cecil B. DeMille’s first epic,
Joan the Woman
, released in 1916, immediately establishes the director’s intensely symbolic vision. Joan emerges onto the screen, Christlike in the company of her sheep, walking toward the audience through a landscape of preternatural light that ultimately gathers around her into a radiant nimbus, a halo enveloping her whole body (
Fig. 5
). Even Georges Duby, the preeminent twentieth-century historian of the French Middle Ages, with limitless access to documented fact,
lumped Joan in among the herd of simple shepherdesses.