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This book collects together for the first time in English the major documents relating to the life and contemporary reputation of Joan of Arc. Also known as La Pucelle, she led a French Army against the English in 1429, arguably turning the course of the war in favour of the French king Charles VII. The story of Joan of Arc has continued to elicit an extraordinary range of reactions throughout almost six centuries since her death. Her story ended tragically in 1431 when she was put on trial for heresy and sorcery by an ecclesiastical court and was burned at the stake. The book shows how the trial, which was organised by her enemies, provides an important window into late medieval attitudes towards religion and gender. Joan was effectively persecuted by the established Church for her supposedly non-conformist views on spirituality and the role of women. She was ransomed by her captors to their English allies who in turn handed her over to the Church to be tried and finally executed for heresy at Rouen on 30 May 1431. This slur against her reputation would remain until her friends and acquaintances gave evidence before a Nullification trial that eventually overturned the earlier judgement against her on 7 July 1456. The textual records of the Nullification trial also present problems for modern scholars, parallel to those for the original Rouen trial.
This document is a pardon granted to two inhabitants of Abbeville by the English authorities which provides very rare evidence of public opinion regarding Joan of Arc. After our enemy and opponents had entered our city of Paris with a woman in their company who was popularly known as the Pucelle, one particular day, the supplicants were in the company of a man named Colin Broyart in front of, and very
(March–April 1429) Source: Quicherat (ed.), Procès de condamnation , III, pp. 391–2. Language: French There is no surviving record of the investigation into Joan of Arc on behalf of Charles VII by the theologians at Poitiers. Nevertheless a document purporting to represent their conclusions was widely distributed, presumably as part of the propaganda
1458, wrote the only medieval papal autobiography. He had travelled to France shortly after the death of Joan of Arc as a secretary of Cardinal Albergati, a papal mediator, but his comments on the Pucelle were composed after the Bishop of Arras, Jean Jouffroy, had attacked her in an eulogy for the Duke of Burgundy delivered to the Congress of Mantua in 1459: the Bishop claimed that Charles VII was
71. Letter from Pope Calixtus III (11 June 1455) Source: Duparc (ed.), Procès en nullité , I, pp. 18–21. Language: Latin Between April and June 1455, the mother and brothers of Joan of Arc appealed to the new Pope, Calixtus III, to set up a commission to examine the Rouen trial of 1431. Calixtus III replied on 11 June
The story of Joan of Arc has continued to elicit an extraordinary range of reactions throughout almost six centuries since her death. She has been presented as a saint but also a victim of the medieval Church, as a challenger to the social order but also a defender of the monarchy and nation, and as a role model and inspiration but also a fraud and even a madwoman. 1 Born around 6
Aubery of this village and godmother to the one who was speaking, Joan [of Arc], that she had seen the Fairy Ladies; but she herself did not know if this was true or not. Item, she said that she never saw the Fairies at the tree, that she knew; but if she saw them elsewhere, she did not know if she had seen them or not. Item, she said that she saw the young girls putting garlands on the branches of the
Performing women takes on a key problem in the history of drama: the ‘exceptional’ staging of the life of Catherine of Siena by a female actor and a female patron in 1468 Metz. These two creators have remained anonymous, despite the perceived rarity of this familiar episode; this study of their lives and performances, however, brings the elusive figure of the female performer to centre stage. Beginning with the Catherine of Siena play and broadening outward, Performing women integrates new approaches to drama, gender, and patronage with a performance methodology to trace connections among the activities of the actor, the patron, their female family members, and peers. It shows that the women of fifteenth-century Metz enacted varied kinds of performance that included and extended beyond the theatre: decades before the 1468 play, for example, Joan of Arc returned from the grave in the form of a young woman named Claude, who was acknowledged formally in a series of civic ceremonies. This in-depth investigation of the full spectrum of evidence for female performance – drama, liturgy, impersonation, devotional practice, and documentary culture – both creates a unique portrait of the lives of individual women and reveals a framework of ubiquitous female performance. Performing women offers a new paradigm: women forming the core of public culture. Networks of gendered performance offered roles of expansive range and depth to the women of Metz, and positioned them as vital and integral contributors to the fabric of urban life.
The visual images of Queen Elizabeth I displayed in contemporary portraits and perpetuated and developed in more recent media, such as film and television, make her one of the most familiar and popular of all British monarchs. This book is a collection of essays that examine the diversity of the queen's extensive iconographical repertoire, focusing on both visual and textual representations of Elizabeth, in portraiture, literature, contemporary sermons, speeches and alchemical treatises. It falls into three sections. The first part looks at the diverse range of religious and quasi-religious images that were employed by and about Elizabeth, such as the Prophetesse Deborah, the suggestive parallel with Joan of Arc, and finally Lady Alchymia, the female deity in alchemical treatises. When Queen Elizabeth I, the first female Protestant monarch, was enthroned in 1558, male poets, artists, theologians, and statesmen struggled to represent this new phenomenon. The second part turns to one of the major enterprises of the Elizabethan era, the attempt to colonise the New World, during which the eastern seaboard of America was renamed Virginia in celebration of the Virgin Queen. The last part focuses on the ways in which the classical world was plundered for modes of imaging and figuring the queen. Finally, the book summarises the enormously wide range of Elizabeth's iconographical repertoire of its appeal, and provides a fitting end to a book which ranges so widely across the allegorical personae of the queen.
This interview was recorded in late 1999 when Jeanne d’Arc was released. 1 Why did you decide to do a film about Joan of Arc? I was interested by the duality between this young girl, this adolescent who shakes everything up, who dreams dreams like all adolescents about a perfect world, and reality. Between thought and action, there’s often a gap, and Joan pays for her