Joan of Arc (2 page)

R
esearch for this book was facilitated by the use of libraries at Eton College and above all by the resources of Cambridge University Library. That research has involved reading texts in English, French and Latin, but not alas in German. Anyone hoping for an adequate literary discussion of the styles of Schiller and Brecht must look elsewhere, as too must anyone in search of a subtle analysis of the relevance of Joan of Arc to Franco-German tensions over Alsace-Lorraine after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.

Like all English writers on French history, I have pursued an inconsistent policy in the forms I have given to French names. Names of prominent people, such as kings, dukes and counts, are usually anglicised; it would be pedantic to say ‘Bourgogne’ instead of Burgundy, but in an age when Reims is familiar as a centre of the manufacture of champagne rather than as home to a certain jackdaw, I have spelt the city without an ‘h’. In a household where Franglais is common, I have kept the acute accent in Orléans, but not in Domremy (as in the latter the word was originally spelt without one). In some cases it seems natural to write ‘Jean’, in others ‘John’, and my protagonist is not Jehanne, nor Jeanne, but Joan – I am sure somebody will disagree with me.

It is a pleasure to recall the genesis of a book. Thanks to my late parents a family holiday in 1957 ended with a meal in the Vieux-Marché in Rouen, the square where Joan was burnt to death; and I found and still have a picture book,
Dans les pas de Jeanne d’Arc
, by the late Régine Pernoud, later doyenne of Johannic studies. Forty years on I began to revisit Rouen in my imagination. A generous grant by the Authors’ Foundation, through the good offices of the Society of Authors, has helped me to trace some of Joan’s footsteps as Régine Pernoud recommended. I thank Ben Glazebrook and Christopher Foley of Lane Fine Art for their helpfulness respectively at the beginning and the end of this project. One or two key pieces of information I owe to the tireless Virginia Frohlick. In technical matters concerning Joan’s various ‘trials’ I have relied on articles by Emeritus Professor Andy Kelly of the University of California, and little of this book could have been written without the labours of many other distinguished scholars. Among these people I must single out people at the Centre Jeanne d’Arc in Orléans both for help in the centre and for help received by e-mail. My special contribution has been my references to the ideas of certain Catholic philosophers and theologians, especially when their works have not been translated into English. For technical expertise in the art of computing I have relied on Nick Kulkarni of Home & Business Computing and I owe a continuing debt to the perceptiveness and encouragement of Laura Longrigg, my agent, and to the incisive comments of Jaqueline Mitchell, my editor at Sutton Publishing, and Anne Bennett. I thank Bow Watkinson, too, who has drawn the maps. Navigating in the unfamiliar world of picture research has been much facilitated by Jane Entrican at Sutton and several friendly voices at various picture libraries. All mistakes, naturally, are my own.

Looking through my late mother-in-law’s possessions after her death, I discovered pages of a liturgy of Joan of Arc that must date from the early 1920s. To my late mother-in-law, Odette Starrett, and my wife Pam a mere Englishman owes insights into France and Anglo-French relations he would not otherwise have. I dedicate this book to them both.

Timothy Wilson-Smith

I
n the Middle Ages the principal sources of abnormal psychology are found in the archives of the Catholic Church. The Church maintained that in and through Christ it revealed God to man, but the Church was also a human institution, with all the faults that institutions have, and above all a concern with self-preservation and self-aggrandisement. Its rulers were ordained clerics, who by accidents of history were at one stage almost the only educated people in Western Europe, conscious that few kings, dukes and counts could read any language, let alone the Latin in which the clergy thought, wrote and prayed. Literacy spread slowly, but as it did so a spirit of criticism and independent thought evolved. There also emerged professional lay lawyers, lay merchants and eventually a large element of the lay upper class, all of whom felt that their voices should be heard. But most of the population, even in northern Italy or the Netherlands, homes to many prosperous towns, were peasants whose only education came from local folk customs and Latin prayers learnt by rote and whose acquaintance with the world hardly reached beyond the next village. A sophisticated celibate male cleric found such people virtually incomprehensible, especially if the person were a woman and one who claimed to have had unusual religious experiences beyond their ken.

Joan first heard a voice, she said, while aged thirteen as she was running with her friends in the fields near her home in Domremy. In the next few years she came to hear voices several times a day and slowly she came to identify them. One was St Margaret of Antioch and one St Catherine of Alexandria, both revered as virgin martyrs, and the third St Michael, archangel patron of France, whose famous shrine
au péril de la mer
, better known now as Mont-St-Michel, lay off the country’s northern coast.