Helen Castor On The Real Joan
The famed historian reflects on her fascination with Joan of Arc and the context in which the young warrior rose to prominence
What was it about Joan of Arc’s story that drew you into writing about her?
I started thinking about Joan as a direct result of talking about my previous book, She-wolves. ‘One of the biggest problems female rulers faced,’ I kept saying, ‘was that medieval women couldn’t lead armies on the battlefield – apart from Joan of Arc, and we all know what happened to her.’ Eventually I realised I didn’t know what happened to her. Or at least, I knew the outline of her story, as we all do – but I didn’t know exactly how and why she came to do the extraordinary things she did. Once I started investigating, I was fascinated.
What would you say are the biggest misconceptions about her life?
That she was ‘saintly’ in the sense of wanting peace and reconciliation. She didn’t: she wanted victory and her enemies’ submission. That the cause for which she fought was straightforwardly nationalist resistance to foreign invasion. It wasn’t: the conflict was a civil war within France, in which Joan fought for the Armagnacs against not only the English but the Burgundians – the ‘false French’, in her eyes – who had allied themselves with the invaders. And that she never faltered in her faith in her mission. In the end she faced an appalling death with profound courage, but the last week of her life was filled with fear and doubt.
How did you approach the idea of her hearing voices?
As I did everything else in the story. I was trying to stand in the shoes and see through the eyes of the people who were there – all of which meant starting from their assumption that God and the devil were at work in the world, so that the idea of someone hearing the voices of angels, saints or demons was entirely plausible. For contemporaries listening to her story it remained feasible that Joan was lying, ill or mad, but it was equally likely that she had truly encountered otherworldly beings – in which case the key question was not whether or not the voices existed, but whether they came from heaven or hell. And that framework of faith also helps to explain why Joan – who believed in the reality of her mission, and wasn’t otherwise physically sick or intellectually incoherent – interpreted her experiences, whatever they were, in the way that she did.
Are there any particular elements from your research of Joan that really helped to flesh her out as a person for you?
Like everyone else who has worked on it, I think, I found myself endlessly absorbed by the transcript of her trial for heresy in 1431, at which she was the only witness. It’s a complex and multilayered document, and Joan’s voice is heavily mediated through the process of translation and transcription – but all the same it’s unmistakably hers. I see new things in the text every time I look.
Do you have a sense of when the mythbuilding around Joan’s story began?
Immediately. You could argue that Joan started it when she called herself La Pucelle, ‘the Maid’ – a name that put the unlikely facts of her youth and her sex at the centre of her claim to a unique relationship with God. It was well under way 25 years after her death, when witnesses from both sides of the previous divide in France gave evidence at the hearings held to overturn her conviction for heresy. Of the men who had been with her at Orléans, two remembered a ‘miracle’ that had allowed her to enter the besieged town: one said the wind had suddenly changed to allow her boat to cross the Loire; the other, that the river had been too low until Joan arrived, and then the waters rose. Of those who’d taken part in her trial and been present at her death, many now claimed to have wept; two said they’d rushed to fetch a crucifix to hold before her eyes as she died; one,
“These days, the myth is so vast that she’s almost become all things to all people”
that a white dove had fluttered from the flames as she took her last breath, and that her heart wouldn’t burn, no matter what the executioner did. These days, the myth is so vast that she’s almost become all things to all people.
To what degree did the circumstances of the time create a perfect storm for Joan to make her entrance and be heard by the Dauphin?
A perfect storm is a good way of putting it. Contemporaries believed that God’s hand lay behind everything that happened in the world – but, at the same time, that direct intervention from heaven was likely only when all human help had been completely exhausted. By late February 1429, after many years of war and with little hope of stemming the Anglo-burgundian tide, the Dauphin – who’d always been looking for someone else to lead his armies, because he clearly couldn’t do it himself – must have felt he’d reached that point. And, if God were going to work a miracle, a teenage peasant girl might be a particularly miraculous way to do it.
Was there anything particularly unique about her message in an era when messengers from God would have been generally more accepted?
Joan wasn’t the first or last person in medieval Europe – not even in 15th-century France – to claim they brought a message from God. But most messengers did just that: brought messages, about what God wanted kings and popes to do. Joan was different because she said God had sent her on a personal mission, to drive the English from France and to lead the Dauphin to his coronation. She brought the message, and wanted to carry it out too.
Would Joan have faced prejudice based on her social standing and age on top of being a woman?
Yes. In all three ways she was unqualified, in contemporary eyes, for the role she claimed. To her enemies, that made her a witch. To her own side, it made her a miracle, at least while she was winning apparently miraculous victories. When she stopped winning, it meant she could be cast aside because she’d become too proud – reached too far beyond her station – and God had abandoned her.
How politically savvy was Joan?
I wouldn’t say she was savvy. She didn’t have the subtlety or experience to be an effective politician – but then she wasn’t trying to be a politician.
She wanted the politicians to stop politicking and listen to God, through her. Her certainty and clarity of purpose were just what was needed in the political and military stalemate of 1429. But they meant that she was left baffled and sidelined when the politicians took over again after her failure to capture Paris that September – an attack for which they’d allowed her only a single day of fighting. She couldn’t understand why they no longer listened to her – nor, when she was captured in 1430, why they didn’t seek to ransom her. The truth was that by then, politically, she’d become a problem rather than a solution.
Were there any women of this time that Joan would have sought support from?
One in particular, though I wish we could say more about their relationship: Yolande of Aragon, duchess of Anjou, mother-in-law of the Dauphin Charles. She was – unlike Joan – an extraordinary politician, diplomat and powerbroker, and circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that she was instrumental in recognising the potential usefulness of Joan’s claims and bringing her all the way from Domrémy to Chinon. But the fact that Yolande’s influence – like that of so many powerful women – was exercised behind the scenes means that we can’t know for sure exactly what she did or said, or how much she saw of Joan
“Her certainty and clarity of purpose were just what was needed in the political and military stalemate of 1429”
in person. Otherwise, Joan’s response to other women wasn’t always positive. When a woman named Catherine de la Rochelle came forward to claim she’d been sent by God to make peace between the Dauphin and the Duke of Burgundy, Joan said her visions were false and she should go back to her housework.
Did Joan have any sympathisers on the Burgundian/english side of the war?
Not many, at least while it was going on. The soldiers she fought against called her a whore and a witch, and the theologians who tried her believed her a heretic. But it’s clear from the trial transcript that some of the clerics involved were impressed by the blazing certainty of her faith and her courage, even if they weren’t won over to her position. So, sympathy if not support. And then, once the war was over and Joan’s Dauphin had won, most of the newly reconciled Burgundians fell over themselves to make clear that they had always known she was right about the identity of the true king of France, and that the conflict – and Joan’s death – had been entirely the fault of the English. Hindsight’s a remarkable thing.
Did you find any common traits between Joan of Arc and the medieval she-wolves you’ve written about previously?
Charisma. Intelligence. Resourcefulness. Purpose. Bravery. Maybe above all a belief in their own agency, in a world where that wasn’t easy for women to claim for themselves.