2 - Joan of Arc and The Skating Party

Summary

In the fifteenth century, during the Hundred Years War, a young peasant girl began to hear the voices of saints telling her to free France from the English and to help the Dauphin, Charles, to be crowned king. She made her way to the court at Chinon, where she convinced him of her sincerity; he gave her permission to don armour and to lead an army to relieve the city of Orleans. Having forced the English to raise the siege, she proudly attended the crowning of the Dauphin as Charles VII at Rheims. After this she defeated the English several times, but failed to take Paris. A year later, she was captured by the Burgundians, who sold her to the English. Accused of being a heretic and a witch, she was condemned to death and burned at the stake in Rouen. She was only 19 years old.

‘A story lives in relation to its tellers and its receivers; it continues because people want to hear it again, and it changes according to their tastes and needs’ (JA 3). That is how Warner begins Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (1981). She is perfectly conscious that Joan is primarily an historical figure, with an objective existence, well documented by the records of her trial and execution. Yet ‘story’ and ‘history’ are not, we should remind ourselves, antitheses. What interests Warner is how the myth of Joan grew up within the historical context of late-medieval France, and how the myth was developed and transformed in the succeeding centuries. Hence the book is divided into two parts. The first part is entitled ‘The Life and Death of Jeanne la Pucelle’: this is about the past, as interpreted in the present. The second part is entitled ‘The Afterlife of Joan of Arc’: this is about the present image of the martyr saint, as informed by layers of speculation and imaginative investment. History and myth meet, just as do past and present: ‘Joan of Arc was an individual in history and real time, but she is also the protagonist of a famous story in the timeless dimension of myth, and the way that story has come to be told tells yet another story, one about our concept of the heroic, the good and the pure’ (JA 7).