Read Online Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured by Kathryn Harrison - Free Book Online
Authors: Kathryn Harrison
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relative worth:“Virgins would be rewarded a hundred times their deserts; widows sixty times; and wives thirty times.” Within each of the three modes,“an explosion of female categories” betrayed a Linnaean determination to impose order on the gender held to be more primitive, lacking the moral restraint and cerebral capacity of men.Sexually immature girls, adolescents ready for marriage, married women, spinsters, late marriers, women past procreating: rankings observed from the perspective of something like animal husbandry were each subdivided according to a social hierarchy that reached from royalty all the way down through minor aristocrats, nuns, servants, and chicken dealers—prostitutes not worthy of inclusion, even in a group so universally disdained.
“Art thou not formed of foul slime? Art thou not always full of uncleanness? Shalt thou not be food for worms?” a medieval cleric ranted. Scholars of the period mined the classics for validation of the early Church’s hostility toward women, which found an ideal target in menstrual blood, both tangible evidence and ready symbol of women’s uncleanness. The“foul substance was blamed for preventing seeds from germinating, for turning grape mash bitter, for killing herbs, for causing trees to shed their fruit, for rusting iron and blackening brass, for giving dogs rabies.”Aristotle taught that the gaze of a menstruating woman was so impure it would darken a mirror, stealing light from the other side of the glass, a conclusion rationalized by Galenic theories of harmful vapors, such as those that issued from menopausal women “because various excess humors no longer eliminated by menstruation now exited through the eyes.” Tertullian memorably described a woman as“a temple built over a sewer,” summoning Christ’s image of“whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean.”
But Joan, her squire reported, didn’t menstruate. During all the months that he dressed and served her, Jean d’Aulon saw no evidence she was afflicted by the “female malady.”“In her, the life of the spirit dominated, absorbed the lower life, and held in check its vulgar infirmities,” Michelet wrote. “Body and soul she was granted the heavenly grace of remaining a child.” Perhaps the fervor of her vow of chastity was enough to forestall menarche indefinitely. Perhaps the strain of warfare and imprisonment suppressed what would have been her natural reproductive cycle. The reason is irrelevant to the story. In memory, and then in biography and history, Joan would remain forever on the cusp of womanhood, not only chaste, but yet to fall under Eve’s shadow or bear her stain.
Friends noted Joan’s withdrawal from their company and must have wondered at her new solitary life. Perhaps they felt sorry for her, a girl too pious to have fun, but they’d never been visited by angels or shown the glories of paradise. They didn’t know Joan had traded their company for a rapture that consumed her several times each day, and never more dependably than when she was in the woods and far from their company.
“I was only born the day you first spoke to me,” Anouilh’s Joan says to her voices, dismissing not only the childhood that hagiographers were so eager to fill with birdsong but the very notion of her ever having existed outside her vocation. “My life only began on the day you told me what I must do, my sword in hand.”
Had Joan’s conduct not been that of an exemplary Christian before the visitation, now her virtue was so intense it demanded her separation from earthly pastimes. As she herself put it, “Since I learned that I must come to France, I had taken as little part as possible in games or dancing.” (Here and elsewhere in the trial transcript, Joan’s use of “France” derives from the confusion inspired by Domrémy’s ambiguous position on the border.)
“She gave
“Art thou not formed of foul slime? Art thou not always full of uncleanness? Shalt thou not be food for worms?” a medieval cleric ranted. Scholars of the period mined the classics for validation of the early Church’s hostility toward women, which found an ideal target in menstrual blood, both tangible evidence and ready symbol of women’s uncleanness. The“foul substance was blamed for preventing seeds from germinating, for turning grape mash bitter, for killing herbs, for causing trees to shed their fruit, for rusting iron and blackening brass, for giving dogs rabies.”Aristotle taught that the gaze of a menstruating woman was so impure it would darken a mirror, stealing light from the other side of the glass, a conclusion rationalized by Galenic theories of harmful vapors, such as those that issued from menopausal women “because various excess humors no longer eliminated by menstruation now exited through the eyes.” Tertullian memorably described a woman as“a temple built over a sewer,” summoning Christ’s image of“whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean.”
But Joan, her squire reported, didn’t menstruate. During all the months that he dressed and served her, Jean d’Aulon saw no evidence she was afflicted by the “female malady.”“In her, the life of the spirit dominated, absorbed the lower life, and held in check its vulgar infirmities,” Michelet wrote. “Body and soul she was granted the heavenly grace of remaining a child.” Perhaps the fervor of her vow of chastity was enough to forestall menarche indefinitely. Perhaps the strain of warfare and imprisonment suppressed what would have been her natural reproductive cycle. The reason is irrelevant to the story. In memory, and then in biography and history, Joan would remain forever on the cusp of womanhood, not only chaste, but yet to fall under Eve’s shadow or bear her stain.
Friends noted Joan’s withdrawal from their company and must have wondered at her new solitary life. Perhaps they felt sorry for her, a girl too pious to have fun, but they’d never been visited by angels or shown the glories of paradise. They didn’t know Joan had traded their company for a rapture that consumed her several times each day, and never more dependably than when she was in the woods and far from their company.
“I was only born the day you first spoke to me,” Anouilh’s Joan says to her voices, dismissing not only the childhood that hagiographers were so eager to fill with birdsong but the very notion of her ever having existed outside her vocation. “My life only began on the day you told me what I must do, my sword in hand.”
Had Joan’s conduct not been that of an exemplary Christian before the visitation, now her virtue was so intense it demanded her separation from earthly pastimes. As she herself put it, “Since I learned that I must come to France, I had taken as little part as possible in games or dancing.” (Here and elsewhere in the trial transcript, Joan’s use of “France” derives from the confusion inspired by Domrémy’s ambiguous position on the border.)
“She gave
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