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Authors: Kathryn Harrison
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into his belly and strangle you with my bare hands for the filthy rutting cat you are.”
If Jacques d’Arc’s recurring nightmare didn’t prove him clairvoyant, it was disturbing enough that her family remembered and recounted something that delineated a significant conflict between Joan and her father. Years after the fact, when spies were plundering the memories of Joan’s childhood friends and neighbors, they stumbled across what storytellers preserved not only for its drama but because it provides an element the virgin martyr’s plot requires: a controlling father who intends to stymie her vocation, a forced betrayal typically the first obstacle to her glory. Chaste as she was, some aspect of Joan’s behavior must have communicated insubordination, enough to eventually inspire Jacques’s efforts to let another man take a turn at containing her. But, as Joan’s father would discover, it’s not easy to marry off a daughter who has given herself to God.
History is rarely kind to a heroine’s antagonist, and Jacques d’Arc’s misreading of his daughter’s character amounted to perversion. She wouldn’t follow an army but lead one, and the power she claimed would rest on her virginity, the most profound and closely guarded aspect of her identity, the one that provided the name with which she christened her reborn self: La Pucelle, the Maid, derived from the Latin puella , a girl yet to enter womanhood.
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*1 Derived from Lotharingia , Lorraine was one of the three territorial divisions of the Carolingian Empire, formed in AD 800, when Charlemagne was crowned by Pope Leo III.
*2 The name given a one-livre coin, minted between 1360 and 1641. Livre, from Latin libra , was a measure of weight, like the English pound.
*3 That exception is a fifteenth-century mural within the chapel of Notre-Dame de Bermont, a mile north of Domrémy. In it, a black-robed—and blond-haired—Joan awaits execution.
*4 The most recent was Vatican II, 1962–65.
*5 The fourteen are Agathius, Barbara, Blaise, Catherine of Alexandria, Christopher, Cyriacus, Denis, Erasmus, Eustace, George, Giles (the only of the fourteen who was not martyred), Margaret of Antioch, Pantaleon, and Vitus.
When Joan was fifteen, her father was summoned to Vaucouleurs, some twelve miles north of Domrémy, to meet with the town’s captain, Robert de Baudricourt, about the“escalating tensions between the warring factions.” Aside from Mont Saint-Michel, and Tournai, both hundreds of miles to the west, Vaucouleurs was the single town north of the Loire to remain in France’s possession, testimony to Baudricourt’s grit and the tenacity of the men stationed in the garrison he oversaw. It was 1427, and Joan’s voices were speaking no longer of virginity but of battle. She knew she was the chosen one and that there was, as she said, “no one on earth, be he king, or duke, or the King of Scotland’s daughter, or anyone else, who can restore the kingdom of France.” The “King of Scotland” wasn’t a random allusion. Reflexively hostile toward England, Scotland was France’s ally, and the king of the Scots’ daughter had recently been betrothed to the dauphin’s son Louis, who was not yet four years old. Only a girl who followed dynastic politics would have known of such a development, and only Joan, her voices made clear, could lead the dauphin’s army to victory and him to his coronation at Reims, where all French kings were made.
“She was not so much warned by the oracle of the gods above,” Alain Chartier recorded in his Epistola de Puella of 1429, “as threatened with a very harsh punishment unless she went swiftly to the King.” Alain Chartier, of no relation to Jean Chartier, Charles VII’s secretary, was one of France’s two great poets of the era—the other was Christine de Pizan—and is unusual in identifying Joan’s vocation as the product of divine coercion, perhaps intending to feminize his subject by ignoring a
If Jacques d’Arc’s recurring nightmare didn’t prove him clairvoyant, it was disturbing enough that her family remembered and recounted something that delineated a significant conflict between Joan and her father. Years after the fact, when spies were plundering the memories of Joan’s childhood friends and neighbors, they stumbled across what storytellers preserved not only for its drama but because it provides an element the virgin martyr’s plot requires: a controlling father who intends to stymie her vocation, a forced betrayal typically the first obstacle to her glory. Chaste as she was, some aspect of Joan’s behavior must have communicated insubordination, enough to eventually inspire Jacques’s efforts to let another man take a turn at containing her. But, as Joan’s father would discover, it’s not easy to marry off a daughter who has given herself to God.
History is rarely kind to a heroine’s antagonist, and Jacques d’Arc’s misreading of his daughter’s character amounted to perversion. She wouldn’t follow an army but lead one, and the power she claimed would rest on her virginity, the most profound and closely guarded aspect of her identity, the one that provided the name with which she christened her reborn self: La Pucelle, the Maid, derived from the Latin puella , a girl yet to enter womanhood.
----
*1 Derived from Lotharingia , Lorraine was one of the three territorial divisions of the Carolingian Empire, formed in AD 800, when Charlemagne was crowned by Pope Leo III.
*2 The name given a one-livre coin, minted between 1360 and 1641. Livre, from Latin libra , was a measure of weight, like the English pound.
*3 That exception is a fifteenth-century mural within the chapel of Notre-Dame de Bermont, a mile north of Domrémy. In it, a black-robed—and blond-haired—Joan awaits execution.
*4 The most recent was Vatican II, 1962–65.
*5 The fourteen are Agathius, Barbara, Blaise, Catherine of Alexandria, Christopher, Cyriacus, Denis, Erasmus, Eustace, George, Giles (the only of the fourteen who was not martyred), Margaret of Antioch, Pantaleon, and Vitus.
When Joan was fifteen, her father was summoned to Vaucouleurs, some twelve miles north of Domrémy, to meet with the town’s captain, Robert de Baudricourt, about the“escalating tensions between the warring factions.” Aside from Mont Saint-Michel, and Tournai, both hundreds of miles to the west, Vaucouleurs was the single town north of the Loire to remain in France’s possession, testimony to Baudricourt’s grit and the tenacity of the men stationed in the garrison he oversaw. It was 1427, and Joan’s voices were speaking no longer of virginity but of battle. She knew she was the chosen one and that there was, as she said, “no one on earth, be he king, or duke, or the King of Scotland’s daughter, or anyone else, who can restore the kingdom of France.” The “King of Scotland” wasn’t a random allusion. Reflexively hostile toward England, Scotland was France’s ally, and the king of the Scots’ daughter had recently been betrothed to the dauphin’s son Louis, who was not yet four years old. Only a girl who followed dynastic politics would have known of such a development, and only Joan, her voices made clear, could lead the dauphin’s army to victory and him to his coronation at Reims, where all French kings were made.
“She was not so much warned by the oracle of the gods above,” Alain Chartier recorded in his Epistola de Puella of 1429, “as threatened with a very harsh punishment unless she went swiftly to the King.” Alain Chartier, of no relation to Jean Chartier, Charles VII’s secretary, was one of France’s two great poets of the era—the other was Christine de Pizan—and is unusual in identifying Joan’s vocation as the product of divine coercion, perhaps intending to feminize his subject by ignoring a
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