As usual, Anne Carson offers the most lucid distillation:
She was captured in battle on May 23, 1430. Her trial lasted from January to May of 1431 and entailed a magistrate’s inquest, six public interrogations, nine private interrogations, an abjuration, a relapse, a relapse trial, and condemnation. Her death by fire took place on May 30, 1431. Thousands of words went back and forth between Joan and her judges during the months of her inquisition; many of them are available to us in some form.
The copiousness of the trial record was anomalous by design. Joan was an international celebrity at the time. The trial was political, ecclesiastical, social, historical, an actual battle in a real war. So the bishop charged with its execution (and, inevitably, with Joan’s), asserting one kind of faith in language, made sure it was meticulously documented and that this documentation was assiduously copied, making it the most detailed and widely available trial record of the Middle Ages.
Among the fruits of these labors was the speed at which news of Joan’s fate spread around the world. According to historian Daniel Hobbins, whose 2005 translation of the trial record is the one on which I rely, nine days after her death, notice was sent to “all the royalty of Europe” and later dispatches ensured that the story had become common knowledge across Western Europe by late summer. These labors also made it possible, twenty-five years after her death by fire, for a subsequent bishop to symbolically burn a copy of the original trial record on the occasion of its nullification. These labors also gave us Joan. “I don’t know what you wish to ask me. Perhaps you might ask me things I can’t tell you” are the first words we hear her say. Of course, she is far more often referred to than heard from.
this woman utterly disregarding
this woman at the time
this woman so denounced
surrender the woman
this woman to us
this woman we ordered
this woman’s words
the woman commonly called Joan the Maid
this woman was taken
this woman is hardly
the said Maid
this woman is
this woman to be handed over
bring the woman to this city
the said Joan this Joan
(The article makes the object.)
Always a pack of them, the assembled masters for each hearing were carefully listed by name and station. The first public session consisted of forty-two men, including abbots, priors, doctors of theology, doctors of canon law, doctors of civil law, bachelors of theology, licentiates of canon and of civil law. Among them, thirteen Jeans interrogating one Jean d’Arc. The second public session: forty-eight, including abbots, priors, licentiates, a brother, a doctor of medicine, doctors of canon law, doctors of canon and civil law, fifteen doctors of theology, seven bachelors of theology, and two canons of Rouen; sixteen Jeans. Third session: sixty-one; fifteen.
asked her birthplace
asked the names
asked where
asked who
asked what
asked how
asked by
asked next
asked whether
asked how
asked what
asked whether
asked what kind
asked whether
asked whether
(And so on.)