Rouen, France
SHE ENTERED THE CITY OF ORLÉANS in the dark, an armored angel keeping her seraphim close. On a white horse she was a streak of light against the sky, a ghostly marquee signaling death to the opposition. In her hand was a white standard emblazoned with angels and fleur-delis. In her ears were the shrieks of dying English soldiers, a cacophony of saintly voices guiding her to free France and offering the seeds of knowledge that she would not live to see it all come to fruition. She knew an arrow would soon pierce her shoulder in battle well before it sliced through the air and parted her flesh. Joan of Arc knew that powerful men would bend the knee before her prophecies.
Jean Luillier, a burgher of Orléans, testified that Joan “was received with as much joy and applause by all, men and women, the great and the lowly, as if she had been one of God's angels!” Angelic was Joan in the original sense, when angels waged war for the Almighty. She preferred to carry her battle standard, not a sword, as her sharpest weapon was her holy guidance. And even though Joan presaged the deaths of thousands of English troops, she never killed anyone with her own hand—or at least that is what she professed. After a week in battle at Orléans, Joan ended a siege that had persisted for seven months. To the French, Joan proved herself a bringer of miracles, fierce and true. To the English, whose army suffered one of its greatest losses of the Hundred Years’ War, Joan proved herself to be a witch. They said only evil could accomplish such feats. They vowed to see her sorcery stopped.
“Hallelujah, I'm a witch, I'm a witch . . .”
A new pop single was floating on the summer airwaves when I reached Rouen. Feminist messaging and genderqueer aesthetics mingled in the song's music video. “Virginity is a social construct” flashed across the screen as the much-maligned Miley Cyrus writhed on the floor in a red latex catsuit before holding a sword high on horseback dressed as an armored Joan of Arc. As I entered the city where Joan took her last breath in 1431, her influence was as palpable as ever, pervading the unlikeliest of places.
Rouen still lives and breathes Joan—Jeanne—nearly 600 years after her cruel execution in the town square. An easy day trip from Paris, the capital of Normandy is filled with quaint cobblestone streets and half-timbered houses. Upon emerging from the Gare de Rouen-Rive-Droite train station on a brisk, sunny day, I found myself walking down Rue Jeanne d'Arc. I wandered past a bust of Guy de Maupassant lording over a pristinely manicured park with water flowing across a rock wall. Nearby, the Esplanade Marcel Duchamp fans out in front of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen where a large Calder sculpture balances by the museum entrance.
Churches seem to decorate every corner of the city. Rouen's towering Gothic abbey dedicated to Saint Ouen has weathered to black around its face, giving the impression of rotting bone against the whiter, more preserved limestone. It was in the cemetery here that Joan was first sent to be burned at the stake. Before the inquisitors could set her ablaze, she signed an abjuration under duress, promising that the voices she said she heard weren't real and that she would no longer bear arms or wear male clothing. She left the grounds of Saint Ouen alive, but wouldn't make it more than a week. As I walked past the imposing edifice, the sun ducked behind its spire, then rolled back into place: an uncanny light show that served as a pointed allegory of the church's power.
The Maid of Orléans remains a martyr icon to millions. Just as the witch is an ever-shifting archetype appropriated for many a cause célèbre, Joan of Arc stands for so much to so many. In feminist circles, she is embraced alternately as a symbol of female strength and ingenuity; an icon of neurodiversity and genderqueer identity; and, to some, evidence that women can be conduits for the divine.
The peasant girl we now know as Joan of Arc has been the subject of countless books, plays, and films over the centuries created and re-created by people of all persuasions. “She has been claimed as an icon by zealous combatants of every shade of opinion,” writes Moya Longstaffe in a biography of the heroine, “clericals, anticlericals, nationalists, republicans, socialists, conspiracy theorists, feminists . . .” There is no single type of person who identifies with Joan, and there is no single Joan whom people identify with.
My first inroad to explore Joan's saga was the Historial Jeanne d'Arc. The museum is accessible only through guided tours, and each one is an immersive, multimedia journey through Joan of Arc history and lore played out in a restored medieval archbishop's palace. Video projections dance across the stone walls, bringing Joan's story to life through narration and reenactments drawn from trial records.
It is mostly through her trial for heresy in 1431 and the trial to pardon her postmortem in 1456 that we know as much as we do about the Maid. But not all these details can be trusted. As Daniel Hobbins warns in The Trial of Joan of Arc, “the political nature of the original trial should put us on our guard when we are dealing with evidence produced by its judges—and so should the political nature of the nullification trial, conducted in a highly charged atmosphere.” (Really, the same can be said of all surviving witch trial records.)
Strange as it may seem, Joan was not called Jeanne d'Arc in her short lifetime. It was during the first day of her trial in February of 1431 that she revealed her father's last name—d'Arc—which others have used to refer to her since. “The appellation Joan of Arc or Jeanne d'Arc, with its spurious aristocratic particle, gives a curiously remote and lofty impression, whether in French or in English, quite misleading as to the personality of the nineteen-year-old Joan,” Longstaffe explains. “She never called herself Joan of Arc, Jeanne d'Arc, but wished to be known simply as La Pucelle (the Maid), or La Pucelle de Dieu (God's Handmaid), thus reminding her troops all the time that she was convinced, and wished others to accept, that she came not of her own volition or ambition, not as the tool of any clique, but at the behest of the Almighty, the girl sent by God.”
Born in 1412, Joan grew up in a loving, pious family of landowning farmers in the village of Domrémy (which has since been renamed Domrémy-la-Pucelle after her). She spent her time learning to sew and spin, and her mother taught her everything she knew about the Christian faith. As a child, Joan was well acquainted with the mysteries of the spirit world. Just outside the town grew a tree suffused with legend that she and other Domrémy children would visit and sing and dance around, throwing garlands upon its branches. The Fairy Tree, also known as the Ladies’ Tree, was hundreds of years old and thought to have curative properties, as did the nearby spring. Joan's godmother told her that she had seen fairies there, although Joan would never reveal if she believed this tale or not. It was around age thirteen, however, when Joan's sustained contact with the ineffable began.
Joan was in her father's garden and could feel a shift, she recounted at her trial. Sight and sound as she knew them were forever altered. Fear welled inside Joan as light poured into her frame of vision on an already bright midsummer day. Her right side aglow, Joan was told by angelic voices to maintain her devotion, as it would one day lead her to save France. Many times a week, Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret began to appear or speak to Joan, delivering messages about her fate. It was then that Joan took a vow of chastity to prepare herself for a life of Godly service. Shortly thereafter, she stole away from home, donned simple soldier's garb, and after much maneuvering, followed her voices to come face-to-face with the Dauphin, the oldest son of then-deceased King Charles VI.
Inside the Historial, the projections are positioned as a sort of parallel—a low-grade facsimile, if you will—of the visions and voices that overtook Joan. We can never know what her experiences were beyond what she told inquisitors, but it is only fitting to try to understand Joan's life by walking into room after empty room only to see them suddenly transform through sound and visuals, setting the medieval palace ablaze in light. Shadows dance, voices bellow, faces suddenly appear only to disappear, leaving nothing in the room once more. There were moments I forgot I was sitting among a tour group, each one of us no doubt hoping there might somehow be a different ending to Joan's story.
When Joan finally found her way to the Dauphin and delivered her messages to him, there was a known saying that France had been destroyed by a woman and would be saved by a maid. Joan never divulged exactly what she told the prince, but we do know that it involved his coronation and the battles ahead. At the time, the French had been in a brutal, decades-long war with the English and the Burgundians over what is now French territory. Hope and resources were waning. Whatever made the future Charles VII listen to a young girl dressed in a tunic and laced hose, Joan had arrived at just the right moment in time.
After her seemingly impossible victory at Orléans, Joan saw to it that the Dauphin was crowned at Rheims. It was reported that the two had a close relationship, but it would not be close enough to save her from death. Joan subsequently floundered in a few failed military advances, including one into Paris, and she was eventually captured by the Burgundians. They sold their precious captive to the English, who had been burning for the chance to burn her ever since Orléans. Kept in a cell where she was chained to the floor and constantly under the threat of sexual assault by her “guards,” Joan the accused heretic was forced to submit to an arduous trial where her piety, her refusal to wear women's clothing, her voices, and her faith were aggressively questioned. Like other witchcraft trials in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, “sorcery was principally a pretext for political ‘show’ trials, as in the case of Joan,” Longstaffe notes.
At the end of the Historial's tour, the final few rooms are dedicated to all of the Joans who have lived since the original passed on. The Mythotèque attempts to offer a window into the heroine known around the world through art, literature, film, and folklore. There are movie posters for Carl Theodor Dreyer's moving silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc, alongside Saint Joan adapted from George Bernard Shaw's stage play, and Das Mädchen Johanna, a propagandistic German film about the Maid from 1935 that draws parallels between Adolph Hitler and Joan, untenable as that may sound. There is a fascinating selection of Joan of Arc commemoratives, like a vintage porcelain plate featuring her tied to the stake with hands crossed at her breast as smoke billows into the sky—a rather tasteless scene to eat from—and a stamp featuring Joan cutting a gallant pose riding on her horse. (She was truly the first “witch” to be merchandized.) In addition to multiple paintings of Joan, characters inspired by the Maid are mentioned in the Mythotèque as well, like Brienne of Tarth from Game of Thrones, a prime example of the Joan d'Archetype.
There is arguably no female figure of the past thousand years who has sparked such inspiration, adoration, and commodification as Joan of Arc. We take for granted that she is a feminist icon today, but how was Joan situated in the gender discourse of her time?
According to some medieval scholars, Joan did not predate feminism at all but was singled out as a model of progressive womanhood while she was still alive by an early feminist writer, Christine de Pisan. “Because of the curtailing transformations women were experiencing and their reactions to them, it is plausible to see in the fourteenth century the antecedents of modern feminism,” poses Alan P. Barr in an article for Fifteenth Century Studies. “Because of the extraordinary and outspoken role she played, it is still more plausible to find in Christine de Pisan the first of feminists.”
In 1405, Christine de Pisan completed Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (The Book of the City of Ladies), writing about a fictional city populated only by women. The author places famous figures in the city from Mary Magdalene to Helen of Troy, Circe, and the Amazons to build a case in favor of women's strength and intelligence. (These illustrious women were split between Christian and Pagan.)
“In The City of Ladies, Christine exposes the falsity of the representation of women by the male authorities of the past whom she had been raised to reverence,” Margaret L. King explains in Women of the Renaissance. Though Christine does not advocate for women to leave their husbands and take over the world, she certainly offers a radical perspective for her time by elevating the idea that women were as smart and capable as men.
When de Pisan heard what the young Joan was doing to liberate France, she was deeply inspired. Joan was an exemplary Christian woman, the writer believed, so she gathered together her feelings of admiration and composed the lyrical poem “Le Ditié de Jehanne d'Arc” in 1429.
“Joan's timely arrival, simultaneously to crown the Dauphin and to presage the liberation of France, provided a made-to-order elaboration of the major contention in Le Livre de la Cité des Dames: that women were at least the equal of men, historically stifled only by men's weightiness,” Barr contends. De Pisan's poem speaks of light overtaking dark, seasons changing, and transformations. She couches the actions of young Joan in terms of great women of the biblical past—Esther, Judith, Deborah—before coaxing even the most skeptical of readers to submit to the greatness of the Maid and, by extension, all womankind.
Oh! What honour for the female sex! It is perfectly obvious that God has special regard for it when all these wretched people who destroyed the whole Kingdom—now recovered and made safe by a woman, something 5000 men could not have done—and the traitors [have been] exterminated. Before the event they would scarcely have believed this possible.
But Joan's glory days would be short-lived. Within two years after the publication of de Pisan's poem, Joan would be dead. Although the accusation of witchcraft would not make the final cut, Joan was found guilty of all twelve articles of condemnation against her, which included her decidedly un-Christian connection to superstitions surrounding the Fairy Tree, her angelic voices and prophesies, her refusal to submit to the church's authority, and her constant company-keeping with male soldiers and wearing of men's clothing. This last accusation continues to be a subject of great interest and debate among twentiethand twenty-first-century feminists—and is essential to exploring the enigma that is Joan of Arc.
Throughout her imprisonment, Joan was repeatedly asked to wear women's clothing, but she consistently refused. Cross-dressing was deemed heretical, although there were plenty of women who had gone to war in men's clothes before her. At times, Joan said she could not change her dress because it was God's will she wear men's attire. Other times, she alluded to the fact that she felt better protected against sexual assault in men's attire. We also know that Joan was offered a variety of chances to attend mass, something she deeply wished to do, if only she would change her garb. She refused even that. “I didn't take men's clothes on the advice of anyone in the world,” Joan testified. “I didn't take these clothes or do anything except at the command of God and His angels.”
In the past few decades, some have argued that Joan's gender variance translates to her being genderqueer or transgender. (The Maid is a significant part of groundbreaking queer author and activist Leslie Feinberg's book Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman.) As it is tricky to apply today's language and identity politics to a person from a vastly different culture and time, I have chosen to refer to Joan as “she,” as there is evidence she wanted to be called a maid, a feminine designation.
Examining Joan's legacy means relying on biased documents whose veracity is not guaranteed, but it is nevertheless clear that Joan's gender expression was transgressive for her time. Many people with gender variant behavior or dress were assumed to be witches in the past, and many people who proudly bear their gender variance today self-identify as witches. Perhaps our contemporary understanding of the word witch is much closer to what Joan herself was, then, given that it is a term whose meaning is always in flux, ever fluid and shifting shape, used to describe a person living between allegiances and gender roles, between modes of seeing and worshipping, between worlds, just as Joan did.
In this contemporary sense, Joan of Arc is far more witch than saint. She had a playful, confrontational demeanor with authority, yet was deeply spiritual. She once jokingly alluded to her supposed ability of witchly flight when confronted by a skeptical priest. She was told by her holy voices not to jump from a tower and try to escape prison but did so anyways. Witches are those we allow to have flaws—and those we force even more flaws upon in many cases. Saints, on the other hand, are those who could never embody the purity on earth that we bestow them with posthumously. Witches are impossible to pin down; their attributes and aesthetics—good, evil, gorgeous, ghoulish—are ever-changing, conjured by whoever speaks of them. Saints are bound by the Catholic Church's beliefs of what is good and godly. They belong to the world of binaries, rules, and order. Saints are deified. Witches, like Joan, defy.
I left the Historial somewhat heartened that Joan was eventually pardoned and declared innocent in her 1456 Nullity Trial. But it was a pyrrhic victory—too little too late. With my back to the museum, I strolled down picturesque streets, passing a bookstore displaying vintage copies of Joan of Arc volumes in the window. A sweet shop showed her bowlcut–framed face on a refrigerated case of macarons. Another restaurant featured a sign with her haloed likeness painted over its awning. As I neared the place where Joan was last seen alive, I came upon a store, Jeanne A Dit (Joan Said) selling shirts with her stylized visage on them, marked by a sign in English that read: “Jeanne is the courageous and combative woman inside us. Jeanne, it's you, her, me.” The design was apparently inspired by a French feminist walkout against gender inequality in the workplace on November 7, 2016. The Joan on the shirt was modernized, but still unmistakably Joan. However, the attributes we imagine when we think of Joan—short hair, armor, white standard in hand—are not based on any surviving portraits, but elements pieced together from trial records. There is so much about her that has been lost to time.
The street I was on eventually emptied out into the Place du Vieux-Marché, the heart of Rouen. The cheerful square where tourists and locals were shopping and eating around a market selling fruits, vegetables, and roast chickens was also where Joan perished. I closed my eyes and saw a crowd collect around a scaffold. A procession of over a hundred men brandishing clubs and swords forced their way into Vieux-Marché leading a lone weeping figure. Far from the handsome scarlet and green fur-lined robe and surcoat she sported after Orléans, Joan walked into the square in a long dress with her head shorn, wearing a miter inscribed with “heretic, relapsed, apostate, idolatress” like a shameful crown. I watched her climb up to the stake, eyes riveted to the crucifix that a friar held aloft in the crowd so that she might die with the vision of Christ on his dying day, too. In front of her was a sign declaring all her misdeeds:
Joan who calls herself the Maid, a liar, pernicious, deceiver of the people, sorceress, superstitious, blaspheming God, presumptuous, erring in the faith of Jesus Christ, boastful, idolatrous, cruel, dissolute, invoking devils, apostate, schismatic and heretic.
The stake was affixed to a towering platform that offered everyone in the square an entrée to her agony. The fear and hatred Joan invoked in the Burgundians and English were palpable in her treatment at the end. Even the executioner was unable to offer her the kindness of strangulation before the fire was lit, a small favor the condemned were usually accorded. Her cries of “Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!” ricocheted around the square. As the smoke began to fill her lungs, she kept her eyes on the image of her lord and savior. His name escaped her throat over and over until she could speak no longer. Some English soldiers in the audience laughed. Many French townspeople cried. The executioner himself was filled with horror, as were many other spectators.
As Joan's body became a smoking statue, frozen in her final moments, the flames continued to burn. The fire's bloody fingers reached into the sky, sparking signs for those ready to receive them. Snowy doves bloomed from their blackness, white as the horse Joan rode, white as her armor in battle. They soared upward, flames transmogrified into holy symbols. The executioner felt his heart split open, wondering if this fire was a foreshadowing of his damnation for killing a saint. He rushed into the friary for answers. Others scoured their souls to understand what they had just seen. In her final moments, Joan succeeded in converting untold people who were forever changed from witnessing her death.
But in a blink the smoke had cleared, the square emptied out. I was standing near the last place Joan stood, marked by a small sign. Poking through dense green bushes, it reads: “Le Bucher” (The Pyre), “The location where Joan of Arc was burnt on May 30th 1431.” Behind the sign is a modern, minimalist church, Église Sainte-Jeanne-d'Arc de Rouen, with a roof like an overturned ship—or an abstract upwelling of licking silver flames. Inside the building there are colored pamphlets in different languages denouncing those who once perverted the powers of the Catholic Church to condemn Joan. It was nice to see the church freely admitting the error in its ways—Joan was canonized as a saint in 1920—but, again, it was too little too late.
On my way back to the train station, I stopped to see the only remaining tower from Rouen Castle, where Joan was once held. Within its fortified walls, she was threatened with physical torture that was not carried out—although the damage had been done already through the psychological torture of her trial and captivity. I trudged through the gravel surrounding the tower, thinking of her bleak final days, heading toward Paris with a heavy heart.
My emotions were erratic in Rouen. I had never felt particularly drawn to Joan before, mostly because she distanced herself from sexuality so completely, condemning sensual pleasures and those who partook in them. However, to view Joan through a contemporary sex-positive feminist lens is quite limiting. When seen through the lens of medieval womanhood, Joan blossoms into a true radical.
But like so many people who defy gender proscriptions, Joan of Arc is far more complex than can be encapsulated or expressed by the word woman. As someone who also defies gender proscriptions and is equally ambivalent about having my own identity summed up by the word woman, I felt a deep kinship with the Maid upon leaving Rouen.
Most of the people—most of the women—executed for witchcraft over the past thousand years are barely a blip on the historical record. Today, they all but blur into a faceless mass invoked for a variety of political ends. Joan of Arc is different. She is the most famous “witch” figure to have ever lived—and the most famous female saint, too. In fact, Joan proves the proximity between witch and saint, as you can find her pictured or invoked as much in witchcraft as in Christian communities today.
At one point during my tour, the Historial Jeanne d'Arc's narration declared that no one owns Joan of Arc. That idea really resonated with me. Joan does not belong to Catholics nor feminists nor witches nor women nor French people, and yet so many have been drawn to her and her story. Joan would not likely have approved of any of us calling her a witch or a saint and idolizing her—let alone worshipping her—but remembering her? It is perhaps the smallest, sweetest gift we can offer the Maid who has given us so much.
