Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured by Kathryn Harrison

Author:Kathryn Harrison [Harrison, Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780385531221
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

Joan and her army set out for Reims with the dauphin and his retinue on Monday, June 27, 1429. Cravant, Bonny, Lavau, Saint-Fargeau, Coulanges-la-Vineuse, Auxerre, Saint-Florentin, Brinon, Saint-Phal: all the Loire towns “welcomed the soldier and the Maid, and all made homage to the dauphin,” as if years of enemy occupation were instantly undone—a transformation that often required nothing so cumbersome as the movement of troops. The English army had been too small for it to garrison each town it conquered, and those it did were given minimal manpower. As Joan’s army approached, sources including the Chronique de la Pucelle suggest that most English-occupied towns surrendered without resistance, let alone bloodshed. But Troyes, where Charles’s mother had publicly disowned and humiliated him, proved harder to convince. The city’s identity was informed by the treaty that bore its name, and it had prospered under Anglo-Burgundian rule. One of the few occupied cities that had been garrisoned, Troyes had time to wait on rescue from the English forces, the dauphin’s guarantee of amnesty insufficient to woo its citizens to relinquish the city’s keys.

Initially, Troyes’s garrison of five to six hundred soldiers inspired the conceit that the town might resist Joan and her army. Like everyone else in the realm, the people of Troyes knew of Joan’s victories and their unnatural accomplishment, but not of the magnitude of her forces, thousands strong, and when they sallied out to discover themselves surrounded by a sea of enemy soldiers, they made an about-face and drew the drawbridge up behind them. Having been “told continually by their Anglo-Burgundian leaders that she was led by a force other than God,” after some deliberation they dispatched an envoy to examine Joan in the form of Brother Richard, a mendicant friar and disciple of Saint Bernard of Siena. Brother Richard was one of countless turn-or-burn preachers who emerge from societies whose apocalyptic beliefs warn of imminent extinction. Jesus was as well. Cultures preoccupied with death cannot help but dwell on rewards and retribution, and in Paris a popular preacher could summon a mob twenty thousand strong, the frenzy of devotion predicting an equally fierce rejection. In April, Brother Richard had been run out of Paris and refused entry by several towns between Paris and Troyes, where he’d found asylum and then adulation. The citizens of Troyes, too, would send him packing, but for now he retained their faith, and as Joan testified, “The people of Troyes sent him to me. They said they were afraid I was not a thing sent from God.”

“Come boldly!” Joan said when he drew near her. “I shall not fly away.” Just as a witch could fly, so could holy water set her flesh afire, and Brother Richard sprinkled it liberally over Joan, who faced him defiantly in her indecent clothing, feet planted on the earth as firmly as his own. Joan, on whom the spray of water fell without a sizzle, was unconvinced of the sanctity of Brother Richard and galled by his presuming to judge her.

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