Excerpt from Joan of Arc by Helen Castor, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Introduction
'Joan of Arc'

In the firmament of history, Joan of Arc is a massive star. Her light shines brighter than that of any other figure of her time and place. Her story is unique, and at the same time universal in its reach. She is, famously, a protean icon: a hero to nationalists, monarchists, liberals, socialists, the right, the left, Catholics, Protestants, traditionalists, feminists, Vichy and the Resistance. She is a recurring motif, a theme replayed in art, literature, music and film. And the process of recounting her story and making her myth began from the moment she stepped into public view; she was as much an object of fascination and a subject of impassioned argument during her short life as she has been ever since.

In outline, her tale is both profoundly familiar and endlessly startling. Alone in the fields at Domrémy, a peasant girl hears heavenly voices bringing a message of salvation for France, which lies broken at the hands of the invading English. Against all the odds, she reaches the dauphin Charles, the disinherited heir to the French throne, and convinces him that God has made it her mission to drive the English from his kingdom. Dressed in armour as though she were a man, with her hair cut short, she leads an army to rescue the town of Orléans from an English siege. The fortunes and the morale of the French are utterly transformed, and in a matter of weeks she pushes on, deep into English-held territory, to Reims, where she presides over the coronation of the dauphin as King Charles VII of France. But soon she is captured by allies of the English, to whom she is handed over for trial as a heretic. She defends herself with undaunted courage, but she is – of course – condemned. She is burned to death in the market square in Rouen, but her legend proves much harder to kill. Nearly five hundred years later, the Catholic Church recognises her not only as a heroine, but as a saint.

One of the reasons we know her story so well is that her life is so well documented, in a distant age when that was true of very few. In relative terms, as much ink and parchment were expended on the subject of Joan of Arc by her contemporaries as print and paper have been in the centuries that followed. There are chronicles, letters, poems, treatises, journals and account-books. Above all, there are two remarkable caches of documents: the records of her trial for heresy in 1431, including the long interrogations to which she was subjected; and the records of the 'nullification trial' held twenty-five years later by the French to annul the previous proceedings and rehabilitate Joan's name. In these transcripts we hear not only the men and women who knew her, but Joan herself, speaking about her voices, her mission, her village childhood, and her extraordinary experiences after she left Domrémy. First-hand testimony, from Joan, her family and her friends: a rare survival from the medieval world. What could be more reliable or more revealing?

Yet all is not as simple as it seems. It's not just that the official transcripts of their words were written in clerical Latin, rather than the French they actually spoke – a notarial translation alerting us to the fact that this first-hand testimony is not quite as immediate as it might initially appear. It's also that, as befits such a star, Joan exerts a vast gravitational pull. By the time those who knew her spoke as witnesses in the nullification trial of 1456 about her childhood and her mission, they knew exactly who she had become and what she had accomplished. In recalling events and conversations from a quarter of a century earlier, they were grappling with the vagaries of long-treasured memories and telling stories that were deeply infused with hindsight – which by that stage included knowledge not only of her life and death, but also of the final defeat of the English in France between 1449 and 1453, events that served to vindicate Joan's assertion of God's purpose beyond anything achieved in her lifetime or for years thereafter. In many ways, then, the story of Joan of Arc as told in the nullification trial is a life told backwards.

From Joan of Arc by Helen Castor Copyright © 2015 by Helen Castor. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.