WOMEN WRONGED: Joan of Arc
On May 30, 1431, Joan of Arc was burned to death in the Old Market Square of Rouen. She was tied to a stake and her body was burned a total of three times. In her last moments, she clutched a makeshift cross and cried out “Jesus, Jesus!” She was 19 years old.
Many of us are familiar with the legend of Joan d’Arc — a peasant girl who became an international sensation as a famed battle commander fighting for the French in The Hundred Years’ War. France was under partial British control since William the Conqueror had invaded in 1066. Beginning in 1337, the British and French monarchs began a century-long war over the control of disputed French territories. The farm maid Joan was born around 1412, so her early years would have been shaped to some degree by French nationalists’ violent struggle for political autonomy.
By her own account, Joan first heard the voices of Catholic saints Margaret and Catherine when she was 13 years old. The saints initially advised her to be a good Catholic, but as she grew older their directives changed. Ultimately, the saints urged Joan to take up arms in the fight to restore Charles VII to his rightful place as uncontested French sovereign. When she was about 17, Joan met with the exiled king and convinced him to supply her with troops and weapons. He (somewhat remarkably) acceded to her demands, and Joan went on to liberate the city of Orléans. Shortly following this and other victories, Charles VII was crowned king during a coronation ceremony over which Joan famously presided.
Joan was finally captured by the Burgundians, and she was sold to the English for the then-astonishing figure of 10,000 francs. (1) The British monarch Henry VI found himself in a difficult situation — Joan was revered across the world for her heroism, and she had previously been deemed legitimate by a religious court. The British ultimately handed her over to Pierre Cauchon, then Bishop of Beauvais, so that she could be tried by renowned Catholic authorities.
Joan was held in unthinkable conditions during her imprisonment at this time. The amount of abuse and assault that she suffered can only be imagined, although her own preserved testimony can give us a sense of what she experienced. When Bishop Cauchon demanded to know why she had forsaken womanly modesty in assuming men’s clothing, she responded: “While I have been in prison, the English have molested me when I was dressed as a woman. (She weeps.) I have done this to defend my modesty.”
Considering Joan’s international celebrity, as well as the complicated political environment of the time, it is perhaps unsurprising that hers is one of the few Middle Age trials that has been almost wholly preserved. The level of detail is astonishing, as is the number of men who judged Joan. Her case was considered primarily by members of the Catholic Church, but The University of Paris also passed judgement on Joan’s alleged heresy and immodesty. A letter signed by the “esteemed faculty of canon law of the University of Paris” noted that Joan “1. is schismatic, 2. she has erred in the faith…3. she is apostate for cutting off her hair and rejecting women’s dress, 4. she is a liar and false prophetess in saying that she is sent by God and speaks with angels and saints, 5. she errs in the faith for enduring anathema for a long time and for preferring to forgo the body of Christ and confession rather than wear women’s dress, and 6. she errs in judgement in saying that she is certain that she will be taken to heaven…” (2)
To modern readers, it might seem astonishing that so many “learned” men would include Joan’s choice of dress as one of the main articles against her. But this issue, judging by the frequency of its mention in the trial record, was predominant. Here are some choice selections:
“The report has now reached many places that this woman, utterly disregarding the honor due the female sex, throwing off the bridle of modesty, and forgetting all feminine decency, wore the disgraceful clothing of men, a shocking and vile monstrosity.” (3)
In the sentence read to her at the castle of Rouen, her judges denounced Joan as “scandalous, seditious, idolatrous, apostate from the faith, evil-speaking and maleficent…wholly forsaking the decency and reserve of her sex, utterly without modesty and shamelessly having taken the disgraceful clothing and state of armed men.” (4)
Henry VI himself castigated Joan’s choice of dress in two of his letters. The first, which he wrote to Pierre Cauchon, stated, “It is sufficiently notorious and well known for some time past, a woman calling herself Joan the Maid abandoned women’s clothes and dressed and armed herself like a man, a thing against divine law and abominable to God, and condemned and forbidden by every law.” In another letter that he wrote following Joan’s death, he said, “With wondrous presumption, this woman whom the common people called the Maid rose up against natural decency, clothed in men’s attire and armed as a soldier, and dared to mingle in the slaughter of men in fierce combat, and to take part in battles.” (5)
There were over fifty articles of condemnation levied against her, several of which addressed the issue of her appearance. Article 12, for example, stated: “Joan cast aside all women’s clothing and had her hair cut round [in a bowl shape], like a young man’s. Then she put on a shirt, breeches, a doublet, and hose fastened together by twenty loops, high-laced shoes, a short, knee-length robe, a close-cut hood, tight-fitting boots, long spurs, a sword, dagger, cuirass, lance, and other armor befitting a man-at-arms.” Article 13 goes on, “Joan attributes to God, to his angels, and to his saints orders that are injurious to the honor of women, prohibited by divine law, abominable to God and man, and forbidden by ecclesiastical ordinances…such as wearing short, tight, and immodest men’s clothing, undergarments and hose as well as other articles.” (6)
Although Joan was a teenage girl with no formal education, her responses to the bevy of accusations from her judges and inquisitors give us a sense of how she must have felt in the face of so many ridiculous charges. She repeatedly refused to swear an oath to tell the truth during her trial, and she ultimately only swore to be honest about things in relation to the trial — she is on record repeatedly stating she would not tell them everything she knew, as even they would not force her to perjure herself against God. When they commanded Joan to stay in her prison cell when she wasn’t being questioned, “she said she did not accept this prohibition and stated further that if she escaped, no one could accuse her of breaking or violating her oath, since she had never given an oath to anyone.” She further noted that “It’s true that I wanted to escape from other prisons and that I still do, as is allowable for any captive or prisoner.” (7)
Her frustration is further evidenced in such responses as “spare me” (8) and “Do I have to tell you?…She said little children have a saying: Sometimes people are hanged for telling the truth.” (9) When her inquisitors asked her “what shape Saint Michael took when he appeared to her, she said she did not see his crown and knew nothing of his garments. Asked whether he was naked, she answered, ‘Do you think God can’t find him clothes?’” (10)
Shortly before her execution, Joan answered her judges’ unending questions with: “In truth, if you tear my limbs apart and separate my soul from my body, I still won’t tell you anything else. And if I tell you anything, later I will say that you forced it out of me.” (11) On May 24, this assertion was put to the test. Her judges publicly read out all of the articles for which she was condemned (heresy, seduction, wearing men’s clothing, etc.). Before they finished, and it was clear that they were about to sentence her to death, Joan recanted all that she had claimed. She renounced her belief that God had sent saints to guide her, she admitted to being a heretic, and she agreed to resume wearing women’s clothing. In turn, she was sentenced to life imprisonment.
But beside Joan’s signature on that document was a sign of the cross, which she was known to include with her signature as a sign to her soldiers that whatever information the letter contained was false. A couple of days later, Joan resumed wearing men’s clothing in her prison cell. Her judges returned to her prison upon learning of this, and demanded to know why she had “relapsed” to her heretical ways. She told these men that she “prefers to do her penance once and for all by dying, rather than endure the torment of prison any longer.” (12) She expressed her shame that she had signed the false confession, and she told the men that she stood by everything she had told them during the trial. These men told her that, since she was going to die, Saint Catherine and Margaret had lied to her in promising her hope of escape. This, they said, proved that she had not heard the voice of God at all, because God wouldn’t lie.
They declared her a relapsed heretic and burned her at the stake. Following her execution, they wrote, “the fire of her pride, which had seemed quenched, was revived by demonic winds and enkindled into destructive flames, and the miserable woman returned to her errors and lying follies that she had earlier vomited forth.” (13)
Such statements, and indeed the fact that Joan was executed at all, may seem remarkable to us today. And of course the trial’s findings have since been reversed, leading ultimately to Joan’s sanctification in 1920. But the fact that 500 years elapsed before Joan was redeemed in the eyes of the church is perhaps less surprising when we consider what Joan’s trial really meant for canon and civil law.
Joan essentially called the church’s bluff — she maintained her commitment to God and claimed it was God himself who demanded that she go to battle outfitted just as a male soldier would have been. None of the men in power, religious or secular, could have accepted this. To do so would be to admit that their own power was built on dubious grounds, on their interpretation of God’s will.
They could not allow a female, uneducated detractor to stand by her own interpretation of God’s law. If they had, this would have been to admit that a peasant woman had as much a right to her own actions as the men who laid siege to her homeland. Such an admission would have undercut their religious and patriarchal power. It was far easier to burn Joan as a heretic than it would have been to reexamine the moral baselessness of their own authority.
1. Frank, John P. “The Trial of Joan of Arc,” Litigation 23, 51-54, 69 (1997)
2. Hobbins, D. (Translator) The Trial of Joan of Arc (Harvard University Press, 2005), 183.
3. Hobbins, 33.
4. Hobbins, 124.
5. Hobbins, 40 & 209.
6. Hobbins, 129.
7. Hobbins, 51.
8. Hobbins, 56.
9. Hobbins, 60.
10. Hobbins, 76.
11. Hobbins, 178-9.
12. Hobbins, 197-8.
13. Hobbins, 210.
