Saint Joan of Arc

NAME Jeanne d'Arc, known in English as Joan of Arc. She signed her own name as "Jehanne." She is also called "The Maid of Orléans" (La Pucelle d'Orléans). (1)

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Joan of Arc was a French peasant girl who, claiming divine guidance, led the French army to decisive victories over the English during the Hundred Years' War, secured the coronation of King Charles VII, and became one of the most celebrated figures in French national history. Captured by the Burgundians and handed to the English, she was tried for heresy and burned at the stake at the age of approximately nineteen. She was later exonerated, beatified, and eventually canonized as a Catholic saint. She is the patron saint of France. (2),

BIRTH Born January 6, 1412, in the village of Domrémy, in the valley of the Meuse, in what is now northeastern France.  (3)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Joan's father was Jacques d'Arc (also recorded as Darc, Dars, Dart, Day, and other spellings — there is no place called "Arc," and the surname derived from later attempts to identify the family name). He was a well-to-do but illiterate peasant farmer who owned approximately 50 acres of land. He supplemented his farming with a minor position as a village official, collecting taxes and heading the local watch. Her mother was Isabelle Romée, a devout woman. Joan had three brothers: Jacquemin, Jean, and Pierre. (4)

CHILDHOOD Joan grew up in the rural village of Domrémy, a community loyal to the French crown in a region otherwise troubled by the ongoing Hundred Years' War. Her birthplace has been preserved for over six hundred years and is now a museum. 

She was a pious child who took Communion monthly. Before she responded to her calling, Joan worked in harvest fields and guarded animals at pasture. She was skilled in sewing and spinning, and had woven wreaths for a statue of the Virgin Mary. (2)

EDUCATION Like her father, Joan never learned to read or write. She received no formal education, but was deeply formed by the religious life of her community.  (2)

CAREER RECORD 1425: Joan began hearing voices she identified as Saints Michael, Margaret, and Catherine in her father's garden at the age of approximately 13. They told her it was God's will that the English be expelled from France.

1428: Aged around 16, Joan was taken by her cousin Durand Laxart to Count Robert de Baudricourt in Vaucouleurs. She persuaded the initially skeptical Count to arrange an audience with the Dauphin Charles.

1429: February — After a searching examination by churchmen at Chinon and Poitiers, Joan persuaded the uncrowned King Charles VII that she had a divine mission to expel the English from France and secure his coronation.

1429: April–May — Joan led a spiritually revived French army to relieve the besieged city of Orléans on the River Loire. The English had begun their siege on October 12, 1428. Joan arrived on April 29 and, nine days later on May 8, 1429, secured victory by taking the southern approach to the bridge.

1429: June — Joan led the French to victory over the English at the Battle of Patay.

1429: July 17 — Joan stood at the place of honour beside Charles VII at his coronation as King of France at Reims Cathedral.

1429, September — Joan was wounded in the thigh by a crossbow bolt during the unsuccessful attempt to recapture Paris from the English.

1430: Joan went to relieve the town of Compiègne, where she was captured by Burgundian forces on May 23, 1430.

1431: After nine months' imprisonment, Joan was tried before the ecclesiastical court presided over by Bishop Pierre Cauchon of Beauvais. She conducted her own defence across fifteen sessions, but was burned at the stake as a heretic  (5)

APPEARANCE A contemporary report described Joan as "a young woman of robust flesh and healthy looking." (2)

She was slightly built as a teenager. Joan wore her hair cut short in order to blend in with the male soldiers around her — a look that, centuries later, is credited as the inspiration for the "bob" haircut that became fashionable in the 1920s. (4)

Speculative portrait, c. late 19th-century, in the style of a 15th-century miniature

FASHION Joan wore men's clothing when mixing with male soldiers, in order to protect her modesty. She was clad in white armour when fighting, and carried a white banner representing God's blessing. During her trial, she was compelled to continue wearing male apparel because that was all she was provided — a fact that the prosecution, led by Bishop Cauchon, exploited to strengthen the charge of cross-dressing against her. (2)

CHARACTER Joan was strong-willed and courageous. At 16, she refused to honour an arranged marriage to a local man. When he sued her for breach of promise, she defended herself in court, arguing she had made no such promise — and won. 

During her trial she stood up to the charges with good nature, focusing on her devotion to her country and her personal purity. Her prosecutor, Pierre Cauchon, sent an agent to Domrémy to gather damaging information on her character; the agent returned having "found nothing concerning Joan that he would not have liked to find about his own sister," which reportedly enraged Cauchon. (4)

SPEAKING VOICE The trial records — among the most extensive for any medieval figure — show Joan was articulate, direct, and formidably composed under interrogation. 

SENSE OF HUMOUR Joan had a reportedly racy sense of humour. She was said to use the word "goddam" frequently as a sardonic reference to the English soldiers, whose habitual oath it was. On one occasion, when the Dauphin complained to her that he never heard the voice of God, she replied: "You must listen — then you will hear." (4)

RELATIONSHIPS Joan had no recorded romantic attachments.

Joan's close companions included her cousin Durand Laxart, who first brought her to Count de Baudricourt. 

One of her companions-in-arms in the French army was Captain Gilles de Rais, a nobleman who fought alongside her and later became one of the most notorious criminals in French history, convicted of torturing and killing over 200 children and believed to be the inspiration for the fairy-tale character Bluebeard in Charles Perrault's 1697 tale. Joan had no recorded romantic attachments. (6)

MONEY AND FAME Joan came from a modestly prosperous peasant family by the standards of the time. Before she appeared, the Dauphin Charles had fallen into severe financial difficulty: he had sold his last jewels, had sleeves patched onto an old doublet, could not afford new shoes, and had only four crowns in his purse. After her victories, Joan was honoured with the place beside the King at his coronation. 

Coronation of Charles VII in Guillaume de Nangis' Chronicon abbreviatum regum Francorum; Joan of Arc stands holding a banner of France to his left. 

In 1429, Charles VII exempted her home village of Domrémy from taxes "forever" as a tribute to Joan — an exemption that held for over 300 years until the French Revolution.  (4)

FOOD AND DRINK Joan would typically have eaten the food of the rural poor: bread made from barley, rye, or bean flour, soaked in rough wine. She was reportedly a highly competent cook. (2)

MUSIC AND ARTS Joan participated in the local village tradition of hanging floral garlands on the Fairies' Tree at Domrémy in honour of the Virgin Mary

LITERATURE Joan could not read or write. However, the trial records — first published in a scholarly edition by Pierre Champion in 1921 — constitute the most substantial body of contemporary documentation on any medieval individual. A notable literary mention came from the young Jane Austen, who wrote in her juvenilia work The History of England: "They should not have burnt her, but they did." (7)

NATURE Joan grew up in the rural countryside of northeastern France and spent much of her youth working in fields and pastures. She reportedly heard her divine voices for the first time in her father's garden.  (2)

PETS There are no historical records indicating she kept personal pets, as the animals she minded were livestock essential to her family's farm survival.

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Joan's domestic skills — sewing, spinning, and cooking — were noted by contemporaries. She also engaged in the outdoor labour of agricultural life: working at harvest and tending animals. (2)

SCIENCE AND MATHS She had no formal training in mathematics or sciences, operating entirely on practical peasant logic and what she believed to be direct divine inspiration

CALLING Joan first heard the voices of Saints Michael, Margaret, and Catherine in 1425 at the age of approximately 13, in her father's garden in Domrémy. They told her it was God's will that the English be expelled from France. She kept these visions largely to herself for several years before acting on them. Within a few months of persuading the Dauphin of her mission, she was leading a French army that had, at her insistence, renounced swearing and camp prostitutes. (3)

Jeanne d'Arc, by Eugène Thirion (1876)

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Joan was a devout Catholic who understood her mission in entirely theological terms — as a direct commission from God, communicated through saints. She took Communion monthly from childhood, a level of religious observance unusual even for the time. 

During her trial she refused to submit her visions to the authority of the Church if doing so contradicted what she believed God had directly told her — a position that made her conviction for heresy almost inevitable under the legal framework of the day.  (3)

POLITICS Joan operated in the deeply fractured political landscape of France during the Hundred Years' War. She was a committed supporter of the Valois claim to the French throne as represented by Charles VII, whose right as heir had been denied by the Treaty of Troyes in 1420. Her victories shifted the political momentum irreversibly. Within 20 years of her death, England had lost virtually all of France, retaining only Calais. (3)

SCANDAL Joan was formally charged with heresy and cross-dressing. The cross-dressing charge was partly engineered: during her imprisonment, she was deliberately given only male clothing to wear, providing the prosecution with the "evidence" they needed. The trial was widely understood even at the time to be politically motivated, serving English interests. The verdict was formally annulled in 1456 and condemned as an atrocious miscarriage of justice.  (3)

MILITARY CAMPAIGNS History occasionally produces people who seem to have stepped out of a completely different story. Joan of Arc was one of them. Within months of convincing the future King Charles VII that God was speaking to her, this teenage peasant girl had transformed a demoralized French army into something resembling a revival meeting with swords. Soldiers gave up swearing, prostitutes were sent packing, and an army that had been specialising in defeat suddenly found itself developing a taste for victory.

The city of Orléans, perched on the Loire, was the northernmost major city still loyal to the French. The English had been besieging it since October 1428 and appeared to be making steady progress. Then Joan arrived, like an unexpected amendment to the script. Nine days later, after a series of bold attacks, the siege was broken when French forces captured the southern approach to the bridge on May 8, 1429. The English, who had probably assumed the war was proceeding quite nicely, found themselves having to reconsider. 

Joan of Arc at the Siege of Orléans by Jules Lenepveu

Joan followed this success by helping secure a decisive French victory at Patay and then persuaded Charles to travel to Rheims for his coronation. Given that Charles had spent much of his recent past looking less like a king and more like a man who had misplaced both his kingdom and his tailor, this was no small achievement.

Not everything about Joan's military career was triumphant. During the attempted recapture of Paris, she was struck in the thigh by a crossbow bolt. Being a national heroine did not, unfortunately, exempt one from medieval projectile weaponry.

MILITARY RECORD Joan had no military training before assuming command. She led troops into battle personally, was wounded at Paris by a crossbow bolt to the thigh, and inspired exceptional loyalty and religious fervour among her soldiers. Her strategic instincts — particularly at Orléans — confounded experienced English commanders. 

She was never defeated in open battle; her capture at Compiègne came when she was cut off during a sortie. (5)

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Joan was described as robust and healthy in contemporary accounts. She endured the physical demands of campaigning in armour without apparent difficulty. 

She was wounded in the thigh by a crossbow bolt during the attack on Paris in 1429 but recovered. (2)

HOMES Joan was born and raised in the family home in Domrémy, which has survived intact for over six hundred years and is now a national museum — the Maison natale de Jeanne d'Arc. 

Joan of Arc's birthplace in Domrémy

During her campaigns she would have been housed in the castles and lodgings of her noble hosts. 

During her captivity she was imprisoned in the castle of Rouen. (4)

TRAVEL Joan's journeys, remarkable for a peasant girl of the era, took her from the rural backwater of Domrémy across eastern and central France: to Vaucouleurs, to the Dauphin's court at Chinon, to Orléans, Patay, Reims, Paris, and finally to Compiègne and Rouen.  (3)

CAPTURE AND TRIAL On May 23, 1430, Joan was captured by Burgundian forces during the defence of Compiègne. She was sold to the English for ten thousand French francs. 

Joan was imprisoned for nine months before being brought before the ecclesiastical court of Bishop Pierre Cauchon of Beauvais in 1431. Across fifteen sessions, she defended herself without legal counsel, with composure and intelligence. Theologians from the University of Paris were involved in the prosecution. 

She was found guilty of heresy and cross-dressing and originally sentenced to life imprisonment, but was condemned to death after being compelled to continue wearing male clothing in prison — technically relapsing into her condemned behaviour. (3)

DEATH Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in the marketplace of Rouen, France, on May 30, 1431, aged approximately 19. She asked for a cross to be held before her so she could see it through the flames. Her last words were: "Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Blessed be God." Eyewitnesses reported that the crowd, including English soldiers, wept. 

Miniature of Joan's Execution from The Vigils of King Charles VII, anonymous (c. 1484,

After her clothes had burned away, her body was displayed publicly to prove she was mortal; her ashes were thrown into the River Seine. (3)

After her death, two of her brothers, Jean and Pierre, presented an impostor as Joan, claiming she had escaped. Between 1434 and 1440 the brothers accepted lavish gifts and attended celebrations before eventually confessing their deception to the King. (2), (4)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Joan of Arc has inspired a vast body of work across centuries. Notable examples include: Friedrich Schiller's play Die Jungfrau von Orléans (1801); Giuseppe Verdi's opera Giovanna d'Arco (1845); Mark Twain's novel Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896); George Bernard Shaw's play Saint Joan (1923); Carl Theodor Dreyer's film The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928); and Luc Besson's film The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999). 

She has appeared in countless paintings, sculptures, novels, musicals, and television productions, and is among the most depicted figures in Western cultural history. (8)

ACHIEVEMENTS Joan of Arc lifted the siege of Orléans in nine days, secured the coronation of Charles VII, and fundamentally reversed the course of the Hundred Years' War. 

She was beatified in Rome on April 18, 1909, and canonized on May 16, 1920. Her feast day is May 30. She is the only Catholic saint to have been condemned and burned as a heretic by the Church that later canonized her. Her trial verdict was annulled on July 7, 1456. 

There is more surviving contemporary documentation on Joan of Arc than on any other figure of the medieval period. 

Sources: (1) Wikipedia — Joan of Arc (2) Encyclopaedia of Trivia — Saint Joan of Arc (3) Encyclopædia Britannica — Joan of Arc (4) History Today — Jeanne d'Arc: Life and Legend (5) National Geographic — Joan of Arc (6) Wikipedia — Gilles de Rais (7) Wikipedia — Jane Austen's The History of England (8) Wikipedia — Cultural Depictions of Joan of Arc