Unfortunately, the author has managed to make some of the most interesting events, and personalities, of the Hundred Years' War deathly dull. Don't bother. ( )

I started reading this book to understand how a young peasant woman managed to capture the dauphin’s (the future Charles VII) imagination and mobilise men to fight moved by the conviction of her voices.

Marina surpassed my expectations in her commitment to look beyond the trial papers and other contextual evidence to try to uncover La Pucelle as a woman, a historical and heroic and tragic figure who has remained in people’s imagination for centuries.

The author examined the complexities of the society at the time, mainly power and religion – and beyond – conventions, myths, art, punishment; as well as how Joan of Arc came to be seen as an image of female heroism after her death. ( )

Warner captures the image of Joan as the saint who gives comfort and provide an image of perfection. An innocent country girl who tended sheep and was called by God.The fictional popularizations of Joan, her sainthood, and symbolic use of her image for so many different and opposing causes over the past two centuries, has obscured the girl who left her small village with a mission she said came from God. Who was the real Joan? ( )

An extraordinary academic investigation - part-biography, part-deconstruction - of the French saint Joan of Arc.

Marina Warner finds the real girl behind the symbolism - and then concentrates on the way her life and death have been used through the years in any number of ways. ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/788752.html

I'm not really a Francophile, but I am a lapsed medievalist, and Marina Warner's meticulous sifting of fact from fiction in the first two-thirds of the book dealing with the actual career of Joan of Arc (not, as she points out, a name ever used by La Pucelle herself) is a beautiful example of how you should take your one major primary source (the transcript of Joan's trial) and test it against all the other available contextual evidence.

Two points in particular stood out for me. First, Joan's entire career was very short - from March 1429 to her execution in May 1431 - and of course the last year of Joan's short life was spent in captivity. Second, something very special obviously did take place when she first encountered the Dauphin, the future Charles VII, at Chinon in March 1429: she was unable to describe the experience clearly, and nobody else seems to have left a record, but the consequences are quite clear - some kind of mystical event was experienced by both her and Charles, and by enough of his courtiers to establish the legend, but we will never know exactly what they thought had happened.

Warner explores Joan's significance as a woman, a hero, a warrior, a prophet, digging deep into late medieval ideas of religion, leadership and gender. In the last third of the book she goes on to look at Joan's influence after her death, on literature, French politics, the church's claims to authority, and concepts of sexuality in Western civilisation. It feels comprehensive, and I found it fascinating. ( )