No Savior
Resharing for free this lecture given on September 28th, 2022 as part of the Women & Power: Radical Women & Stereotypes Course for Advaya that I originally shared behind a paywall.
Picture her. Moonlight polished armor. Inky hair cut straight and short across her forehead. Face flushed with purpose. Ember-ignited eyes directed towards the heavens or whatever invisible entity swings her, like a compass hand, into precise action.
At the age of 13 she began to receive visions on hilltops, near sacred oak trees, and in her father’s garden that urged her to take up arms and save France. By the age of sixteen she had risen from peasant to general and convinced the nobility of France that she was divinely inspired. She correctly prophesied her victory at the siege of Orleans. She performed miracles and dressed as a man and survived near fatal wounds. She turned the tide of the Hundred Year war in France’s favor and crowned the dauphin Charles the VII King of France at the traditional coronation site of Rheims. Subsequently, she was captured by Burgundian forces and sold to the English where she stood trial without counsel as a heretic interrogated by a group of forty theologians both English and French, united by their distrust of a mystical female rebel. Who was she? A martyr? A saint? A virgin? A feminist icon? A symbol of nationalism or piety? A gender rebel? A vessel for god? A suit of armor?
Or a human being with foibles and faults and desires and a tragically interrupted story? What does it mean to try to claim power as articulated by monarchial and militaristic paradigms? Is it possible to hijack the system from the inside?
Joan of Arc, or Jehannne and Jeannette as her family and friends knew her, grew up in the small town of Domrémy in the Meuse valley. Domrémy, a liminal town, destabilized by nearly a hundred years of fighting, was in the French duchy of Bar and yet also inside the diocese of Toul which left its inhabitants, including Joan, calling themselves not French or English but “Lorrainers”. When Joan finally rode into the Loire to crown King Charles and demand her army, she said she was “going into France”. She did not identify herself as having been grown in France, but instead willingly chose to enter its domain physically, spiritually, and politically when with the aid of the Robert de Baudricourt she rode to see the dejected Dauphin in March of 1429. Domrémy was not a town with an allegiance to either an elite, noble class or to a scholastic church.
Joan of Arc by Jules Bastien Leplage
Joan’s life ends in ashes. But in a certain respect, it also begins in the ashes. When she was born, sometime around the Feast of the Epiphany in January of 1412, the people of Europe were in psycho-social pressure-cooker. The Black Plague had arrived in the 1330s, killing nearly 50 million people and 60 percent of Europe’s population. The pestilence was immune both to Christian prayer and the deep-rooted folkloric healing practices that pre-dated Christianity. No matter how hard you prayed, everyone in your village still died. And often in a period of hours. One of the most terrifying and gruesome qualities of the plague was the speed with which it developed and decimated a human body, the space between infection, first symptoms, and death sometimes being reported as a manner of hours.
To speak of the coming apocalypse is a position of privilege. Apocalypse is always perspectival. It is always happening to someone, to some being, somewhere. There are many people who live in post-apocalyptic worlds, the ashes left behind by disease and colonial violence and ecocide. Following the plague, waves of anti-Semitic violence cascaded across Europe followed by a general crisis religion leading to the legal procedures that would produce the Inquisition. While the early Middle Ages had seen a plethora of mystics, saints, and religious sects, the period post plague can be characterized by a frenzy to establish orthodoxy. In a traumatized cultural body, the survival mechanism was a desire to establish stable value systems and order. Unfortunately, these attempts to create order were inherently violent and overseen by an ecclesiastical white male population, convinced that the apocalyptic plague and general discord was the fault of anyone not white, male, wealthy, and church affiliated.
Let us re-root Joan as a post-apocalyptic figure. Not only does she come from the rubble of the Black Plague, so does she come from even earlier than that - from the Celtic cinders still smoldering under the bad paint job of Romanized Christianity. The historian Francois Le Brun has questioned whether “the French countryside was ever really Christian prior to the seventeenth century”. It has been well-documented that the popular religion of pre-modern Europe was practiced by an illiterate population who had syncretized their earlier Celtic practices into Christianity. This religion was practiced by people who could not read and knew the bible only as fairytales misheard and recombined with other local legends. It was a relational religion, maintained in breath by communal storytelling that included village and family folklore. It was contextual and earth-focused and highlighted a “cult of saints” that were updated tutelary land deities that pre-dated Christianity, surviving when they were given superficial Christian makeovers. Sacred springs and groves and hilltops were included in the new religion, but still carried stories and significance from older pre-Christian Celtic rites and rituals. Specifically in the Meuse valley, in Domrémy, where Joan was from, we see a religion that while called Christianity, was far from what the noble, educated elite would characterize as Christianity. It is deeply important, then, to realize that while Joan entered France, and entered into ecclesiastical courts with the academic apparatus of the church, she was unknowingly entering into a very different sort of religion than the one within which she was raised. This dissonance proved crucial and tragic. There were effectively two different religions practiced at that point in Europe: oral folkloric Christianity – animist and deeply syncretic with older Celtic belief systems - and the elite increasingly scholastic Christianity of the educated nobility and the church.
This dissonance sets Joan up for a series of misunderstanding and mismatches in her trial. A perfect example occurs when she is asked whether she would submit to the militant church. Joan came from a folk tradition where the individual’s mystical experience was both allowed and encouraged. But the church was increasingly wary of charismatic individuals and groups that challenged established order and suggested that the church was not a necessary intermediary to God. Joan unknowingly was stepping into radical terrain when she stated after being asked, “Will you refer yourself to the decision of God?”
From Louis Maurice Boutet de Monvel’s Maid of Heaven
“I refer myself to God who sent me, to Our Lady, and to all the Saints in Paradise. And it my opinion, it is all one, God and the Church; and one should make no difficulty about it. Why do you make a difficulty?”
Joan didn’t understand why it was considered both spiritually and politically radical to assert that she could access God without the church because…God and the church were interchangeable in her eyes: heavenly and exceeding any human institution, available in any spring or holy grove. By spiritualizing the church, Joan unwittingly suggested that the human church and its apostolic apparatus did not matter. We can assume that it was out of ignorance that she was aligning herself with the radical propositions of other heretical movements at the time such as John Wycliffe and the Lollards and the rhetoric that had inspired the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 in England. We must remember that following the Black Plague there were a series of violent peasant uprisings and that in the eyes of the elite, ecclesiastical revolt was always synonymous with political and economic upheaval. When Joan refused to answer multiple questions at her trial and to make vows, for fear of betraying her voices, she was positioning herself not only as a spiritual radical but as a social rebel, resonating with the Lollard’s anti-authoritarian refusal to take oaths.
But let us pause here. There are many portraits of Joan as valiant martyr, as feminist icon, as courageous mystic. As someone who has studied and loved Joan for many years, I want to plant her back in her context and her humanity and her complexity. I do not think it buys us anything to fetishize her heroism or her tragic death. Rather, she may offer more to us if we look at her compassionately as someone caught in a socio-religious political storm making good and bad decisions simultaneously, who died too young and has been simplified and coopted by nationalist and religious movements. Let us peer through the cracks in the armor to the living, breathing being.
First, it is worth naming the roles she did genuinely occupy during her brief 15th century life. She was a social radical. And Joan was a true medieval mystic, informed by a rich inheritance of ecstatic visionaries and prophets who had normalized their involvement in ecclesiastical and monarchial affairs in the preceding centuries. Kings and queens often called on visionaries for political advice. This strain of spiritual individualism, directly inspired by a dialogue with God, although initially sanctioned by the church when it safely occurred in convents or religious institutions, was quickly becoming a dangerous vocation. Christianity, post plague, informed by the rise of literacy, was increasingly defined by stable intellectual categories: dogma and canon law, and a well-defined liturgy available only to a male priesthood. The individual revelation classical of female mystics was seen a direct threat to the order of the church militant. It didn’t help that women, exiled from scholastic faith, often located their spiritual experiences in the body’s ecstasies and agonies. By the 1400s the church was actively working to suppress female mystics and wisewomen. The Beguine movement, an order of laywomen who practiced miraculous cures, levitation, and mystical meditation outside of ecclesiastical male supervision, were officially outlawed by Pope Clement V in 1311. It is important to note that these women did not self-identify as witches. Rather they truly believed they were Christians, accessing the divine without the meddling of a priesthood that was, by the lower classes, often seen as overly preoccupied with money and rules. Prior to Joan’s life, Marguerite Porete, another French female mystic who received visions of Jesus, was executed in 1310, and her trial set the template for how Joan would also be misinterpreted and framed as heterodox. Like Joan, Marguerite’s testimony was lifted out of context and pasted together to produce a heretical portrait that was then sent to a theological commission for judgement. Marguerite was incorrectly portrayed as saying that nature could grant her all that she asked. This statement was radical and alarming to church authorities for several different reasons. One, it implied a pre-Christian Celtic affinity for working with elements and commanding them through magical means. Two, it implied that there was no need for the mediation of priesthood, liturgy, or sacraments, as the divine was already freely available in the natural world. This was a conscious misrepresentation of Porete who did not oppose what she called “the Church of the little”, but, instead, stressed the greater importance of spiritual self-sufficiency.
Marguerite Porete
By the time Joan was born, proclaiming individual revelation was decidedly risky. But there was still some safety in the strain of mysticism that inspired a monastic retreat from society. Many mystics from the Middle Ages are characterized by their ecstatic inaction. Yes, they were visionary, but they rarely let those vision manifest as political or social activity. While Joan’s visions overlap with those of Porete, Hildegard de Binge, Margery Kempe, and the Beguine laywomen, her response to these visions diverge dramatically from the norm.
The question that is most interesting is not the legitimacy of Joan’s mystical experiences, but why or how her visions focused on the crisis in the French Monarchy? The Hundred Year war alongside the plague, famine, and social strife, had left both the nobility and the peasantry cynical about France’s future. The Dauphin’s plight and the question of his illegitimacy were well-known, but he did not have outspoken support from either noblemen or peasants. There was a collective fatigue following the loss of the battle of Agincourt. The peasantry were hard-pressed and over-taxed on both sides of the conflict. Their lands were looted by both armies. Outlaws terrorized them.
This war-ragged reality was not conceptual to Joan and neither was it biased towards France, which makes her own decision to cleave to the disgraced dauphin compelling. She knew that her town had been largely unprotected by French forces. She knew several people who had died in the conflict. Her cousin by marriage was shot down in front of the village church of Sermaize. In 1419 an outlaw squired had captured 33 men just miles from Domrémy and Joan’s father and his friends were forced sign an agreement with the outlaw in exchange for safety. And in 1428, by the time Joan had decided to claim her role, Vaucouleurs just 19 kilometers north of Domrémy was under attack by Anglo-Burgundian forces. Domrémy was raided by Burgundian troops shortly after and, for a time her family had to seek refuge in Neufchâteau to escape violence. When they returned it was to a town that had been burned to the ground. But what was it that dilated Joan’s natural worry about violence and civil unrest into an epic and heroic vision of military redemption through her individual intervention?
Banner that Joan had designed to carry into battle reading Jesus Maria
We can interrupt a saccharine image of Joan as a beatific martyr, bent on saving her country, when we realize that she was a canny young woman who grew up in a culture that put great stake in prophecy. Part of the reason why she was so readily accepted by Charles, by the nobility, and by the army was because there was a prophetic tradition stretching back 500 years to Bede, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Merlin, St. Euglide, and then rearticulated by the contemporary mystic Marie Robin, that a maid would come from the Lorraine to save France. Visionary states are often abstract, rejecting easy interpretation. Joan herself struggled to explain her mysticism when pressed to vocalize the experience on trial. It is interesting to imagine a young Joan in her father’s garden in the summer of 1924 receiving what she would later describe as a great light and “points of light”, planting the ineffable in the contextual soil of these folkloric prophecies. Was she initially prompted to save France? Or did she readily interpret the mystical intervention as a divine sign that she was the maid in question?
We hear by her own words in her trial that her father too had prophetic dreams and that many times he had dreamed that she took off with “men-at-arms”. For him, this could only mean Joan was a traveling prostitute. He couldn’t see the other much wilder possibility. That she would be leading those men-at-arms.
This leads to one of the first – as I am calling them – cracks in the armor of the fetishized maid. Joan was powerful not because she was chosen by God, but because she actively chose her own fate for better and for worse. Mysticism when it is represented in the world of language and the world of symbolic action always requires translation, it is always flavored and biased by the instrument from which it emanates. Joan, when her visionary strings were plucked, chose to play the song of militaristic victory. And we honor her, not by making her divine vessel, but by understanding her own entanglement with the socio-political context of her time. As anthropologist I.M. Lewis states, “mystical experience, like any other experience, is grounded in and must relate to the social environment in which it is achieved. It thus invariable bears the stamp of the culture and society in which it arises.” I would add that is also bares the stamp of the individual and bodily ecosystem it chooses as its mouthpiece.
When we give Joan her agency to choose back, she shakes loose the docility of the saint, the tragic romance of the martyr, the dour stricture of divine vessel, and steps onto the shaky ground of rebellious visionary. Joan made choices. And those choices were morally complex.
For one, she chose to stay a virgin, defending herself in village court against a potential suitor, and yet when she rode into France she did not call herself “vierge” for virgin, but styled herself as the “la pucelle”. Pucelle is a complicated term that designated the passage into sexual maturity. By summon the transitional state from girlhood to motherhood, Joan portrayed herself not as a static virgin, kept separate for God, but as a potent and dynamic figure in movement, in transition. Pucelle as a word scintillates. It is as much a verb as it is a nominal. Joan made the choice to position herself “between” countries, genders, mystical states, and social classes. The pucelle was transitioning between girl and woman. Between woman and man. Between the Lorraine and France. Between peasant and nobleman.
There are many compelling feminist interpretations of Joan’s choice to dress like a man. There are also contemporary interpretations of Joan as a non-binary or trans figure that are equally compelling. All must be equally considered. Applying modern identity valuations onto historical figures from the distant past always requires a certain amount of updating. It is more interesting to me to ask how Joan self-conceptualized as a 14th century peasant living inside a radically different belief sphere. Rather than uplift one of these modern interpretations over the other, I will seek to contextualize Joan in the very real social and practical implications of choosing to wear armor and male clothing.
One very simple reason often disregarded in more romantic interpretations, is that it very practically prevented rape. Male garb was harder to remove than female garb and it also worked to desexualize Joan. It made her job as a political and military figure physically and practically easier. Later on, in prison, it quite simply kept men from easily taking off her trousers to rape her. On numerous occasions she asserted that this was one of the reasons she wore it. While in prison she recounted numerous times that rape had been attempted, and specifically said that she had not been allowed to “lace her trousers tightly enough” to prevent rape. In fact, it was when she buckled and put on women’s clothing that we know with some certainty, that she was finally successfully raped. Valorous and romantic stories of Joan’s martyrdom erase the ragged crisis in faith she actually experienced. Her confessor Martin Lavendu confirmed that rape had been attempted against her during imprisonment and that after putting on women’s clothes again an English Lord had been given access to her room. She confessed to Martin it was because of rape that she had resumed male clothing. Isambart de la Pierre, a priest who tried to aid Joan throughout her trial, putting his own life at risk, reported seeing her ravaged and destroyed from some type of encounter. He saw her “weeping, and disfigured” and said she had been raped.
We can claim Joan then not as a figure of purity, but briefly, as a survivor, attempting to update her conception of victory and divine vocation in the midst of meaning-deflating violence.
We have forgotten that one of her biggest rebellions was not so much one of gender, but one of class. She did not put on male peasant garb. She chose to put on male militaristic accessories. Wearing armor is bigger than just a rejection of the narrow ideas of femininity of the time. It was illegal to peasantry and equivalent to putting on nobility. It was a sumptuary offense. Only nobles were by law allowed to wear armor. To be a knight was not a profession, it was a hereditary position granted only to men with money and noble blood. The 14th century and 15th century saw waves of peasant revolt and powerful outlaws who often signaled their subversion of the dominant order by breaking sumptuary dress laws. Joan was invoking this radical trope when she put on armor as a peasant.
What set her apart from other contemporary visionaries of which there were many, primarily female, was the extent to which her visions centered dukes, captains, and kings. Joan desperately wanted into the “boy’s club”. And she often denounced other female figures. Joan, once she had left Domrémy exited connection to her social class.
Moreover, needing our heroine’s tragic death to come quickly after her victories, we gloss the complicated middle act of Joan’s life. After her first victories and coronation of Charles she was free to go home. She had financial reward and was a popular figure among the upper and lower classes. There is always a moment in a tragedy when a different decision could be made. To take the decision away from Joan is, again, to rob her of her complexity. Instead, she chose to stay among people who were not her blood or friends or social peers. People who saw her as a pawn to be used and then discarded.
We can mourn Joan the human girl and reject the monumental vision of a virgin martyr. While we can love her for her bravery, her vision, her candor and spiritual clarity, we can also weep at her youth and naivete. Her new upper class companions were not people who would fight for her after she had stopped winning battles. While she readily inserted herself into courtly life and made rich and noble friends, she did not readily create intersectional alliances with other mystics and visionaries. She saw herself as indispensable and solely responsible for the fate of France. It was this attachment to individual vision and purpose that both propelled her to power and spelled her downfall. Unlike in a tightknit village community where every-body was your god-father or godmother or actual kin, the courtiers had no deep-rooted spiritual or class loyalty to Joan. They found her amusing and enjoyed the benefits of her militaristic victories. But the minute she became burdensome and unwieldy, crying for more battles, for a crusade, they disappeared. No one came to her aid or made a serious attempt to save her after she had been captured by the Burgundians and then the English. She had played her role. At the end of the day, she was a peasant and she was a girl. They were happy enough to have another country dispose of her and to wash their hands. It is dangerous to pretend that individuals win battles. And they alone save countries. It is dangerous to pretend an individual person can save themselves.
I wonder what Joan was thinking that last month, promised victory by her invisible counsel, but facing the sober reality that her idea of victory and her council’s idea of victory might not match. We know for one that she tried to escape or commit suicide early in her captivity, jumping from a sixty foot tower and miraculously surviving. She must have been desperate, physically ill, and unnerved. But we forge this because of how remarkably articulate and composed she is in the trial transcripts. Let us try for once to remember the girl that thought someone – be it a king or a god – was going to come and save her.
Movies show us Joan going to her death heroically. But she did not court martyrdom and was increasingly frantic as she realized her voices assurance of victory might not conform to the victory she had imagined for herself. When her counsel shifted and Michael the angel of war was exchanged for Gabriel the angel of acceptance and compassion, she spooked, asking the angel, “Will I burn?” She reported that he said to her, “Wait upon him in all your doings.” As she approached her execution, it seems she experienced a radical crisis in the personal faith for which she so well-loved. I think it is more compassionate to the human being to allow her this personal apostasy.
It is in the places where we let go of a story that is killing us, that escape becomes possible. Joan jumped from the tower. She put back on women’s clothes. She signed a confession. These are not her moments of lapse. But her moments of radical self-preservation. I am not interested in the bravery it takes to assert proudly that God has sent you. I am interested in the ragged bravery it takes to admit to yourself that you could be wrong, you might not understand the story.
For a mystic who had repeatedly claimed that she was sent by God and promised paradise, in her final hour, we do not see this personal certainty. Rather when she was visited by the priest Pierre Maurice in her cell, she asked, “Where shall I be tonight?” The priest was dumbfounded by the question as this was the same girl who had courageously defended her divine vocation and certainty of salvation in front of an ecclesiastical court of 40 grown men. “Do you not trust God?” Maurice asked.
I ask that we look not at the martyr on the pyre or the valorous hero on horseback, but the shivering girl in the cell, awaiting her death by fire, and realizing that her council of divine aid were not, in fact, sending aid.
I then want to ask us a question. Why do we need saints and martyrs? Why do we need Joan to be a hero? Or a martyr?
What makes Joan extraordinary, is what makes her inappropriate as a contemporary idol or role model. Her version of hyper-individuality and self-revelation was radical in 15th century France, but is that what we need in an age where hyper-individuality as wedded to capitalism and anthropocentrism is already normalized?
Joan would still have been a hero if she had gone home before being captured. She would still be remembered for crowning the king. For winning back Orleans and turning the tides of the Hundred Year War. And yet her commitment to individual glory guided her ever deeper into a patriarchal death trap. A fact that drops out of most romantic accounts of her life was her desire to “kill the Saracens” and lead a Crusade against the Holy Land. It was that desire that kept her ensconced in courtly life well past her initial victories.
What seems most fascinating to me is that Joan was never suited to monological narratives – be they political or spiritual. She did not see one saint or one God. While she believed she was practicing monotheistic Christianity, she was deeply informed by a pantheistic, folkloric tradition epitomized by the cult of saints. Instead of one deity, she referred to her “counsel” – a group of saints that modern research have shown us were all updated pagan figures given Christian makeovers, Saint Michael, Saint Margaret, and Saint Catherine.
In Joan’s trial her association with a fairy tree and with her saints caused her strife. But it is also this understanding of Joan as being representative of a nature-reverent tradition where saints are the manifestations of oak trees and sacred springs, woven loosely into a Christian narrative, that can offer us a foothold.
I do not think Joan as hero or martyr is healthy for us right now. But Joan gives us something radical. We can stand up to patriarchy, to groups of blood-thirty naysayers knowing we are never individuals. We are always holding within us a counsel, just like Joan. On a practical level, our bodies are ecosystems composed of other beings, container more bacterial and fungal cells than human cells. We are built from carbon that once lived inside a hummingbird heart, a glacier, a cosmic storm eons ago.
Aside from mystical interventions, we all have a counsel. A team of voices with visions and advice on how to save not our human nation, but our entangled ecosystem. Our counsel will not be heavenly, but earthly. It is our actual web of animals, fungi, insects, trees, invasive species, geological formations. And unlike abstract angels, these beings will actually show up if we show up for them – as our friends, our medicine, our food, our shelter.
We can reclaim Joan as spokesperson for the forest. For the fairy trees and ecological saints. The polyphonic chorus of inhuman voices that need to be listened to and inserted back into the discussion. How can we look at the whole forest as our council? The times are perilous. But we will not be saved be heroes or angels or virginal maids. It is time for intersectionality and for inter-species collaboration. For rhizomatic counsels rather than hierarchical priesthoods.
While no one came to save Joan in July of 1431, we can save her now from bad stories that gloss over the pain and complexity of her experience. We can honor the texture and tenacity of her life instead of her death. We can reclaim the wild landscapes and animist practices that inspired her visions.
There will be no savior for any one of us. No personal salvation. No single person or species is going to make it alone. We need counsels of beings. Many different perspectives.
No one is coming to save us. Everyone is coming to save everyone.
Sources:
Joan of Arc: Heretic, Mystic, Shaman by Anne Barstow
Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured by Kathryn Harrison
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman
The Trial Transcript of Joan of Arc
Joan of Arc by Mary Gordon
Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federeci
Joan of Arc: La Pucelle collected transcripts and documents edited by Craig Taylor
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I am overwhelmed with gratitude by how many of you have showed up here to support my work and widen my thinking. Right now you are literally keeping me alive and funding the out-of-pocket medical expenses that allow me to receive IV nutrition and connective tissue specialists.
I am grateful in a way that is wide and deep and low. I hope you can feel some sonorous note of it - the hum and grind of ice relaxing under the sun - in your body. I am sending the song of my thanks your way. I love you all so much.
Thank you for this nuanced perspective! And of course for tying it back to the plight and opportunity of our time.
She is so much richer and more wonderful in all her messy human complexity. Thank you for sharing this with us.