Joan of Arc

Okay, confession time: I dismissed Joan of Arc for most of my life.

Here's what I actually knew about her before I was maybe 24: French. Armor. Burned at the stake. Something about hearing voices. She's basically on every "historical badass women" listicle between Cleopatra and Amelia Earhart, and that's exactly where I'd filed her—as a symbol people wave around to win arguments, not as a real person.

Also? I assumed the whole story was Catholic nationalism dressed up as religion. A teenage peasant girl hears saints and goes off to save the French king. It sounded suspiciously convenient for everyone who needed France to win.

Then a friend who was doing medieval studies shoved a translation of Joan's trial transcript at me. "Just read it," she said. "It's not long."

Reader, I sat with that thing for three days and couldn't shake it.

Who I Was Looking For (Before I Found Who She Was)

Here's the weird thing about going into someone's story with assumptions: you end up not seeing the actual person.

I went in looking for a symbol. I found a nineteen-year-old girl.

Joan of Arc was born around 1412 in Domrémy, a tiny village in northeastern France. She couldn't read or write. She knew her prayers—the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Creed—and she knew how to sew. That was the extent of her formal education.

At thirteen, she started hearing voices. She said they came with light, and over time she identified them as St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret. (If you're already skeptical, hold that—we'll get there.) The voices gave her an assignment that sounds completely unhinged even by the standards of people who hear divine voices: go to the Dauphin, help him be crowned king, drive the English out of France.

And she went.

Not immediately. She spent two years trying to convince people to help her, being mostly laughed at. Then she found a knight who believed her, traveled across enemy-occupied France in the dead of winter, walked into the royal court, and told the king God had sent her.

He gave her an army.

Seventeen years old. Given an army.

What happened next has been analyzed, mythologized, and debated for six hundred years. The short version: she helped break the siege of Orléans, won several more battles, stood beside Charles VII at his coronation in Reims, and genuinely changed the course of the Hundred Years' War.

Then she was captured, sold to the English, and tried by a church court for heresy.

The Transcript

I can't overstate what reading the trial transcript does to you.

It's over two hundred pages. Months of interrogation. And what you see is more than a hundred trained clergy—bishops, theologians, canon lawyers, university professors from Paris—spending enormous resources trying to catch one teenage girl in a theological error.

They try to trap her:

"Are you in a state of grace?"

This is a loaded question. Claiming you are is presumptuous; denying it is admitting sin. There's no right answer.

Her response: "If I am not, may God put me there; if I am, may God keep me there."

I read that and sat back in my chair. This is a girl who couldn't read. Who had no formal education. And she just handled that like it was nothing.

They ask about her voices. Over and over. What language do they speak? How do you know they're from God? Will you submit to the church's judgment about them?

She keeps her ground: she will submit to God. She will not deny what she heard.

The questions about her clothing take up an almost comical amount of the transcript. Why do you wear men's clothes? Why won't you put on a dress?

Her answers are practical: she needs armor to fight, men's clothing is safer in a military camp, her voices told her to dress this way. What she can't quite say—because she doesn't have the vocabulary for it, and also because it would get her killed—is that the clothing represented something. To put on women's clothes was to put on the assigned role. To put on armor was to say: I'm not playing that.

They convicted her. She recanted. They put her back in the same prison with the same threatening guards, and four days later she took the recantation back.

They burned her.

The Weird Part I Wasn't Expecting

I went in thinking I understood this story. I thought it was about gender politics and institutional corruption—which it is. But I wasn't expecting to care about the voices.

I'm not religious. Or I wasn't, at the time I first read this. And the voices are the part of Joan's story that makes everyone uncomfortable for different reasons: skeptics think it's mental illness or fraud, believers are nervous about claiming certainty either way, and the church itself spent decades tied up about whether she was a mystic or a heretic.

But here's what struck me: by every measure the church used to evaluate mystical experience, Joan's voices passed. They led to humility, not pride. They never contradicted Scripture. They produced unmistakably good fruit—France was saved, the rightful king was crowned. And when the court pressured her to deny them, she couldn't. Not even to save her life.

Whether or not you believe the voices were supernatural, you have to grapple with what it means that she couldn't renounce them. She tried. She signed a recantation. And then four days later she took it back, knowing exactly what it would cost her.

I don't have a neat theological explanation for what Joan heard. I'm still working through what I even think about religious experience. But I can't explain away a nineteen-year-old girl dying for something she didn't have to believe.

The Part That Still Bothers Me

The church canonized Joan of Arc in 1920. Saint Joan of Arc.

The same church that burned her.

Twenty-five years after her execution, they retried her and declared the original verdict invalid. They were also, it's worth noting, doing this partly for political reasons—the English alliance had collapsed and rehabilitating Joan served France's interests. Complicated.

I've been trying to figure out what to do with this. On the one hand: good, the right call was eventually made. On the other hand: she was dead. And the institutional church spent the five centuries between her death and her canonization continuing to teach that women couldn't have authority, couldn't preach, couldn't lead.

I'm not going to tie this up with a bow. I genuinely don't know how I feel about institutions that do the right thing five hundred years too late. I'm still working on it.

What I keep coming back to is this: Joan's story is a pretty direct argument that the institution is not always the voice of God. Sometimes God is in the peasant girl. Sometimes the bishops are wrong. And people in power have a remarkable talent for not knowing the difference until it's convenient for them to know.

What I Actually Think Now

I think Joan of Arc was a real person who had a real experience she couldn't explain or deny, who did something extraordinary because she believed she was supposed to, and who faced an unjust death with more courage than most of us will ever need to find.

I think her story is genuinely about gender and power—a woman claiming authority she wasn't supposed to have was threatening in ways that a man doing the same thing wouldn't have been. The trial makes that embarrassingly obvious.

And I think she matters now not because she's a convenient symbol, but because she was a specific, irreducible person. The transcript preserves her voice. She's in there—quick, stubborn, tired, scared, holding on to something she couldn't let go of even when it killed her.

There's something in that I can't stop thinking about.

If You Want to Explore Further

If you're curious and want the primary source: the trial transcript is available in English translation and it's genuinely readable. It's also genuinely upsetting.

Joan of Arc: A History by Helen Castor and The Virgin Warrior by Larissa Juliet Taylor are both good modern biographies that don't sentimentalize her.

If you're interested in the spiritual discernment angle—how you tell authentic religious experience from pathology or fraud—that's actually a fascinating rabbit hole. The church has real criteria for this, and Joan's case gets more interesting the more carefully you look at it.

I'm still figuring out what I think about all of it. But I'm glad I stopped dismissing her long enough to actually look.