Joan of Arc: Neither Prophet nor Puppet

Joan of Arc was sainted by the Catholic Church nearly 500 years after she was burned at the stake.  During the canonization proceedings, the Devil’s Advocate made a compelling case against Joan’s sainthood, arguing among other things that she had recanted her beliefs and died for political rather than religious reasons.  In her own time, only a few people described her as saintly, although most commented on her piety.
This paper will examine the traditional view that Joan was a prophetess sent by God and her saints on a mission to save France from English occupation.  While the number of female prophets in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries who spoke about the French kings or the Hundred Years War was notable, I will argue that Joan was not one of them.  Another view, expressed at the time by Bishop Jean Jouffroy and mentioned in the Commentaries of Pius II, was that Joan was a creation of the French court.  This is more plausible, for Charles VII’s mother-in-law had close connections to the region around Domremy.  Why else would a seventeen-year-old peasant girl have been put at the head of an army?  I believe that careful stagecraft allowed the court to ‘create’ the Maid of Orléans.  At the same, if the court hoped that Joan would be a figurehead, they were soon disabused of the notion. She showed an uncanny knack for warfare along with a belligerence that put her at odds with French policy less than six months after her first victory. A warrior rather than a prophet, she allowed people to believe the legends that swirled around her even as those who had created her realized they could not control her. Joan’s conviction that only her way was the right way led to her capture and execution.