Vita Sackville-West wrote Saint Joan of Arc in 1936 at the age of forty-four, and had, at that point, already been writing for thirty years. At fourteen, Sackville-West published her first book, and at fourteen Joan of Arc first heard the voices. Joan was seventeen when she took command of the armies of France--a peasant girl in the early fifteenth century in charge of a nation's forces. At nineteen she was captured by the British and tried as a witch by a church court. Before her twentieth birthday she was burned at the stake. In 1920 she was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church as a saint. In a clever, brisk voice, Vita Sackville-West tells the triumphant story of a French peasant girl raised in a country torn apart by the Hundred Years' War who rose from poverty to military greatness. With dazzling insight and clarity, Sackville-West breathes new life into Joan of Arc's beautiful and tragic story.
"Although France would be lost by a woman, a maiden would save it" (French prophecy during the 1400s). Joan of Arc was that maiden, and her courage, dedication, eloquence and martyrdom make her an enduring inspiration. Acclaimed author Tabatha Yeatts depicts Saint Joan s remarkable story, from her first experience hearing sacred voices to her canonization. Learn all about Joan of Arc s childhood in war-torn France; ride with the young warrior into battle after battle and see how she helped a king win his rightful crown; watch as she falls into British hands and suffers an unjust trial for heresy and find out about her terror-filled final days and how, finally, her reputation was gloriously, posthumously restored.
The fame of Joan of Arc began in her lifetime and, though it has dipped a little now and then, she has never vanished from view. Her image acts as a seismograph for the shifts and settlings of personal and political ideals: Joan of Arc is the heroine every movement has wanted as their figurehead. In France, anti-semitic, xenophobic, extreme right parties have claimed her since the Action Francaise in the 19th century. By contrast, Socialists, feminists, and liberal Catholics rallied to her as the champion of the dispossessed and the wrongly accused. Joan of Arc has also played a crucial role in changing visions of female heroism. She has proved an inexhaustible source of inspiration for writers, playwrights, film-makers, performers, and composers. In a single, brief life, several of the essential mythopoiec characteristics that throughout history have defined the charismatic leader and saint are powerfully and intensely condensed. Even while Joan of Arc was still alive, but far more so after her death, the heroic part of her story sparked narratives of all kinds, in pictures, ballads, plays, and also satires. This was only heightened in 1841-9 by the publication of the Inquisition trial which had examined Joan for witchcraft and heresy. The transcript of the interrogations gives us the voice of this young woman across the centuries with almost unbearable immediacy; her spirit leaps from the page, uncompromising in its frankness, good sense, courage, and often breathtaking in its simple effectiveness. Joan of Arc into one of the most fully and vividly present personalities in history, about whom a great more is known, in her own words and at first hand, than is, for example, about Shakespeare. However, this has not stopped the flow of fictions and fantasies about her. Marina Warner analyses the symbolism of the Maid in her own time and in her rich afterlife in popular culture. The cultural expressions are part of an ongoing historical struggle to own the symbol - you could say, the brand. In a new preface to her study, Marina Warner takes stock of the continuing contention, in politics and culture, for this powerful symbol of virtue. Joan of Arc's multiple resurrections and transformations show how vigorous the need for figures like her remains, and how crucial it is to meet that need with thoughtfulness. She argues that abandoning the search to identify heroes and define them, out of a kind of high-minded distaste for propaganda, lets dangerous political factions manipulate them to their own ends. When Marine Le Pen calls on Joan of Arc's name, she needs to be confronted about her bad faith and her abuse of history.
Joan of Arc is an unusual saint. Canonized in 1920 as a virgin, she died in 1431 as a condemned heretic. Uneducated, militant, and youthful, she obeyed 'Voices' that counselled her to pursue an unprecedented vocation. The various trial records provide a wealth of evidence about how Joan and others understood her spiritual life. This collection explores multiple facets of Joan's prayerful life. Two-thirds of the essays focus on Joan in her own time; the later chapters study Joan's formative influence upon modern women. Taken together, these essays offer new perspectives on the heroism of Joan's original way of sanctity.
The transcripts of Joan of Arc's trial for heresy at Rouen in 1431 and the minutes of her interrogation have long been recognized as our best source of information about the Maid of Orleans. Historians generally view these legal texts as a precise account of Joan's words and, by extension, her beliefs. Focusing on the minutes recorded by clerics, however, Karen Sullivan challenges the accuracy of the transcript. In The Interrogation of Joan of Arc, she re-reads the record not as a perfect reflection of a historical personality's words, but as a literary text resulting from the collaboration between Joan and her interrogators. Sullivan provides an illuminating and innovative account of Joan's trial and interrogation, placing them in historical, social, and religious context. In the fifteenth century, interrogation was a method of truth-gathering identified not with people like Joan, who was uneducated, but with clerics, like those who tried her. When these clerics questioned Joan, they did so as scholastics educated at the University of Paris, as judges and assistants to judges, and as pastors trained in hearing confessions. The Interrogation of Joan of Arc traces Joan's conflicts with her interrogators not to differing political allegiances, but to fundamental differences between clerical and lay cultures. Sullivan demonstrates that the figure depicted in the transcripts as Joan of Arc is a complex, multifaceted persona that results largely from these cultural differences. Discerning and innovative, this study suggests a powerful new interpretive model and redefines our sense of Joan and her time.
Father Daniel Rankin and Claire Quintal have translated the original French manuscript biography of Joan of Arc, adding as well the first English translation of a brief chronicle of great moments in Joan's career. The original authors of both documents remain anonymous, although the author of the manuscript biography gives a clue to the time it was written. He explains that he compiled the work “By order of the King, Louis XII of that name.” That places the writing before 1515, the year Louis XII died. This edition includes not only the fully translated manuscript of the biography and chronicle of Joan of Arc, but expert commentary and explanation by Rankin and Quintal, who have also retained the literary tone of the sixteenth-century text. An appendix offers the first text in English about Joan's close friend, Ambrose de Loré.
Joan of Arc: The Mystic Legacy provides an intimate portrait of the enigmatic young woman whose heroic life story has provoked ongoing controversy for nearly six centuries. Fresh insights, gleaned from the author's full decade of research and three field trips to France, shed new light on the essential nature of the girl whose faith-based acts of courage altered the outcome of the Hundred Years War. Thirty-nine exclusive full color photographs of historic sites breathe life into the text, and allow time to collapse. January 6, 1412, the six hundredth anniversary of Joan's birth, will be celebrated around the world throughout 2012.Examining the external and internal forces that shaped Joan's well documented life, a discussion of esoteric elements found on nearly each page of the historic records is carefully framed in evidence that has not been plumbed to these depths, until now. Joan's own words speak with clarity from her trial testimony as the most trustworthy resource for understanding her perceptions, motivations and behavior. The visions and voices she identified as the three spiritual guides who were with her constantly, from the age of thirteen until her death, are traced into the roots of Judeo Christian antiquity; Her interaction with them is examined through the inclusive lens of contemporary cross-cultural mysticism.In his essay on the universality of her story, The Joan in All of Us, John Steinbeck said that everyone who studies the trial testimonies comes to find a "corroboration of his convictions, no matter what they may be." He identified the source of our fascination with her as "....the miracle, the worrisome nagging fact. Joan is a fairy tale so improbable that, without the most complete historical record and evidence, it could not be believed. If a writer were to make up the story it would be howled down as an insult to credulity."In Joan of Arc: The Mystic Legacy, each stage of Joan's transformation is traced, from her childhood in the rural marshlands of Lorraine to the halls of power where she claimed her right to command the French army and lead her troops to victory in Orleans and beyond. This unique exploration of Joan of Arc's mortality and transcendence documents the rise and fall of the military leader whose prophecies were ultimately fulfilled.
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Executioner's Knife; Or, Joan of Arc" by Eugène Sue. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
Joan of Arc was a young farm girl who claimed to have heard the voices of saints. She led an army in many battles to drive the English out of France and put the rightful King on the throne. After she was captured, the King and the armies did nothing to help her. She was sold to the English and put on trial for crimes against the Church. Joan was convicted and burned at the stake. She was nineteen years old when she died. Find out about the life of this girl who fought for France against the English, and was burned at the stake for wearing men's pants! Ages 8 and up. LearningIsland.com believes in the value of children practicing reading for 15 minutes every day. Our 15-Minute Books give children lots of fun, exciting choices to read, from classic stories, to mysteries, to books of knowledge. Many books are appropriate for hi-lo readers. Open the world of reading to a child by having them read for 15 minutes a day.
The extraordinary story of the Maid placed in the France of her time, presenting her and her contemporaries in all their humanity to the general reader. Who was this notorious and enigmatic country girl, on trial for her life?
This eBook features the unabridged text of ‘Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc’ from the bestselling edition of ‘The Complete Works of Mark Twain’. Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. The Delphi Classics edition of Twain includes original annotations and illustrations relating to the life and works of the author, as well as individual tables of contents, allowing you to navigate eBooks quickly and easily. eBook features: * The complete unabridged text of ‘Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc’ * Beautifully illustrated with images related to Twain’s works * Individual contents table, allowing easy navigation around the eBook * Excellent formatting of the textPlease visit www.delphiclassics.com to learn more about our wide range of titles
