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The Interrogation of Joan of Arc

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One can only be astounded by this book's approach to the subject. Historians have never considered the transcript of Joan of Arc's Condemnation Trial to be our "best source of information" about Joan: that distinction is granted to the transcript of the posthumous Rehabilitation Trial held in the 1450s, shortly after the English were driven from Rouen about 20 years after Joan's death. It is this transcript which has given us most of the details of Joan's life, related by 115 witnesses ranging from the villagers she grew up with to the clergy who took part in the trial which condemned her - including the three court notaries (Guillaume Manchon, Guillaume Colles, and Nicolas Taquel) who drew up the transcript of the Condemnation Trial itself. The latter document has long been known to be largely fraudulent, not due to the findings of modern "literary analysis" (as this book would claim) but because the above witnesses testified that significant portions were deliberately falsified on the orders of the presiding judge, Pierre Cauchon, in order to cast Joan in the worst possible light. Many of her statements were modified from their original form or deliberately mistranslated into Latin; the section at the end of the document was entirely fictional; her appeals to the Pope and the Council of Basle were edited out of the record, as was her chief rationale for retaining male clothing (i.e., she was being subjected to rape attempts in prison, and therefore didn't dare give up the security provided by her laced pants and tunic "for fear of being violated in the night", to quote the phrase used by Guillaume Manchon). Such testimony has always been the standard primary source used by the historians who are considered experts on Joan of Arc - from Jules Quicherat in the 19th century to Pierre Champion and Regine Pernoud in our own era. Why, then, are there books (such as this one) which appear to take no notice of such an important source, a source which, unlike the Condemnation Trial record, is both credible and exhaustive: DuParc's classic transcription takes up two hefty volumes totalling 1,137 pages, constituting a vast wealth of information about St. Joan's actual statements, Catholic beliefs, life, and death - and the moving passages in which her conviction was overturned by an Inquisition court on July 7, 1456, thereby paving the way for her eventual canonization. Why is this ignored in favor of the propaganda of Joan's enemies?

My advice is to skip this book and buy something by Regine Pernoud or one of the other experts on the subject. "Literary analysis" is no substitute for historical analysis.

Since I'm translating the trial transcript which this book analyzes, I thought I would comment. First of all, the author doesn't seem to realize that the Condemnation transcript has never been considered to be a reliable document, for a number of reasons: it doesn't follow the correct form and procedures of an Inquisitorial process (the trial was conducted by a political kangaroo court, not a valid court of the Inquisition); it contradicts itself at numerous points; one section was never notarized; and, most importantly, a number of the clergy who took part in the trial later testified that crucial sections were 'creatively edited' (so to speak) in order to gratify the English who were running the trial, thereby falsifying and distorting Joan's statements. If the author truly had an exhaustive knowledge of all of the texts related to Joan of Arc's life, the author would compare these texts to each other rather than dealing with one in isolation and treating it as if it were a "collaborative work" written jointly by Joan and her accusers (of all the strange notions connected with this subject, this has got to be one of the strangest). Additionally, the claim that her trial was not a political matter reveals a profound lack of understanding of the subject: the Rehabilitation witnesses testified that it was entirely a political charade, which involved intimidation of both the defendant and many of the clergy who had been forced to take part in it.

In short, this book seems to be little more than the latest attempt at sensationalism, billed as a "radical reassessment" as a selling point; and it seems to be based on the currently trendy practice of pretending that historical documents are works of fiction, thereby giving authors an excuse to make up their own alternate version of events. "Literary analysis" is purely subjective, and therefore a convenient vehicle for anyone who wants to invent their own fantasized view of an historical person or event; and as such, it has no academic value.

As Joan often said at her trial in response to irrelevant questions: "passons-oultre" (which we may colloquially render as "let's skip over this one").

This beautifully written work is uniquely provocative of multiple, diverse interpretations of the person, story, really, the legacy that is Joan of Arc, and, perhaps more impressively, of the broader literary and philosophical questions involving witnessing, testimony, and the possibility of the truthful expression of divine communication. I am throughly baffled by the tenor of the negative reviews here. The author demonstrates, in my opinion, a thoughtful, intimate familiarity with the historical records in question, but I understood the work to be using them in order to explore the crucial questions underlying history. Instead of any ignorance of the subject matter, I understood the author to be undertaking the real work of a scholar that is pushing the boundary of what is known in order to come to understand the range of truths in history. Joan of Arc is far more than one historical person. This work, uniquely, in my opinion, demonstrates this most beautifully. Even if one is not interested in rethinking her history and meaning per se, the work raises radical questions of authority and action, knowledge and its demonstration, and does so in an engaging style of writing that often reads as mosaic as the portraits it paints of the warrior and as dramatic as the questions it asks of both history and its reader. If you are looking for a history text book account, look else where; if you seek an engaging and rewarding philosophical read, this is the work that you want.

Perhaps the best way to deal with this book is to examine the author's main themes: 1) the idea that Joan's trial allegedly revolved around differences in education and perspective (layperson vs clergy) rather than military rivalry (Armagnac versus Anglo-Burgundian); and 2) the notion that Joan used language "miniaturizing" her Voices, thereby allegedly indicating that she rejected them in the end.
The first point ignores the many documents, including English and Burgundian sources, which bluntly show that her trial was, in fact, paid for by the English (as even English financial records show in great detail), and the tribunal was stocked entirely with clergy who were members of the Anglo-Burgundian faction and who, in many cases, were actually paid officials of the English occupation government. There are English documents throughout late 1430 and early 1431, dated Sept. 3rd and 14th, Oct. 24th, Dec. 6th; Jan. 31st, March 1st, April 2nd, 9th, 14th, 21st (etc) detailing payments given by English officials to the judges and assessors, and documenting the taxes levied to pay the cost of obtaining Joan from John of Luxembourg. The chief judge, Pierre Cauchon, had long been a salaried official of the English occupation government (paid 1,000 pounds annually) who also served for a time as Chancellor for the Queen of England. Before that he had been in the service of two successive Burgundian dukes, who often tapped him to commit other crimes aside from his conviction of Joan: for instance, there's a letter from Duke Jean-sans-Peur de Burgundy dated July 26, 1415 authorizing Cauchon to bribe Church officials in order to corrupt justice in favor of the Burgundian faction.The other members of the tribunal are also known to have been partisans of the same faction: the reason why the University of Paris changed so dramatically (as the author herself notes) after Paris came under Anglo-Burgundian occupation is the simple fact that all the pro-Armagnac members had to leave, with the result that the University was thoroughly Anglo-Burgundian by the time of Joan's trial, and therefore rabidly opposed to her because she was defeating their faction's armies. All of the above corroborates the testimony of the Rehabilitation witnesses. It is this corroborative evidence (and much more of a similar type in numerous chronicles, letters, etc) which has moved historians to accept the Rehabilitation as the more credible of the two transcripts - not for 'partisan' reasons, but simply because the preponderance of the evidence confirms the latter. This book, on the other hand, tries to dismiss the prevailing view by accepting at face value the very Condemnation transcript which is proved unreliable by so many other documents. This brings me to the second main point that the author tries to make, concerning Joan's view of her Voices. The book's version of this issue is based on a handful of phrases in the alleged confession mentioned at the end of the transcript, a section which is dated June 7 - a full eight days after Joan's execution. If you look at the original manuscripts you'll see that this section was never signed by any of the purported witnesses nor by the notaries, a fact which the notaries themselves later explained when they testified that the "confession" had never been witnessed by them and in fact did not appear until after she was already dead. This is why historians have viewed it as fictional. But the author of this book accepts it at face value, then engages in a bit of word play in relation to a few phrases in which Joan is made to say that her Voices appeared to her in "great number and small size" (or variations on that theme). The author interprets this as an attempt to "miniaturize" her Voices and thereby "objectify" and in essence reject them, an interpretation which would be dubious even if these quotes were authentic: even those who still believe in this sort of psychoanalysis would say that you cannot psychoanalyze someone who you've never met. But the quotes are not authentic, nor would there be any reason to believe that the phrase "small size" reflects 'feelings' at all. Information that was never signed by either witnesses nor notaries (as required under medieval law) cannot be accepted as valid, especially when the notaries themselves cast doubts on its authenticity.
In much the same vein, the book claims that Joan did not initially identify her voices as specific saints, and only "chose" specific saints during the course of the trial. Not only is this purely subjective, but it ignores the fact that the Condemnation transcript itself includes an explanation of why Joan was initially unwilling to reveal the identity of her Voices to her judges. Unless you can show that this portion is not authentic, you cannot replace her own recorded words with arbitrary speculation about her "real" motives.
This is the problem with Sullivan's methods throughout the book, and the problem with such analysis in general: once an author has decided to reject the plain meaning of recorded statements and to ignore all correlative evidence from other documents, while accepting precisely those portions which are known to be fraudulent (the exact reverse of the proper procedure), a process of invention is followed in which even the smallest word can be manipulated to mean whatever the author wants it to mean and then be used as the basis for an elaborate theory. It's as if someone were to rewrite the life of, say, Abraham Lincoln simply by interpreting his use of a few commonplace words in a dubious text, and then publish a book making the splashy claim that the author has come up with a startling new theory on the subject. This is a good marketing technique, but dishonest scholarship.

Sullivan's book is by far one of the best readings of the condemnation trial ever written. She reads the transcripts as not only "literary" material, but as historical documents as well. Her understanding of the texts are exhaustive and she is very lucid in her accounts of what the texts really mean. This book is a great read.

It is apparent that Karen Sullivan has a keen analytical mind and thorough knowledge of her subject. The negative reviews posted on this site are ridiculously partisan, not taking into account that the pro-French accounts (and possibly witnesses) are at least as politically motivated as the English, which Sullivan deals with masterfully.
Perhaps the best and most insightful modern book on the topic.

I must agree with the other negative reviews. Normally an original trial transcript would be first-rate source material. Joan of Arc's condemnation trial is a well known exception. She was that special sort of political prisoner who needs to be discredited. Joan had led a rival claimant to the throne to coronation. Condemning her was an effort to undermine her king.

No serious historian believes that Joan of Arc's condemnation trial was fair. Documentary evidence abounds to confirm that her main judges were paid by the government she warred against and that numerous procedural rules were violated during her condemnation. The English occupying government forced several court functionaries to work under death threats. One surviving letter from the English government to her judges even warns that her execution was guaranteed.

Fortunately for posterity, the pope convened a second posthumous trial which reversed the original conviction for heresy and recorded the testimony of well over one hundred witnesses, a number of whom had worked at the original trial. This unusual remedy was not the political gesture that the original trial had been: French king Charles VII did not manipulate the proceedings. If a serious case could be made that the second trial was biased, then it is doubtful that she would ever have been declared a saint.

For an excellent overview of Joan of Arc's life I recommend Regine Pernoud's "Joan of Arc by Herself and her Witnesses." An hour's research either on Google or at a university library should confirm that poor reviews of Ms. Sullivan's book are not biased attacks but the reflection of scholarly consensus.