Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint [Paperback]

Donald Spoto (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 11, 2008

Since her death at the age of nineteen in 1431, Joan of Arc has maintained a remarkable hold on our collective imagination. She was a teenager of astonishing common sense and a national heroine who led men in to battle as a courageous warrior. Yet she was also abandoned by the king whose coronation she secured, betrayed by her countrymen, and sold to the enemy. In this meticulously researched landmark biography, Donald Spoto captures her astonishing life and the times in which she lived. Neither wife nor nun, queen nor noblewoman, philosopher nor stateswoman, Joan of Arc demonstrates that everyone who follows their heart has the power to change history.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. According to biographer and theologian Spoto, Joan of Arc is a girl for the 21st century. She asserted and fought for the ideal that nations shouldn't invade and occupy others for the sake of empire building, a message to contemplate in today's political landscape. But it's unfair to read our contemporary concerns back into her 15th-century story, says Spoto. In this engaging and at times gripping biography, he examines Joan's life and particularly her faith in the face of a church threatened by her visions. Spoto details what is known or surmised about Joan's early life and military career, but the book's most fascinating aspect is the suspenseful day-by-day account of her year-long trial and conviction for heresy. Here we see the Maid's (as she called herself) sense of God's instructions for her life, and her efforts to obey God above all else, including earthly church authority. Spoto helps us understand her threat to political and ecclesiastical figures. The only person to have been condemned for heresy and later sainted, Joan of Arc continues to capture the popular imagination and is, Spoto argues, "the sign that God is free to act as He wills to act, not as we presume He ought to act." (Feb. 20)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Best-selling biographer and theologian Spoto has fashioned a fascinating new biography of one of the most intriguing figures to emerge from the murky shadows of the late Middle Ages. Though she was condemned to death by the church at the age of 19, Joan was eventually canonized a saint by the same institution that proclaimed her a heretic. Through the ensuing centuries the embellished legend of Joan of Arc has taken on a life of its own, but Spoto does an admirable job of scratching beneath the surface to expose the flesh-and-blood woman who generated one of the most controversial debates in the history of the Catholic Church. Believing wholeheartedly in her divine mission from God, the young peasant girl overcame seemingly insurmountable odds in order to fight for the glory of God and France during the Hundred Years' War. Basing much of his research on newly translated transcripts of Joan's trial, Spoto breathes new life into an old subject. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: HarperOne (March 11, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061189189
• ISBN-13: 978-0061189180
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,324,470 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Grace apparent through a teenaged girl, September 20, 2007

By 

K. Rodgers "krr63" (Shawnee, OK USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint (Hardcover)

Spoto's picture of Joan is of a brave, patriotic, spiritual girl who followed what she believed to be God's will.

His descriptions of her months of loneliness, terror and suffering -- chained in a dark dungeon and nearly starving -- and the disgraceful and dishonest onslaught from her tormentors will touch even a Joan skeptic.

Spoto's message: 1) God is against imperialism; and 2) He often sends the least likely person to do the job (in this case, defending the French nation and culture from English invasion).

Spoto's writing is lively, and he doesn't try to hide his admiration for this teenaged girl or his religious sensibilities. It is not a sermon, though, but an enthralling biography that makes a good introduction to Joan of Arc or adds to the understanding of those whom she continues to fascinate nearly six hundred years after her execution.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Jehanne, March 2, 2008

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Seachranaiche (USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint (Hardcover)

Donald Spoto takes a departure from the pop-culture biography and applies his efforts toward the life of a young woman whose name is recognized by practically everyone, but whose life, although very well documented, has been perpetuated with myth and mysticism. There is something about Joan of Arc that that draws affection and devotion from people, something beyond her remarkable exploits--something about Joan herself. As Spoto tells her story, he avoids the mythological and mystical: he does not dwell on the provenance of her sword, her seemingly divine ability to have been able to recognize the dauphin Charles, or the sudden change of wind at Orleans. He focuses instead upon the girl, in language that is often poignant and revealingly endearing.

For those who have studied Joan's life, through countless books, films, poems and plays, Spoto's take will read with the freshness of clean mountain air. Those who are just now taking up Joan's life (and especially those who have only seen the movies) will probably benefit more from Spoto's telling than any other available account. He embeds a chronology into the story, sometimes a day-by-day account, which helps the reader to comprehend events. He applies some of his own translations, which helps to clarify some of the fuzzier aspects of Joan's popular interpretation, and he includes some key details that are often overlooked, such as the unrelated deaths of Joan's older brother and sister, that two other brothers joined her during her campaigns, that her mother and father met her at Reims, and that her family was in Rouen during her imprisonment and execution. These are small details, but make for a more thorough story while eliminating the embellishments that have given rise to so much mythology. Spoto shows that Joan's factual life is much more compelling than her mythological life.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Prelude to murder, February 23, 2009

By 

Linda Bulger (United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint (Audio CD)

The first lesson to be learned about Joan's life is that it can't be understood strictly in modern context. Her life in fifteenth century France is remarkably well-documented, yet the girl eludes our understanding. Born in 1412 in the village of Domremy in eastern France, she grew up tending the family flocks and crops and learning the domestic arts. Like village girls of her time, her education was exclusively based around church and home; there was nothing extraordinary about her until she began having visions at the age of twelve.

Biographer Donald Spoto reminds us that a person of Joan's time--of any time--had only the vernacular to describe the indescribable. Saints and angels, sent from God, telling her to travel to Orleans and break the English siege, to bring the Dauphin to Rheims to be crowned as Charles VII ... the sheer implausibility of it!

England and France were engaged in a long-running dispute over the throne of France, with England claiming the French throne through the royal family's French connections. This dispute, The Hundred Years' War, had raged intermittently from 1337. After a huge French defeat at Agincourt in 1415, England took parts of France and formed alliances with French supporters of the English claim. In 1429 the English armies were on the brink of taking Orleans by siege, when Joan persuaded the Dauphin to let her lead the troops against the English.

The story is among the most widely retold in religious and secular culture: Joan in knight's armor leading the army to victory at Orleans; the triumphant coronation at Rheims; Joan's capture, Charles's refusal to pay her ransom, the irregularities and cruelty of her trial for heresy, her burning at the stake, and eventually her canonization as a saint. Records of testimony from the 1431 trial have been preserved, along with many eyewitness testimonies from the 1455 trial that exonerated her so long after her death. But understanding depends on medieval realities, such as the scriptural ban against cross-dressing, the significance of Joan's vow of virginity, the concept of divine right of kings to rule, and the peculiar power of the court of inquisition. In the end we can only try to understand.

Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint is a very accessible biography of a figure whose story is fascinating and unfathomable. I listened to the audio but can't really recommend it: the reading by the highly capable Dick Hill had an oddly staccato quality that, I believe, may have been engineered in somehow. Do choose this in book form; it's an excellent introduction to the life and times of the Maid of Orleans.

Linda Bulger, 2009