Epilogue: Joan of Arc

Abstract

Down the hill from the open-air theater where the Mystère de Sainte Reine is performed every autumn stands a monument to another virgin martyr. Wearing a full suit of armor and mounted on a horse caught in mid-stride, Joan of Arc looks past a straggle of houses and over the green valley below. The contrast between the two saints is telling. Despite the local cult devoted to her, Reine seems to belong entirely to legend; Joan’s life is the most extensively documented of the medieval period, and her cult is anything but local. Statues of her are ubiquitous in France; Catholic schoolchildren the world over are given prayer cards decorated with appropriately saccharine images to mark her feast day (May 30); she transcends religious affiliation both as a patriotic icon in France and as a pop-culture diva in Europe and North America.1 This juxtaposition of a local legend and an international heroine may serve to illuminate the degree to which the brief, passionate life of Joan of Arc reflects, refracts, and (perhaps?) finally escapes the paradoxes inherent in the virgin martyr narrative. In the previous chapters, I have argued that the experience of the legendary virgin often informed the lives of medieval women more or less directly, and especially the lives of those rare medieval women who wrote. Hrotsvitha, Hildegard, and Clemence had confronted in various ways the ideological traps inherent in the legend of the virgin martyr; they worked especially hard to undo the connection between virginity, silence, and death by rendering it purely and usefully ironic or metaphorical.KeywordsTrial TranscriptRehabilitation TrialDivine InspirationPassionate LifeGreen ValleyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.