Joan of Arc in the English Imagination, 1429-1829 by Gail Orgelfinger

Abstract

Reviewed by: Joan of Arc in the English Imagination, 1429-1829 by Gail Orgelfinger Kevin J. Harty Gail Orgelfinger, Joan of Arc in the English Imagination, 1429-1829. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019 (cloth), 2020 (paperback). Pp. xiii, 230, 1 map, 17 b/w illus. isbn: 978-0-271-08218-9 (cloth), isbn: 978-0-271-08219-6 (paperback). $89.95 (cloth), $34.95 (paperback). —'[We need to catch] this thief and burn her at the stake, like Joan of Arc!' —Harriet Tubman's former owner in the 2019 film Harriet The Maid of Orléans is seemingly everywhere these days: in bizarre (often cross) cultural references such as the one quoted above, in new and revived off-Broadway plays, in political controversies about whether a young woman of mixed race should portray her in the city's annual commemorative procession and pageant. That she should be so ubiquitous may prove puzzling to some, and perfectly natural to others. As Gail Orgelfinger's excellent, ground-breaking study shows, Joan has never been far from the public eye. Joan's story is, of course, more than well known. In her lifetime, she attracted the attention of Christine de Pizan who in her 1429 Le Ditié de Jehanne d'Arc proclaimed that Joan was responsible for God's magnanimity toward his enemies. Since her death, [End Page 131] the Maid of Orléans has been the subject of studies pro and con from around the world. Orgelfinger focuses on an important part of Joan's legacy, the imaginative response her life, death and legend received in England over four centuries. The result is a major addition to what we know about Joan and the way she was used, abused, misused, and confused by her natural enemies, the English, whom she helped the French finally to defeat in the Hundred Years' War. In Chapter One, Orgelfinger sets out to 'reconstruct in as much as possible, Joan's own opinion of the English' (p. 11). This attempt leads Orgelfinger to analyze Joan's letters to the English and subsequent reports of how she spoke about the English during her military exploits and at her trial and condemnation. In Chapter Two, Orgelfinger reverses the interrogative dynamic and looks at what early English chroniclers and historians had to say about Joan. The earliest such document, a June 1431 epistolary manifesto sent across Europe in the name of the boy King Henry VI, sought to mitigate and justify the English role in Joan's death. Subsequent documents in the early seventeenth century attempted to balance English and French sources for their accounts of Joan in their defense of earlier English legal processes. But the English characterization of Joan eventually moved beyond historical texts to anthologies portraying famous and heroic women, and such anthologies soon enough found themselves at the heart of religious and social debates about the proper role of women in society. These debates, which, as Orgelfinger shows in her third chapter, extended over almost three centuries, took up the issue of whether Joan was a witch, a sorceress, simply a woman warrior or a virago. In life and death, Joan was never very far from the political arena, and Orgelfinger next argues convincingly that, in Elizabethan England, 'political anxieties surrounding the status of Mary, Queen of Scots, reverberate even more strongly in Joan Puzel' (p. 12). Such reverberations are nowhere more clearly seen than in the characterization of Joan in Shakespeare's 1 Henry VI, for which Orgelfinger offers one of the most insightful readings I have ever read of the Bard's play in general and of his portrayal of Joan in particular. Joan's attire vexed her contemporaries, who saw in her refusal to wear women's clothing nothing less than a kind of sexual heresy. So too late eighteenth-century and Romantic English characterizations of Joan focused extensively on issues related to her domestic femininity. But as in all matters Jehanne, there was no unanimity in these characterizations. Writers, including women writers, continued to 'indict Joan herself for eschewing her own instinct to return to a gender-defined role' (p. 12). Joan of Arc in the English Imagination, 1429...