Modernizing Joan of Arc: Conceptions, Costumes, and Canonization (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Modernizing Joan of Arc: Conceptions, Costumes, and Canonization Nora M. Heimann Ellen Ecker Dolgin, Modernizing Joan of Arc: Conceptions, Costumes, and Canonization. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 2008. Pp. vii, 199. ISBN: 978–0–7864–3120–5. $35. The remarkable, anomalous life of the woman now known commonly as Joan of Arc (or Jeanne d’ Arc) has inspired the composition of hundreds of books since her death in 1431. One of the latest, and perhaps most problematic entries to the field is Ellen Ecker Dolgin’s Modernizing Joan of Arc: Conceptions, Costumes, and Canonization. Dolgin’s study begins by laying out the ambitious aspiration to interpret the iconographic transformations of this medieval maiden in a wide variety of media ranging from historical accounts and literary works to paintings, popular imagery and cinematic productions in relation to medieval conceptions of gender and authority, and the modern progressive movements of universal suffrage, dress reform, labor reform, and women’s suffrage in America, England, and France. Contrasted with these movements are a selection of works by, among others, Voltaire, Vita Sackville-West, Thomas DeQuincy, Friedrich Schiller, Mark Twain, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Haskell Coffin, Bernard Shaw, Carl Dreyer, and Bertolt Brecht. In interweaving these representations and themes, Dolgin seeks to illustrate the manner in which the Maid’s persona has been evoked by supporters and detractors alike both to reinforce and to challenge reigning social and political norms. In so doing, Dolgin follows a route already traveled by numerous scholars who have explored many of the complex vicissitudes of Joan’s reputation and her image’s protean capacity to embody a variety of causes on both sides of the Atlantic, including Charles Lightbody’s Judgements of Joan (1961), Ingvald Raknem’s Joan of Arc in History, Legend and Literature (1971), Marina Warner’s Joan of Arc (1981), Gerd Krumeich’s Jeanne d’Arc in der Geschichte (1989), Michel Winock’s essay on ‘Jeanne d’Arc’ in Les Lieux de mémoire (III, 1992), Robin Blaetz’s Visions of the Maid (2001), and this author’s Joan of Arc in French Art and Culture, 1700–1855 (2004). Disappointingly, Dolgin’s book lacks reference to any these studies, save Warner’s. Modernizing Joan of Arc might have furnished a useful contribution to this discourse if her scholarship had been more thorough and sound. Unfortunately, her work is plagued by factual errors, unreliable assertions, and incorrectly cited footnotes. One need not even open Modernizing Joan of Arc to become doubtful of its reliability, for on its back cover the reader is informed that ‘this book examines the social and political threads that led to the canonization of Joan of Arc in the nineteenth century.’ (The Maid was, of course, canonized in 1920). Taken individually, a number of [End Page 87] ambiguous and incorrect observations may be dismissed as minor; cumulatively, however, her book’s many factual misstatements (which include, for example, that France’s second revolution was in 1848, and its Third Republic begin in 1879) ultimately undermine the author’s credibility. Although some of her errors may be attributed simply to inadequate proofreading, many appear to have a more disturbing origin in a lack of adequate research. It is, frankly, difficult to understand otherwise the author’s astonishing description of Schiller’s Johanna in Die Jungfrau von Orleans—a cold-hearted protagonist who proudly attributes her superhuman strength to her own ‘cruel implacability’—as a ‘feminized good girl’; or her bewildering assertion that Voltaire’s ribald, often pornographic political satire La Pucelle ‘reflected the Rehabilitation image of purity and charisma.’ At times, it appears that Dolgin did not read carefully some of the specific works she endeavors to describe and analyze. In other instances, her book suffers from clearly poor scholarly choices, as when the author opts to rely upon unpublished, tertiary materials from the internet in the place of abundantly available, more authoritative primary and secondary sources. As it is, Modernizing Joan of Arc represents a missed opportunity to shed further light on a fascinating subject. [End Page 88] Nora M. Heimann The Catholic University of America Copyright © 2008 Arthuriana