The Literary Image of Joan of Arc: Prior Influences

Abstract

Scholars have preferred the accounts of Joan of Arc's career in chronicles and in the reports of her trial to other contemporary sources from the realm of poetry and literature.' Literature offers, however, what history often does not: the image of Joan of Arc in her own time. The chronicles contain the events and chronology of the Maid's life, but they have little to say about the meaning of her unusual accomplishments as understood by her contemporaries interpretive comments about Joan's mission by the chroniclers are infrequent and naive. The literary sources, on the other hand, influenced by literary models, themes, and traditions, attempt to explain the meaning of Joan of Arc's career and often to justify it. The early poetry and ecclesiastical treatises are thus a rarely tapped source of contemporary commentary that may be studied to supplement the about Joan of Arc. Far from obscuring the historical reality of Joan of Arc, literature reveals more of that reality than can be determined from the facts alone. In certain cases literature seems even to shape the historical reality. Two themes in the literature about Joan of Arc are particularly important. The first of these is the association of Joan with biblical heroines. The churchmen who first investigated the validity of the Maid's mission cited Esther, Judith, and Deborah as precedents for what Joan of Arc promised to do. Using biblical models to lend authority to an argument was common practice in secular as in religious writing, and it is not surprising to find fifteenth-century poets like Christine de Pizan also comparing Joan of Arc to these biblical heroines. The second theme that marks the literature about Joan of Arc is prophecy. When Joan arrived on the historical scene, she became associated almost immediately with prophecies and prophetic-sounding patriotic literature that had been in circulation before 1429, the year she left Domremy.2