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What about Joan? A fierce woman in combat? Medieval gender bender? Sandra Miesel has the inside scoop on Joan of Arc.

Article Excerpt
JOAN OF ARC is the one medieval figure everybody knows. But what they acknowledge varies wildly. To Shakespeare, Joan was a witch; to Shaw, a proto-Protestant; to Twain, a true saint in a godless universe. The poet Schiller and the composer Verdi added love interests to her story but left out death at the stake. Luc Besson portrayed her as a guilt-ridden hysteric in The Messenger (1999). Feminists embrace her as the heroic woman in the clutches of evil men who connive at her ruin.

How can one well-documented woman be the inspiration for so many legends? Don't we all know that Jeanne d'Arc, the Maid of Orleans, was a simple shepherdess called by God to save France from the English? Captured by her enemies and burned as a witch, she became a saint. On closer inspection, however, even this most traditionalist reading of Joan of Arc turns out to have distortions.

For starters, Joan the humble shepherdess is a romantic fancy. This daughter of prosperous peasants seldom watched sheep. But from the beginning, Joan's admirers liked the pastoral myth with its obvious comparison to the biblical David called from his flocks to save his people. Marina Warner, Joan's principal feminist historian, disparages this image of the simple maid with her simple sheep in her 1981 book Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism. In a review of Warner's book in Newsweek, Jean Strouse noted that Joan is a cultural Rorschach test: Each age sees her in the light of its own moral preoccupations."

Warner seems to see Joan through the prism of a class in myth and symbol. The book, according to a description on the website of the University of California Press, "takes note of her historical antecedents, both pagan and Christian, and the role she has played up to the present as the embodiment of an ideal, whether as Amazon, saint, child of nature, or personification of virtue."...

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