EARLY TREATMENTS OF JOAN IN ART AND LITERATURE

The earliest drawing of Joan of Arc that survives is a doodle in the margin of a parliamentary council register drawn by Clement de Fauquembergue. The entry is dated May 10, 1429. Joan is shown holding a banner and a sword, but she is wearing a dress and has long hair. Fauquembergue, drawing from his imagination, may be excused for putting her in women’s clothing, but long after Joan’s dressing practice was well known, many artists still preferred to dress her in skirts. An illustration in Les Vigiles de Charles VII by Martial d’Auvergne, a rhymed chronicle of the Hundred Years’ War composed after 1472, shows a long-skirted Joan conducting the attack on Paris.

The first and only official French court biography of Joan was written around 1500 during the reign of Louis XII (r. 1498-1515), son of that duke of Orleans who was the prisoner of the English when Joan raised the siege of his city. In subsequent reigns, official court historians gave Joan only a passing mention. Her good name and deeds of valor were preserved by private individuals and historians from Orleans, Reims, and Rouen who used the biography of 1500 as a basis of their works, adding local records as appropriate.

From her lifetime to our own, Joan of Arc and her story have been used to reflect contemporary concerns and biases. Shortly after Joan’s success at

Orleans, the poet Christine of Pisan wrote a poem in which she compared Joan to the heroes and heroines of antiquity. Within a few years of her death, Joan was featured in a play performed at Orleans in memory of the lifting of the siege. French writers, even Burgundians, tended to treat Joan with respect and admiration, but in England she retained a reputation as a harlot and a witch. The Shakespearean play Henry VI, Part 1 (1590) has Joan communing with demons.

In 1656, Jean Chapelain (1595-1674) wrote an epic poem about Joan, entitled The Maid, The Deliverer of France. Chapelain’s boring epic prompted Voltaire (1694-1778) to write The Maid of Orleans, a satire in which he portrayed Joan as a village idiot, using her story to attack the church, the monarchy, and the French nobility. Voltaire’s poem circulated in manuscript from about 1730, scandalizing a great many admirers of the Maid. In 1762 he published an edited version, but 100 years after his death, the memory of his disrespectful treatment of Joan of Arc could still spark riots.