Talk:Joan of Arc/cross-dressing

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During her campaigns and imprisonment, Joan of Arc wore male clothing. Her motive is given in her own words, either quoted directly or via eyewitnesses who knew her.

A summary of this evidence would be as follows:

• During her campaigns, she said - as quoted by chronicles such as "la Chronique de la Pucelle" - that she wore such clothing primarily to better safeguard her chastity while camped in the field with her troops, to discourage them from lusting after her, and because her saints had commanded her to adopt such clothing as part of her service in the army.
• She was quoted by a number of the clergy who took part in her trial, who later admitted that she had said repeatedly that she clung to such clothing out of necessity: since the type of male clothing in question had "laces and points" by which the pants and tunic could be securely tied together, such clothing was the only protection she had against attempted rape at the hands of her English guards. Additionally, they said that she was finally maneuvered into a "relapse" by two methods
  1. after being forced to wear a dress under threat of immediate burning, her guards increased their attempts to abuse her in order to induce her to re-adopt the protective clothing, and
  2. in the end they finally left her nothing else to wear except the offending male outfit, which she put back on after a prolonged argument with the guards that went on "until noon" (according to the bailiff at the trial, Jean Massieu). This was seized upon as an excuse to convict her by the pro-English judge, Pierre Cauchon, who had been placed as her judge by the English in order to convict her using any excuse or trick that could be devised.

Since the medieval Church granted an exemption for such necessity-based instances of "cross-dressing", as defined in the "Summa Theologica", "Scivias", etc, her actions were defended during her campaigns by a number of prominent clergy such as the Archbishop of Embrun, the famous theologian Jean Gerson, etc, as well as by the clergy who were called upon to give their ruling at the postwar appeal of her case (the "Rehabilitation" or "Nullification" Trial) after the English were driven out of Rouen.