Portal:Saints/Saints Selected biography/March 2007

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Painting, c. 1485. The only known portrait for which she sat has not survived, so all depictions of her represent artistic license. (Centre Historique des Archives Nationales, Paris, AE II 2490)

Joan of Arc, also known as Jeanne d'Arc,[1] (c.1412 – 30 May 1431)[2] was a national heroine of France and is a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. She asserted that she had visions from God which told her to recover her homeland from English domination late in the Hundred Years' War. The uncrowned King Charles VII sent her to the siege at Orléans as part of a relief mission. She gained prominence when she overcame the light regard of veteran commanders and lifted the siege in only nine days. Several more swift victories led to Charles VII's coronation at Reims and settled the disputed succession to the throne.

The renewed French confidence outlasted her own brief career. She refused to leave the field when she was wounded during an attempt to recapture Paris that autumn. Hampered by court intrigues, she led only minor companies from then onward and fell prisoner at a skirmish near Compiègne the following spring. A politically motivated trial convicted her of heresy. The English regent John of Lancaster, 1st Duke of Bedford had her burnt at the stake in Rouen. She had been the heroine of her country at the age of seventeen and died at just nineteen. Some twenty-four years later Pope Callixtus III reopened the case and a new finding overturned the original conviction. Her piety to the end impressed the retrial court. Pope Benedict XV canonized her on 16 May 1920.[3]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Her name was written in a variety of ways, particularly prior to the mid-19th century. See Pernoud and Clin, pp. 220–221.
  2. ^ Modern biographical summaries often assert a birthdate of 6 January. Actually she could only estimate her own age. All of the rehabilitation trial witnesses likewise estimated her age even though several of these people were her godmothers and godfathers. The 6 January claim is based on a single source: a letter from Lord Perceval de Boullainvilliers on 21 July 1429 (see Pernoud's Joan of Arc By Herself and Her Witnesses, p. 98: "Boulainvilliers tells of her birth in Domrémy, and it is he who gives us an exact date, which may be the true one, saying that she was born on the night of Epiphany, January 6"). Boulainvilliers, however, was not from Domrémy. The event was probably not recorded. The practice of parish registers for non-noble births did not begin until several generations later.
  3. ^ A tribunal led by Inquisitor-General Brehal retried her case after the war. The new verdict overturned the original conviction and described the earlier proceeding as "corruption, cozenage, calumny, fraud and malice". [1] (Accessed 12 February 2006)