1/6/12 Joan of Arc - Enduring Power - NYTimes.com1/3 www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/opinion/joan-of-arc-enduring-power.html?pagewanted=printReprintsThis copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order presentation-ready copies fordistribution to your colleagues, clients or customers here or use the "Reprints" tool that appears next to anyarticle. Visit www.nytreprints.com for samples and additional information. Order a reprint of this article now.January 5, 2012Joan of Arc: Enduring PowerBy KATHRYN HARRISONJOAN OF ARC was born 600 years ago. Six centuries is a long time to continue to mark thebirth of a girl who, according to her family and friends, knew little more than spinning andwatching over her fathers flocks. But type her name into Amazons search engine and you getmore than 6,000 results. Frances national archives include tens of thousands of volumesabout her. She has been immortalized by Shakespeare, Voltaire, Twain, Shaw, Brecht, Verdi,Tchaikovsky and Rubens; more recently, her life was fodder for the CBS television series Joanof Arcadia.What is it about Joan of Arc? Why is her story of enduring interest more than a half amillennium after her birth?By the time Joan of Arc was 16 and had proclaimed herself the virgin warrior sent by God todeliver France from her enemies, the English, she had been receiving the counsel of angels forthree years. Until then, the voices she said she heard, speaking from over her right shoulderand accompanied by a great light, had been hers alone, a rapturous secret.But in 1428, when the voices pressed her to undertake the quest for which they had beenpreparing her, they transformed a seemingly undistinguished peasant into a visionary heroinewho defied every limitation placed on a woman of the late Middle Ages. The least likely ofmilitary leaders, Joan of Arc changed the course of the Hundred Years War and of history.Joan said she sheared off her hair, dressed in male attire, put on armor and took up her swordat Gods behest. She was feverish in her determination to succeed at what was, by anyonesmeasure, a preposterous mission. As Joan herself protested to her voices, she knew not howto ride or lead in war; and yet she roused an exhausted, underequipped and impotent armyinto a fervor that carried it from one unlikely victory to the next. She raised the siege ofOrlans by defying the cautious strategies of seasoned generals to follow inaudible directionsfrom invisible beings.Illiterate and uncouth, Joan moved purposefully among nobles, bishops and royalty. So intent1/6/12 Joan of Arc - Enduring Power - NYTimes.com2/3 www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/opinion/joan-of-arc-enduring-power.html?pagewanted=printon vanquishing the enemy that she threatened her own men with violence, she herself recoiledat the idea of bloodshed. To avoid having to use her sword, she led her army carrying a 12-foot-long banner emblazoned with the words Party of the Kingdom of Heaven. Witnesses saidshe was luminous in battle, light not glinting off her armor so much as radiating from the girlwithin. Her enemies spoke of clouds of butterflies following in her wake, a curiously beatificreport from men who said she was in league with the devil.In the aftermath of combat she didnt celebrate victory but mourned the casualties; her menremembered her on her knees weeping as she held the head of a dying enemy soldier, urginghim to confess his sins. Her courage outstripped that of seasoned men at arms; her tearsflowed as readily as any other teenage girls.After a series of victories, Joan suffered the reversals her voices had predicted. Captured andsold to the English, and shackled in a dank cell for more than a year, Joan was put on trial forher life. For refusing to renounce the voices that guided her as deviltry, Joan, 19 years old, wasburned at the stake before a jeering crowd, her charred body displayed to anyone who cared toexamine it. Thirty years later, in 1450, a Rehabilitation Trial overturned the guilty verdict thatcondemned her to death; the 19th-century rediscovery of the transcripts from both trialsresulted in her canonization in 1920.Like all holy figures whose earthly existence separates them from the broad mass of humanity,a saint is a story, and Joan of Arcs is like no other.The self-proclaimed agent of Gods will, she wasnt immortalized so much as she entered thecollective imagination as a living myth. Centuries after death, she has been embraced byChristians, feminists, French nationalists, Mexican revolutionaries and even hairdressers.(Her crude cut inspired the bob flappers wore as a symbol of independence from patriarchalstrictures.) Her voices have been diagnosed retroactively as symptoms of schizophrenia,epilepsy, even tuberculosis. It seems Joan of Arc will never be laid to rest. Is this becausestories we understand are stories we forget?Joan frustrates efforts to reduce her to mortal proportions. What can explain what her voicestold her, whether directing her movements in battle or scripting answers to her inquisitors.And what about her reputed clairvoyance, accounts that her touch raised a child from the dead,her ability to direct the wind to fill her stalled boats sails?We dont need narratives that rationalize human experience so much as those that enlarge itwith the breath of mystery. For as long as we look to heroes for inspiration, to leaders whose1/6/12 Joan of Arc - Enduring Power - NYTimes.com3/3 www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/opinion/joan-of-arc-enduring-power.html?pagewanted=printvision lifts them above our limited perspective, who cherish their values above their earthlylives, the story of Joan of Arc will remain one we remember, and celebrate.Kathryn Harrison is writing a biography of Joan of Arc.