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Joan of Arc

A Life Transfigured

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About this listen

 The profoundly inspiring and fully documented saga of Joan of Arc, the young peasant girl whose "voices" moved her to rally the French nation and a reluctant king against British invaders in 1428, has fascinated artistic figures as diverse as William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Voltaire, George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, Carl Dreyer, and Robert Bresson. Was she a divinely inspired saint? A schizophrenic? A demonically possessed heretic, as her persecutors and captors tried to prove?

Every era must retell and reimagine the Maid of Orleans's extraordinary story in its own way, and in Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured, the superb novelist and memoirist Kathryn Harrison gives us a Joan for our time—a shining exemplar of unshakable faith, extraordinary courage, and self-confidence during a brutally rigged ecclesiastical inquisition and in the face of her death by burning. Deftly weaving historical fact, myth, folklore, artistic representations, and centuries of scholarly and critical interpretation into a compelling narrative, she restores Joan of Arc to her rightful position as one of the greatest heroines in all of human history. Europe France Historical Women Western Europe Middle Ages
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I'll be returning this book, but I wanted to review it before I did.

Given the book's length, I was hoping for a grounded, in-depth history of Joan and some of the historical controversies that have popped up around her. Maybe some good context into Medieval thinking that would help a modern thinker understand the psyches involved. Did Joan really believe in her voices, or was she merely a pawn in other peoples' political plays... or both? Was she an outlier, or did people in that time often have ecstatic religious experiences?

Instead we have an author that makes her biases perfectly clear from the offset, making statements like "Just like Jesus before her, Joan's birth was prophesied" and broadly painting her story with all the nuance of a children's book. It just was bland and insipid. The narrator was ok, but the material she had to work with was not. Other reviewers have complained about her accents, but I didn't even make it far enough to get to them.

Barely counts as history

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