The cause of her voices and visions has been fiercely contested for almost 600 years, from the first moment she stepped onto the public stage in February 1429. Was she visited by angels or deceived by demons? Did she have epilepsy? Schizophrenia? Bovine tuberculosis?

That debate will always be with us. But it’s just as hard to be sure exactly what it is that we’re trying to explain.

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No surviving source from 1429 or 1430 contains any description of how Joan received the messages she claimed came to her from God.

It was only in 1431, under relentless questioning by the judges at her trial for heresy, that she began to talk in specific terms about what she saw and heard. Even then, her answers took so long to unfold that it’s taken me three posts – here, here and here – to explore them.

It wasn’t just that she was resistant. It wasn’t just that she was evasive. (Though she was both of those things.) It was that, under intense pressure to prove that her messages came from heaven, she began by describing only ‘a voice’ and ‘a light’. It took time – an interrogation that went on day after day after gruelling day – before the figures of three, or sometimes four, named saints began to emerge.

And when it came to the point of most intense pressure – questions about the sign through which her king was convinced that she was sent by God – she told a story that no one has ever believed: that an angel had walked into the king’s chamber in the castle of Chinon and handed him a golden crown.

This was extravagant invention, an imagined elaboration of the essential truth to which she clung – her belief that she had, in fact, been sent by God – in order to ‘prove’ it to her judges by whatever means might be necessary.

It didn’t work.

On Wednesday 30 May 1431 Joan faced her execution.

Six days earlier, she had been sentenced to death as a heretic. Faced with the unimaginable horror of the stake, she renounced her visions and submitted to the authority of the court. Four days after that, her judges were recalled to her cell. Her voices had told her, she said, that she had damned her soul to save her life. Whatever agonies she faced, it was clear that she couldn’t live with letting go of what she believed.

She had relapsed into heresy. Now, she would be burned.

On the morning of 30 May, a deputation of clerics gathered in her cell. Their testimony, recorded a week later, suggests that Joan was no longer bold, but broken. She had thought she would be rescued, and rescue, she now knew, wasn’t coming. But still: she could not – would not – abandon the truth of what she had seen and heard.

But what was that truth?

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NB: the answer isn’t ‘probably Capricorn’…

If you’re not sure what else the question might mean, you’re not alone. The outline of Joan’s story is so overwhelmingly familiar that it’s tempting to assume we know all its major landmarks, but for me at least – until I started reading the records of her life in detail – her ‘sign’ wasn’t one of them.

Then, when I did start reading the records in detail, the question of why most of us don’t know the story of her sign became more and more intriguing – because, once heard, it’s never forgotten; and during her trial it emerged as one of the most fundamental issues at stake between Joan and her interrogators.

It’s been a little while since we spent a couple of weeks – here and here – listening in detail to everything Joan told her judges about the nature of her visions and her voices.

The conclusion I reached was that her identification of those visions and voices as three saints – St Michael, St Katherine and St Margaret – wasn’t a settled story, a straightforward description of past experience, revealed little by little under hours of questioning.

Instead, it was a series of elaborations she came up with in response to that questioning.

I’m not saying Joan was deliberately and explicitly lying. It’s entirely possible that, by the time she gave these details, she’d come to believe them.

But it is clear that she was under extraordinary pressure.

And it was that pressure which eventually brought the issue of her ‘sign’ into the open.

In fact, we’ve already encountered its first mention, on Tuesday 27 February, the long and exhaustingly relentless day of interrogation when she first began to give names to the voices she heard:1

… Asked what sign she gives to show that her revelation comes by the authority of God, and that it is St Katherine and St Margaret who speak to her, she replied: ‘I’ve told you often enough that they are St Katherine and St Margaret: believe me if you wish.’

Every new answer prompted another set of questions. Her judges changed tack constantly, but it wasn’t long before they returned to the subject of authority and authentication. When she arrived at the court at Chinon, how had she proved that she was sent by God?

Asked why her king placed trust in her words, she replied that he had good signs, and through the clergy.

Asked what kind of revelations her king had, she replied: ‘You will not have these things from me this year.’ She said she was questioned by clerics for three weeks at Chinon and Poitiers; and her king had a sign about her deeds before he would believe in them.

Here’s our first hint of the problem that now loomed ahead of Joan. When she arrived at Chinon in February 1429, her king and his advisers had been uncertain at best about whether they should believe in her mission. She was questioned by theologians there and at Poitiers for several weeks, but those clerics weren’t able to agree on a verdict either. Instead, they suggested that she should be put to a practical test: she should be sent to Orléans, a strategically vital town on the river Loire that was currently besieged by the English. If she failed to lift the siege and drive the English away, her claims could be dismissed out of hand. If she succeeded, it would be a sign from God that her mission was true.

In May 1429 – in just four days of fighting – Joan freed Orléans from the siege. Her king had his sign. He began to believe.

But two years later in a courtroom in the English-held castle of Rouen, filled with Burgundian French clerics who had sworn their allegiance to the English king, the defeat of an English army would never be accepted as a heaven-sent miracle. What sign could Joan describe that would convince her judges of what she knew to be true, that God was with her?

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The sessions were long and relentless. The exchanges I’m transcribing here are extracts from questioning that went on and on and on, constantly switching from one topic to another so that she could never be sure what she might be asked next.

Nor – as an uneducated young woman facing a room full of theologians and canon lawyers – could she possibly understand exactly what technical agenda lay behind the questions she faced.

I said last time that her judges were not trying to prove that her visions were delusion or fabrication, but that’s not quite true: the possibility that Joan might be mad or bad had to be considered, if only to be set aside.

So far, she had been articulate, coherent, and extraordinarily brave in asserting the truth of the messages she claimed to have received from God. So far, she appeared to be neither lying nor hallucinating.

But the questions didn’t stop. And Joan had already begun to shift the ground on which she stood. Her first day’s refusal to say anything about her revelations – not even if her head should be cut off – had given way to a description of a voice accompanied by a light, a beautiful voice that she knew (she said) to be the voice of an angel.

It was a start; but, in order to make their assessment, her judges needed more.

They returned to the subject as soon as the court reconvened on Tuesday 27 February.

Asked whether, since Saturday, she had heard her voice, she replied: ‘Yes, truly, many times.’

Asked whether, on Saturday, she heard it in this hall, she replied: ‘This is not part of your trial.’ And afterwards she said yes.

Asked what it said to her on Saturday, she replied: ‘I didn’t understand it well, and I understood nothing that I could repeat to you, until I got back to my room.’

Again, she was combining moments of resistance with concession – but, this time, not just concession. Her judges wanted to prove that her visions came from hell. Joan wanted to prove they came from heaven. The next question was one she’d been asked before. This time, she gave an entirely new answer.

… Asked whether it was the voice of an angel, or of a male or female saint, or came directly from God, she replied that the voice is that of St Katherine and St Margaret, and their figures are crowned with beautiful crowns, in very rich and very precious fashion. ‘And I have permission from Our Lord about this. If you doubt it, send to Poitiers where I was questioned before.’

(Poitiers was where Joan had been examined by theologians on her own side of the war in 1429, after she’d arrived at the castle of Chinon with a message from God for her king. All that now survives of that examination is a summary of the clerics’ conclusions, saying they found no evil in her and that her mission should therefore be put to the test. Whatever Joan had or hadn’t told them about the nature of her voices, there was no chance that – two years later, across enemy lines – her judges in Rouen could check with the investigators from Poitiers.)

Asked how she knows they are these two saints, and if she clearly recognises one from the other, she replied that she knows well who they are, and that she clearly recognises one from the other.

Asked how she knows one from the other, she replied that she knows them by their greeting to her. She said it is seven years since the first time they came to guide her. She said she knows them also because they tell her their names.

Asked whether they are dressed in the same cloth, she replied: ‘I won’t tell you anything else about them now.’ She does not have permission to reveal it. ‘And if you don’t believe me about this, go to Poitiers.’

… Asked whether they are the same age, she replied: ‘I don’t have permission to tell you that’.

Asked whether they speak at the same time, or one after the other, she replied: I don’t have permission to tell you that, but I always have counsel from them both, every day.’

Asked which one appeared first, she replied: ‘I didn’t recognise them straight away. I knew this once, but I’ve forgotten.’ And if she has advice, she will willingly say. It is in the register at Poitiers. She also said that she had counsel from St Michael.

The day had started with a voice and a light. Now, not two but three named saints populated Joan’s account of her visions.

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I suspect we all do, from time to time. By now, she’s part of the cultural sea in which we swim: a name to conjure with, an instantly recognisable image.

Every time I google, I find a new gem. Recent favourites range from a North American brand of canned beans (‘Joan of Arc® beans valiantly transform any ordinary dish into something extraordinary’) to a Vogue headline from 2018:

Still a beauty muse?? And nice deployment of ‘blazing’…

I’ve been thinking about her specifically because I’m soon going to be talking about her, at Roundtable Presents: A Day of Icons for New York’s legendary 92nd Street Y. It’s a fantastic online line-up – please join us on June 25, if you can.

But I’ve been wanting to write about her here too, because Joan’s story seems to me to be less like a bean, and more – if you’ll forgive the extended vegetable-based metaphor – like an onion, made up of layer upon layer of text and interpretation (that will, if you’re not careful, bring tears to your eyes).

As a result, most of the things we think we know about Joan turn out, on closer inspection, to be much more complicated than they first appear.

I thought I’d start with the central and much contested question of Joan’s voices. What exactly did Joan see and hear?

The story is so famous that it’s utterly familiar. Here’s the relevant bit of the version I grew up with, in Elizabeth O’Neill’s Nursery History of England, published at the beginning of the twentieth century:

She was just a young peasant girl, and looked after her father’s sheep. But she was very good, and she was very sad when she heard how the English soldiers were hurting the French people. While she was saying her prayers, she thought that St Michael and St Catherine told her to go to the king and save France.

And if we turn to the charges assembled against Joan towards the end of her trial for heresy, held at Rouen in 1431, it seems that we’re hearing a matching account. According to the very first article in a long list, Joan said

… that when she was around the age of thirteen, she saw with her bodily eyes St Michael, who would comfort her, and sometimes St Gabriel, appearing in bodily form. Sometimes she also saw a great multitude of angels, and then St Catherine and St Margaret showed themselves to her, appearing bodily. She also sees them each day and hears their voices, and sometimes embraces and kisses them, materially and bodily touching them. She has seen the heads of these angels and saints, but will say nothing of the rest of their bodies or clothing.

But here’s our first clue that we need to pay attention to what’s happening beneath the surface of this text. Why the repeated insistence on bodies, on physical corporality?

No evidence in which Joan describes her voices and visions survives from before her trial. All the details we have come from within the transcript of the proceedings against her, in which the nature of the messages she claimed to receive from God played a central part.

This was not a criminal trial, but a theological one. Her judges – a collection of the most learned clerics in northern France who supported the English regime there, in what was a civil war within France as well as an English invasion – were not trying to prove that what she had seen and heard was delusion or fabrication.

They knew that it was possible for otherworldly beings to appear to men and women of entirely sound mind. What they were trying to establish, therefore, was whether Joan’s voices and visions came to her from heaven or from hell.

To do that, they needed details. Over the days and weeks of Joan’s trial – a process in which she was the only witness – it was a subject to which they returned again and again.

And as the days and weeks went by, under the extraordinary pressure of their questioning, Joan’s answers changed and grew.

What I’m going to do here – over the course of two posts, because there’s so much to cover – is show you exactly what the trial record reveals about what Joan said. At the end of the second post, I’ll sketch out possible interpretations – and I hope you’ll tell me what you think.

First, a warning: ‘exactly what the trial record reveals’ is not the same as ‘exactly what Joan and her judges said’. The transcript isn’t verbatim, but summarised – and in general we hear more detail from Joan’s answers than we do of the questions she was asked. While part of the transcript survives in the French which Joan and her judges spoke, the formal record as a whole was translated into Latin, the language of the Church and of international diplomacy – a language Joan didn’t understand.

The French and Latin texts aren’t exactly the same. I’ve used the French version for the extracts below, but where there are additional details given in the Latin text, I’ve added them in brackets. And for now, I’m focusing only on Joan’s descriptions. What her voices said, I’ll leave for another time.

The first mention of Joan’s visions came on her first day in court, in the chapel of the English-held castle at Rouen where more than 40 clerics assembled to hear and judge her case. They asked her to swear on the holy gospels that she would tell the truth in response to their questions.

Her first words in reply are recorded as direct speech.

‘I don’t know what you want to question me about. Perhaps you might ask me things that I will not tell you.’

The sticking point, it turned out, was her visions.

… the revelations God had made to her, she had never told or revealed to anyone, except to Charles whom she calls her king, and she would not reveal them even if her head should be cut off, because she knew from her visions that she must keep them secret; but within eight days she would know well if she should reveal them.

The next day the room was even more crowded – and as the interrogation went on, despite her previous refusal, Joan did begin to talk about what she heard and saw. No question is recorded at this particular point in the transcript.

She declared that when she was thirteen, she had a revelation from Our Lord through a voice that taught her how she should behave. The first time she was very afraid. And she said the voice came around midday in summer when she was in her father’s garden, on a fast day, and she said that the voice came from the right side, towards the church. And she said that the voice rarely comes without light, which is always near the voice.

[In Latin: Asked how she saw the light she spoke of, since that light was to one side, she did not answer, but moved on to other matters.]

She said further that, after she heard the voice three times, she knew it was the voice of an angel. She also said that this voice always took good care of her.

[In Latin: … And Joan told the questioner that he would not learn from her, for this time, what the voice looked like when it appeared to her.]

The next session took place two days later. Now that she had begun to speak of her voice, the judges were determined – among other lines of interrogation – to press her for more.

Asked when she last heard her voice, she replied that she had heard it yesterday and today.

Asked what time she heard it yesterday, she said she heard it three times, once in the morning, once at the hour of vespers, and once at the hour of the Hail Mary; and she hears it much more often than she says.

Asked what she was doing yesterday morning when she heard this voice, she replied that she was sleeping, and the voice woke her.

Asked whether the voice woke her by speaking or by touching her on the arms or elsewhere, she said she was woken by the voice, without being touched.

Asked whether the voice was still in her room, she said she thought not, but that it was in the castle.

…

Asked whether the voice is an angel, or comes directly from God, or from a male saint or a female saint, she replied that it comes by the authority of God. ‘And I think I’m not telling you everything I know, and I’m more afraid of saying something that displeases them than I am of answering you.’ And she said: ‘As for this question, I beg you to give me time.’

… Asked whether, on the last two days when she heard her voices, there had been light, she replied that light comes before the voice.

Asked whether, with the voices, she sees anything else, she replied: ‘I’m not telling you everything, because I don’t have leave, and also my oath doesn’t cover that. But I tell you that it is a beautiful voice, and good and worthy, and I’m not bound to answer about it.’

She was asked whether the voice had vision, that is to say if it had eyes, since she was asking to see in writing the points about which they wanted to question her; to which she replied: ‘You won’t learn that yet.’

And she said little children have a saying that sometimes people are hanged for telling the truth.

So far, after three days of questioning, we have no details: no names, no saints, no bodily experiences – nothing but a voice, and a light.

It would be another three days until she faced the next questions.

To be continued …

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