Listening to Joan of Arc #2

More sound, more visions

Last time, we left Joan on Saturday 24 February 1431, after three days of interrogation by her judges in Rouen Castle.

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.

Detail from Jules Bastien-Lepage’s painting of Joan’s visions in the garden at Domrémy, 1879