Joan of Arc: A History

by Helen Castor

Overview

From the author of the acclaimed She-Wolves, the complex, surprising, and engaging story of one of the most remarkable women of the medieval world—as never told before.

Helen Castor tells afresh the gripping story of the peasant girl from Domremy who hears voices from God, leads the French army to victory, is burned at the stake for heresy, and eventually becomes a saint. But unlike the traditional narrative, a story already shaped by the knowledge of what Joan would become and told in hindsight, Castor’s Joan of Arc: A History takes us back to fifteenth century France and tells the story forwards. Instead of an icon, she gives us a living, breathing woman confronting the challenges of faith and doubt, a roaring girl who, in fighting the English, was also taking sides in a bloody civil war. We meet this extraordinary girl amid the tumultuous events of her extraordinary world where no one—not Joan herself, nor the people around her—princes, bishops, soldiers, or peasants—knew what would happen next.

Adding complexity, depth, and fresh insight into Joan’s life, and placing her actions in the context of the larger political and religious conflicts of fifteenth century France, Joan of Arc: A History is history at its finest and a surprising new portrait of this remarkable woman.

Joan of Arc: A History features an 8-page color insert.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062384409
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	05/17/2016
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	122,465
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.80(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Helen Castor is a historian of medieval England and a Bye-Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Her first book, Blood and Roses, was long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize and won the English Association’s Beatrice White Prize. Her second book, She-Wolves, was selected as one of the books of the year by The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Independent, Financial Times, and BBC History Magazine. She lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

[An] illuminating new biography... a clear and elegant account .

Times Higher Education

Gripping…Written to the impeccable standards of her award-winning bestseller, SHE-WOLVES, Castor’s meticulous untangling of six centuries’ worth of incredibly complex and contradictory detail into elegant prose is a thing of wonder…Castor doesn’t make history fun or cool in JOAN OF ARC. She makes it shockingly, poignantly, irresistibly real.

BookReporter

[An] excellent retelling of the strange tale of the Maid from Domrémy...JOAN OF ARC: A HISTORY is popular history at its best

Daily Telegraph (London)

With the meticulous scholarship that she revealed in SHE-WOLVES, and in the same captivating manner, Helen Castor presents us with a very compelling analysis.

Trevor James

Enlightening ... [an] elegant and vivid account.

The Times (London)

Excellent ... perhaps Castor’s greatest achievement is to remind us of just how extraordinary Joan was.

Literary Review

A fascinating biography ... truly thrilling.

Daily Mail (London)

An elegant, subtle biography of great historical integrity and sensitive understanding. Castor lets the humanity of Joan’s story shine through.

Kate Mosse

…quite intriguing. This book is a great historical read.

Manhattan Book Review

Compelling ... [Castor] succeeds triumphantly in rescuing [Joan] from the various straitjackets in which she has been confined ... a fascinating and privileged insight.

Sunday Times (London)

[A] vivid and intelligent biography ... hugely impressive.

Sunday Business Post

There have been many lives of Joan, and books about her times, some of them excellent. But none is quite like Castor’s ... [her] book is a historian’s achievement.

The Guardian

An amazing read…This is a true story from the histories and journals of the times that reads like fiction…one of the best histories I have encountered.

Blogcritics (Leslie Wright)

JOAN OF ARC: A HISTORY is popular history at its best: pacy, clear and undergirded with a formidable array of scholarly footnotes. Helen Castor shows how well it can be done.

Daily Telegraph

Castor’s account is filled with gruesome murders, even more gruesome accidents, and layers of intrigue that make Game of Thrones look like child’s play…enjoyable…never dull, thanks to Castor’s knack for weaving in salacious bits, usually involving a particularly unfortunate death.

Daily Beast

Castor brings keenly observed historical details to the grandeur and drama of the political and religious turmoil of medieval Europe and an extraordinary young woman.

Booklist

Convincing and gripping…a highly satisfying biography…Castor’s great coup is in framing this biography within another context...it puts the women back into the story…Castor’s book is an important way of returning Joan’s ‘star’ to the realm where it belongs, the human one.

Amanda Foreman

In Castor’s hands [Joan’s] voice comes across in a truly vibrant way that illuminates her personality as few others have managed…eye-opening, engaging, and overall, excellent non-fiction…Castor’s outstanding ability to convey the important events and people that made up the political landscape make this one a winner.

BookBrowse

A triumph - brings the real Joan and her time to dramatic, moving and brilliant life.

Dan Jones

A book that shows vividly what Joan meant to those in her own time, politically and militarily…fascinating

The New Yorker

03/02/2015
Now a legendary symbol of France, Joan of Arc began her life as a 15th-century peasant girl who, after hearing the voice of God, donned “armour as though she were a man” and inspired the army of the dauphin Charles to victory over the English before leading him to his coronation at Reims as Charles VII. Castor (She-Wolves) recreates the heady atmosphere of a period when rival French, English, and English-Burgundian claims resulted in two claimants to the French throne. Her detailed, lengthy, and well-written account relates the fighting between primary dynastic houses before Joan arrives on the scene. Joan remains enigmatic throughout much of Castor’s work, but as she faces death at the hands of her English-Burgundian captors, her extraordinary will shines through. Castor increasingly uses Joan’s words during her trial, and quotes from the testimony of her friends and family members in the posthumous re-examination of her cleric-orchestrated trial. Surprisingly, Castor doesn’t mention post-WWI French nationalism and the desire of competing factions to appropriate Joan’s story in the brief discussion of Joan’s canonization in 1920. Castor creates a strong introduction to the courageous girl who swore she heard saints’ voices, but also to the nation-rending struggle for power so fiercely waged that only that singular, obsessive teenager could finally save France. Illus. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"An unorthodox yet erudite and elegant biography of this 'massive star.'" —Kirkus

From the Publisher

04/01/2015
The title of this work explains what we need to know. This is not a biography, nor a religious parable or a folktale recast. Castor (She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth) has thoroughly rooted the story of the Maid of Orléans in its social, dynastic, and military context. Joan herself does not appear until a third of the way through the book; Castor begins nearly 30 years earlier and proceeds to paint a detailed picture of French politics and—with the help of several family trees—the elaborate crosscurrents of the French and English empires during the Hundred Years' War. By the time Joan enters the story, the reader understands the forces in play that allowed an illiterate peasant girl to gain an audience with the deposed heir to France's throne and lead an army to multiple victories before her capture, trial, and execution for heresy (and cross-dressing)—as well as the reasons for the "nullification trial" 25 years afterward to rehabilitate her name. Castor's research is thorough and her account at times dense but always fascinating. VERDICT Readers interested in history, rather than folklore, will find this detailed framing of Joan's story very rewarding. [See Prepub Alert, 11/17/14.]—Lisa Peet, Library Journal

Library Journal

All this is entirely convincing and gripping, but what makes Castor’s biography notable is the other context she subtly weaves through the narrative. Related with little fanfare or highlighting, it puts the women back into the story. The only time Joan’s life became truly an all-male affair was during the orgy of misogyny that passed as her trial.

The New York Times Book Review - Amanda Foreman

2015-02-03
A fresh attempt to put young, willful Joan the Maid squarely back at the center of the French-English drama of early- to mid-15th-century France.If readers can wade through the mystifying details of the struggle for supremacy between the Burgundians (allied to the English and King Henry V) and the Armagnacs (devoted to Charles of Valois), a reward awaits when Joan finally appears midway in British author Castor's (She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth, 2010, etc.) historical account. Deciding which side God was on seemed to be the order of the day, and after their humiliating defeat by the English at Agincourt in 1415, the French were hard-pressed to understand why God had chosen the aggressive English invaders to punish them for some unspecified sin. Indeed, Joan was not the first female visionary to appear to advocate for the cause of France. Both Marie Robine (d. 1399) and Jeanne-Marie de Maillé (1331-1414) had broadcast their visions to urge an end to schism. Joan, an illiterate shepherdess at age 16, had left her home village to set out on a mission to speak with the dauphin, housed at Chinon. Her astonishing claims to have been instructed by God to raise an army and drive the English from France so that Charles could be properly crowned required some testing of her integrity, including her virginity. Her adoption of male clothing seemed both an aid in riding and waging war and a way to thwart the sexual advances of men, which plagued her constantly up until her imprisonment. Her victories at Orleans, Jargeau, Patay and Meung, sending the English fleeing in confusion, galvanized the soldiers and townspeople, while her capture at Compiègne suddenly indicated that God had forsaken her. Castor carefully combs the record of her interrogation then and rehabilitation 25 years later. An unorthodox yet erudite and elegant biography of this "massive star."

Kirkus Reviews