Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc (edited by Bonnie Wheeler and Charles T. Wood) is a volume in Garland Publishing's new monographic series called The New Middle Ages. It consists of fifteen articles, an Epilogue by Regine Pernoud (to whom the book is dedicated), and two short pieces that are called Appendices. Of the twenty people who participated in this collaborative effort, five are historians and twelve are specialists in language and literature. Fourteen are associated with institutions in the United States, while four are French.
As always, it is difficult to review a collection of articles because, inevitably, they are uneven in quality, and any attempt to comment on each paper would produce little more than an annotated table of contents. The usefulness of the articles will vary according to the interests and knowledge of the individual reader. As a person whose own specialty is medieval history, this reviewer is partial to the contributions that are based on historical documents and less impressed with those that emphasize the critical analysis of literary texts. I found most interesting, however, two articles that presented information that was completely new to me -- Henry A. Kelly's analysis of Joan's lengthy process of canonization during the pontificates of Leo XIII and Pius X, and Kevin J. Hardy's study of the numerous motion pictures devoted to Joan of Arc. A reviewer with different interests might have quite different preferences.
What we can say with certainty about this volume is that it advances our knowledge on many points of detail and advances our understanding of Joan of Arc and her impact -- without, however, really solving any of the mysteries. The coverage seems thorough; on the major aspects of Joan's career, most of the "usual suspects" are represented: the clergy's obsession with her use of men's clothing (article of Susan Schibanoff) and with the identity of her mysterious "voices" (article of Karen Sullivan and that of Jane Marie Pinzino); her success as a military commander (article of Kelly DeVries); the "sign" that she gave Charles VII at Chinon in 1429 (article of Jean Fraikin). Christine de Pizan (herself something of a "growth industry" in recent years), whose last work dealt with Joan of Arc, is the subject of two articles (that of Christine Webb and that of Anne D. Lutkus and Julia M. Walker).
All these papers furnish food for thought and force us to consider asking new questions or phrasing the old questions in different ways. The research will continue, especially now that scholars have noted significant errors in the transcribing and publishing of some of the documents (article of Olivier Bouzy). What makes Joan of Arc such an unending subject of fascination is our realization of the gap that exists between our own way of thinking and the mentality of early fifteenth-century France. A teen-aged peasant girl arrives at the king's court and says that she has been hearing voices that urge upon her a mission to lead the French army to the relief of Orleans. How to respond to such an extraordinary pronouncement? The undergraduates in my classes over the years would expect the response to be "Nonsense, you're a teen-aged peasant girl." But the actual response was, in effect, "Whose voices?" Therein lies the real mystery, the fascinating aspect of Saint Joan's career for most modern students -- what kind of a world was it that produced such a response to her proposal?