There is no shortage of modern biographies of Joan of Arc (1412?-1431). [1] Yet readers inspired by those narratives may struggle to find reliable, scholarly resources to aid them in deepening their knowledge and understanding of the many themes, issues, people and places that frame the remarkable story of the Pucelle.
Readers of French would be advised to start with Jeanne d’Arc. Histoire et dictionnaire, edited by Philippe Contamine, Olivier Bouzy, and Xavier Hélary. It is first rate and provides a collection of scholarly essays on most of the key stages of Joan’s story, as good as anything written in the more famous biographies, together with useful information on her itinerary, potted biographies of all the main characters in the story, and short discussions of places and key themes, big and small. That may be usefully supplemented by the Dictionnaire encyclopédique de Jeanne d’Arc, edited by Pascal-Raphaël Ambrogi and Dominique Le Tourneau, which is organized simply as a dictionary with short descriptions of people, places, and themes, but lacks the scholarly expertise of the all-star team of Contamine, Bouzy, and Hélary. [2]
Anglophones have little to match the resources offered by these French dictionnaires, apart from the appendices to the biography of Joan of Arc by Régine Pernoud and Merie-Véronique Clin, published in 1998. [3] So the publication of Scott Manning’s Joan of Arc: A Reference Guide to Her Life and Works is very welcome. Like the French dictionnaires, Manning’s book provides short, potted discussions of a wide range of topics ranging from people and places that were part of Joan’s story to more complicated issues that framed her story from “Clothing,” “Virginity” and “Voices, Visions, and Revelations” to “Horses,” “Idolater” and “Inquisition.” In addition, the book offers a useful timeline, bibliography and set of short appendices on subjects such as the surviving letters of Joan of Arc.
It is no surprise that Manning’s book does not reach the heights of the outstanding Histoire et dictionnaire written by Contamine, Bouzy, and Hélary, three of the most important historians of fifteenth-century France. And there are inevitably small errors and points of contention in the entries within Manning’s dictionary, though it would be churlish to include a list in a review like this. The crucial point is that Manning has written for those beginning their investigations into the history of Joan of Arc. His book is an extremely helpful resource for students and for those who are starting to read about Joan and is certainly far superior to the countless internet resources that are deeply flawed and filled with historical inaccuracies. Intelligent readers should view the entries in Manning’s book as the starting points for further investigation, rather than as definitive answers: anyone interested in serious research into the history of Joan of Arc will need to go back to the surviving evidence and review the debates in the secondary scholarship, much of which is usefully identified in the bibliography.
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Notes:
1. See, for example, Kelly DeVries, Joan of Arc. A Military Leader (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999); Larissa Juliet Taylor, The Virgin warrior. The life and death of Joan of Arc (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), and Helen Castor, Joan of Arc (London: Faber and Faber, 2015), as well as noteworthy studies published in French by experts such as Philippe Contamine, Jeanne d’Arc et son époque. Essais sur le XVe siècle français (Paris: CERF, 2020), Gerd Krumeich,Jeanne d’Arc en vérité (Paris: Tallandier, 2012), and Franck Collard, La passion de Jeanne d’Arc. Mémoires françaises de la Pucelle (Paris, 2017).
2. Jeanne d’Arc. Histoire et dictionnaire, ed. Philippe Contamine, Olivier Bouzy, and Xavier Hélary (Paris: Bouquins, 2012), and Dictionnaire encyclopédique de Jeanne d’Arc, ed. Pascal-Raphaël Ambrogi and Dominique Le Tourneau (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2017).
3. Régine Pernoud and Marie-Véronique Clin, Joan of Arc: her story, revised and translated by Jeremy Duquesnay Adams (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). Also see Deborah A. Fraioli, Joan of Arc and the Hundred Years War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005).