Saint Joan of Arc

What follows is one of the strangest stories in the history of the Church: a peasant girl, unlettered, without military training or social standing, presenting herself to the commander of a fortress and then to the Dauphin himself, persuading both of her mission through means the historical record does not fully explain. She led armies. She was wounded. She took Orléans. She stood beside Charles VII at his coronation in Reims Cathedral in 1429.

Captured by the Burgundians in 1430 and sold to the English, Joan underwent a lengthy trial at Rouen before an ecclesiastical court. The trial records have survived in full and are one of the most remarkable documents in medieval history. The judges aimed to convict her of heresy. Joan, unlettered and alone, defended herself with a precision and courage that astonished the notaries who recorded it. When asked whether she was in a state of grace, she replied: "If I am not, may God put me there; if I am, may God so keep me." The court found no answer to that.

She was burned at the stake in the Old Market Square of Rouen on May 30, 1431. She was nineteen. Twenty-five years later, a rehabilitation trial overturned every finding of the original condemnation. She was canonized in 1920. Her trial records remain the primary way to encounter her — not secondhand, but in her own words under the most severe pressure imaginable.

Joan is patron of France and of soldiers, captives, and those who face institutional power with no resources but conscience. The places of her mission — Domrémy, Orléans, Reims, Rouen — form one of the significant medieval pilgrimage circuits in France.