Happy 600th Birthday, Joan of Arc! Although it's a bit too convenient that the Saint happened to be born on the Epiphany, and it is more likely that her birth date is simply unknown, I still like the idea of celebrating Joan's birth. Her death date is, of course, quite certain (30 May 1431), but she was many things before she was burned at the stake. She was a pious girl, an outspoken woman, a battle leader, a key participant in a king's coronation. She was a woman who refused to wear a dress, and a peasant who refused to be silenced when she had something to say. She demanded that the people around her listen, and, quite surprisingly, they did. She wouldn't have been tried and executed in such a public manner if she hadn't made a lot of people very nervous. She was barely more than a child, and she would probably have lived a quiet life completely outside of the historical record if she hadn't stood up and made people take notice of her. She insisted on entering and changing the course of history.
So often we define Joan by her death, and it is true that her death was so spectacular that we could hardly forget it. Not only was Joan the only person in history to be both convicted of heresy and canonized by the Catholic Church, but her manner of execution was horrific even by the standards of her time (perhaps even more so by the standards of her time). Her body was burned twice and her ashes were thrown in the river -- not a sight that people could forget. Representations of the saint in film often focus almost exclusively on her trial and moment of death, and movie posters show larger images of Joan engulfed in flames. To the left, Ingrid Bergman screams in pain amid technicolor flames with the caption, "Greatest of all spectacles!" Her death holds a morbid fascination; it is the culminating point of her story. Yet she would have been neither executed nor canonized if she hadn't led an extraordinary, though extraordinarily brief, life. And,
as I've written before, her story has continued beyond as well. Her story has been appropriated by every possible political and religious and ideological agenda, and it is hard to extract her from the complex web of retellings and associations. But the very fact that her story has taken on such a life of its own indicates that many found her life, as well as her death, both fascinating and inspirational.
