Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured Read Online Free PDF

apparatus of human memory to nudge Joan’s winter arrival to align with a date befitting her glory. It mattered little whether an Epiphany birthday resulted from heavenly manipulation, happy coincidence, Lord Perceval’s imagination, or was the gift of a fabulist somewhere in the chain of rumor that delivered news to the French aristocracy; more important was that Joan’s birth be met with fanfare and its date carry meaning. Epiphany marks the Magi’s paying homage to Jesus, the infant Messiah who represents the “new heaven and new earth” of Revelation, a book dear to the medieval mind for its wealth of symbol and allegory. For a girl who understood herself as God’s agent—“the reason I was born” to save the people of France and deliver its crown to God’s chosen king—there was no more fitting birthday. Jesus borrowed December 25 from Sol, who, like most solar deities, had timed his arrival to follow on the heels of the winter solstice, and Jesus took Sol’s halo as well—as did the Roman emperors.
    Where no tangible historical records or artifacts provide a counterweight to the pull of a narrative tradition shaped by faith, the historical truth of a life like Joan’s or Jesus’s gives way to religious truth. Deities in mortal form must have parents, places of birth, and childhoods, and Boulainvilliers unwittingly aligned Joan’s birthday with an event that might never have taken place. No evidence supports any wise men’s pilgrimage to the newborn Son of God; no astronomer recorded any celestial phenomenon that might have been interpreted as a guiding star. The idea of Jesus’s being laid in a manger derives from a mistranslation of the Aramaic to the Greek; he was probably born in an underground room used for pressing olives, far from a manger, with no space for receiving shepherds and magi. The Nativity might not have occurred in Bethlehem. Among the five cities archaeologists have identified as possible birthplaces for Jesus, Nazareth is the most likely, as his name suggests.The Evangelist Matthew chose Bethlehem to fulfill a messianic prophecy made eight hundred years earlier by Micah:“You, oh Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by nomeans least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who will govern my people Israel.” John’s Gospel chose a different validation:“We have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph,” summoning in the case of Moses a tradition dating as far back as the Bronze Age. As it had been for Jesus, so it would be for Joan; an origin myth was added as a prefix to what was known of her extraordinary life, an auspicious beginning that predicted the subsequent miracles—prophecy applied retroactively to provide context for phenomena witnessed by hundreds of people and, as nothing else explained them, experienced as divine.
    Witnesses to Joan’s early childhood include friends, neighbors, local clergy, a man who identified himself as Joan’s uncle but who was in fact her cousin’s husband, and four of her dozen or more godparents. When parishes had yet to keep written records and the majority of the populace was illiterate, twelve wasn’t an unusual number of godparents, especially not for the daughter of a prominent villager. The more people who could bear witness to a person’s identity, age, and, most important, baptism, the better. Named Jehanne, or Jehannette, after one of her godmothers, Joan never used the name “Arc.” As she explained to the notary who each day read her recorded testimony back to her to confirm its accuracy—lest “the said Jehanne should deny having made certain of the replies collected”—in Joan’s part of the world, children bore their mother’s surname (suggesting to some biographers that her father’s mother might have come from Arc, ten miles north of Ceffonds). She supposed she might be Jehanne Romée, but she had always chosen to identify herself