Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women Read Online Free PDF Page A

would be damned before she surrendered. She died at the age of eighty-two, a remarkable age in a remarkable life, outliving most of her children. She is buried beside her husband at the abbey.
    Eleanor was a woman of extraordinary power and influence even while constantly having to operate from behind the men who controlled the throne. Contemporary chroniclers, uneasy with the idea of a woman wielding power, tended to focus on Eleanor’s romantic relationships. Some accused her of being a demon in league with the devil. Modern historians, who have been able to cut past the detritus to examine her influence, have given her the credit and recognition she deserves. Eleanor of Aquitaine was an extraordinary woman for any age, refusing to be bound by the rules of proper behavior for women. She played a major role in political events, unusual for her time, helping to create an empire for her descendants through diplomacy and clever marriages. Brave and independent, she remains one of history’s most impressive women.

     

Joan of Arc
     

1412-1431
     
    Even little children repeat that oftentimes people are hanged for having told the truth.
    —JOAN OF ARC AT HER TRIBUNAL
     
     
    She was just a small-town girl living in a small-town world, called Domrémy, France, population two hundred. But in a few short years everyone in the medieval world would know her name. Her actions helped turn the tide in the Hundred Years’ War with England. Not bad for an illiterate peasant girl from the French countryside whose public career lasted less than two years!
    Joan was born around January 6, 1412. Unlike the image of her as a poor, barefoot peasant girl, Joan came from a family of wellto-do farmers who owned a nice two-story home with a slate roof that’s still standing. Her father, Jacques, was well respected by the villagers; he was responsible for the defense of the town and collected the taxes. Until the age of twelve, Joan lived an ordinary life, going to church, helping her mother with the housework, and tending the sheep, with marriage or the convent in her future. But God and history had other plans for her.
    Joan first started hearing her “voices,” which she claimed were those of the saints Michael, Catherine, and Margaret, when she hit puberty. Nowadays if a teenager claimed to be hearing voices, she would probably be diagnosed as schizophrenic and pumped full of psychotropic drugs. But this was the medieval world, where no one put you in a padded room if you heard voices, particularly if they came from God. However, Joan’s voices told her to do something extraordinary. She was to lead an army against the English, and crown the Dauphin, who was heir to the throne, King of France. At first Joan refused to listen. How could a teenage girl with no connections hope even to meet the Dauphin, let alone lead an army? The task was so daunting that she kept her voices to herself, not even telling her priest.
    The French and English had been fighting over who got to wear the French crown for nearly one hundred years. Thanks to the longbow, the English kept winning, soon occupying huge chunks of France. In 1415, Henry V scored a major victory at Agincourt, along with a French princess and the promise of the crown. After the deaths of Charles VI of France and Henry V in 1422, half of the kingdom now believed that Henry’s son, the child king Henry VI of England, was their king, while the other half supported the Dauphin. Joan’s hometown was smack in the middle of the war zone. While Domrémy was true to the forces of the King of France and his allies, it was surrounded by those loyal to the Duke of Burgundy, who had allied with the English. But Joan couldn’t refuse God’s orders, and she had her voices to guide her. She just needed to find a way to the Dauphin.
    Leaving home without telling her parents, Joan convinced her uncle to accompany her to Vaucouleurs to see the powerful lord in her area, Robert de Baudricourt, to tell