Book Review: Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc: A Historyby Helen CastorHarperCollins, 2015The key to Helen Castor's brilliant, utterly absorbing new history of Joan of Arc is disarmingly simple: a wider frame. Instead of effectively beginning Joan's story in 1429 when she meets the Dauphin at Chinon and convinces him that she's the God-chosen cure to France's flagging morale in its ongoing war against England, Castor (author of 2011's excellent She-Wolves) begins her story in 1415, with England's stunning victory over France at the Battle of Agincourt, where Joan's God first entered the picture:

For the English, it was simple. Their king's claim to the throne of France – and, for that matter, his dynasty's contested right to wear the crown of England – had been utterly, gloriously vindicated by his astonishing victory at the battle they called 'Agincourt'. Only God's will could explain how so few Englishmen had vanquished so many great knights of France, and how it was that so little English blood had been spilled when so much death had been visited on their adversaries. This was heaven's mandate in action: the triumph of another David over the might of an arrogant Goliath, as one of the royal chaplains who had formed the spiritual corps of the English army now solemnly noted in his account of the campaign.

“One of the reasons we know [Joan's] story so well is that her life was so well-documented, in a distant age when that was true of very few,” Castor writes, and yet despite that abundance of documentation, hers must surely be one of the few biographies of Joan of Arc in which the Maid doesn't really show up until almost a quarter of the book is done. Instead, readers get the tangled history of France's conflict with England throughout the 15^th century, and for once the colorful characters in that broader story aren't relegated to the status of background players for a deluded village girl and her novel scheme to market herself to a nation.But even after Joan's capture by the English in 1430 and her trial and death at the stake in 1431, when it might seem natural for Castor's story to settle into more predictable patterns, the narrative stays fresh and revelatory, mainly because, as our author politely points out, she's intending to tell the whole story the sources sketch out, rather than picking and choosing:

Sometimes, historians have picked their way through the different accounts, choosing some details to weave into a seamless story and glossing over other elements that don't fit, without explaining why one has been preferred to another. Sometimes, too, parts of a single testimony have been accepted while others are dismissed, apparently more on the basis of perceived plausibility than anything else.

This Joan-in-context approach works wonders for making the old familiar story feel both newer and more complete than any other English-language biography has yet to manage. Readers more familiar with the standard miracles-in-chainmail version of Joan will require additional patience to take in the much fuller tale Castor tells, but they'll find the added enlightenment well worth the effort.