Trials and Tribulation of Joan of Arc. Her judgment and execution were just the beginning in a long series of fluctuations for the canonized combattant of God…
In general, we find that Joan of Arc all over the world is too many people a symbol of nationalism. We find her presented in this light in the national literatures of peoples as remote from France as Latvia and Poland and Brazil. In Maltese there are books which present Joan as a nationalist symbol. There have been Jewish theories of Joan of Arc, which have, explicitly or implicitly, identified with Joan the Jewish people, suffering and persecuted through the centuries; Joan thus appears again, in yet another role, as champion of the downtrodden. It is interesting to contrast the “Celtic theory,” which, inspired by chauvinistic nationalism, suggest absurdly enough that Pierre Cauchon, the prosecuting bishop at her trial was a Jew and makes Joan a symbol of opposition to Jews.
—Statue of a young Joan of Arc inside the Joan of Arc Center in Domremy.
The base of the statue is inscribed in Hebrew from Psalm 27 (verse 1 & 3) and reads:
“The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? the Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? Though a host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear: though war should rise against me, in this will I be confident.”
The follwing interesting details about this statue were provided by Virginia Frohlick of the St.Joan of Arc Center and translated into English by Chris Snidow of PilgrimWitnesses.com who also took the photo.
“The Maid up at midnight to listen to her Voices, is the subject of this statue.
Marble statue made by an anonymous sculptor, from the last quarter of the 19th century.
In August of 1902, an administrative subdivision of Neufchateau received two very large packages (the statue and the stand) from England, sent by a Sir H. Dalton, an Englishman. He had notified them in advance that he was offering this statue to the birth-house of Joan of Arc, and that he was himself coming for its inauguration. The administrative staff of Neufchateau certainly thought it was a beautiful work, and they were also intrigued by the Hebrew text engraved on the stand. They learned that it is verse 1 & 3 of Psalm 27.
As the news of this gift got around, it became a big ‘story’. The local press immediately flew into a rage, under the pretext that it was “an outrage from a treacherous traitor, and that such the lack modesty excluded it from the sanctuary, etc.
So the Neufchateau authorities went again to the Israeli translators to get their opinion. They said that this statue certainly couldn’t be any Biblical woman of the Bible, and that it would be contrary to all the Israeli traditions to represent a Jewish woman, head uncovered, and not even with a headband, and praying on her knees.
…
- He had bought it 30 years earlier, found in an artist’s workshop, and the artist himself didn’t really know from where it had come from. He felt that there was a certain resemblance to the statue by Chapu (1872), that was entitled Joan of Arc at Domremy, it was quite probably him who named it Joan of Arc.
Read More:http://www.maidofheaven.com/joanofarc_pictures11d6.asp
American biographies, plays, histories, dealing with Joan of Arc were, in the nineteenth century, usually echoes of the European counterparts. In the work of Mark Twain, however, we may catch an authentic reflection of the rough, brawling axaggerations of frontier humor and the sentimental frontier attitude toward women, who have, in a new country, a scarcity value! Joan of Arc, too, was a favorite with pioneer American feminists like Sarah Moore Grimke.
To Fentonville, writing in Richmond as the shadow of defeat closed about the Confederacy, Joan was the embodiment and the inspiration of a national “guerre a outrance.” Albert Bigelow Paine produced a more sober version of the sentimentalism of his friend Mark twain, whose biographer he was. Francis Lowell, a judicial-minded Bostonian, provided, however, in his Joan of Arc what can be esteemed as the most historical work upon the subject of the Maid in our language.
—I’d always wondered exactly what heresy Joan had been found guilty of, but I had not got around to reading the contemporary documentation of her trial. It is a remarkable account, the fullest we have from that time. I read most of it in WP Barrett’s translation from 1931, and I prefer his more literal treatment to the recent version of Daniel Hobbins (published by Harvard).
Some aspects of Joan’s trial strike us as horribly unjust. It was controlled by her enemies the English, who imprisoned her in a castle during the three months it lasted. At a late stage she was threatened with torture, which, though not legal in England, was a commonplace of Continental secular law. Joan was asked baffling questions, but at least her examination was thorough. In an English criminal trial, she’d have been condemned to death in a day.
Joan comes through as honest, good and clever, but not a practised courtroom operator. For a weakened and fearful captive thrown into doubt, her performance was astonishing. Read More:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherhowse/3558706/The-voices-that-Joan-of-Arc-heard.html image:Painting by Paul Gauguin of Joan of Arc with her Voices titled “Joan of Arc” read more:http://www.maidofheaven.com/joanofarc_pictures2e.asp
ADDENDUM:
Rene d’Anjou had connections in every direction and he was a classic Brotherhood figure at the centre of a vast web. Just two of the famous names of history to whom he was connected were Christopher Columbus and Joan of Arc. At one time he employed Christopher Columbus and the enormous significance of this will become clear soon. Joan of Arc, it appears, was born as a subject of Rene d’Anjou in the duchy of Bar.
According to official history, in 1429 she announced her ‘divine mission’ to save France from the English invaders and to ensure that Charles became king of France, as he did as Charles VII. She asked for an audience with Rene d’Anjou’s father-in-law and great uncle and when the meeting took place, Rene, was present.5 To fulfill her mission, she said, according to the official tale, she needed Rene, a horse, and: “some good men to take me into France”.
Historians who chronicled Rene’s life suggest that he left with Joan to meet with Charles and was at her side in her victorious battles against the English which put Charles on the throne. His whereabouts cannot be accounted for between the years 1429-1431, the very years when Joan of Arc was at the peak of her military career. Joan was eventually burned at the stake by the Inquisition as a witch and it is very clear when you look at the evidence that her whole story was another historical smokescreen.
We are supposed to believe that this young girl from a poor background knocked on the door of the aristocracy and they allowed her to lead a war against the English. Yes, OK, and I can tie my willy to the lamppost across the street. The man who was really behind that military campa
was Rene d’Anjou with the story of Joan of Arc (based on the legend of the ‘Virgin of Lorraine’) merely a convenient way of hiding the real goings on.Read More:http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/biggestsecret/biggestsecretbook/biggestsecret08.htm
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