Illiterate adolescent peasant girl, prompted by inner voices, turns knight-redeemer of her country—temporarily. A life of the
martyr Joan of Arc (1412–31), presented (contradictions intact) by a lifelong admirer.
Gordon (Seeing Through Places, 2000, etc.), whose works often portray women confronting faith, pinpoints how “Gift,
chance, accident, coincidence” converged during the Hundred Years” War to manifest such a heroine, crusading to crown an
unwilling Dauphin as God’s elect who would ransom France. Gordon highlights how Joan vindicated here prophetic status by
manipulating symbols (her divinely designed battle standard, her armor, and her male dress) to leverage untrustworthy men: the
king who soon shunned his champion, the companions-in-arms who fought then flitted, the French royals who sold her out, and
the accusers who tried and burned her as a heretic. Gordon qualifies the myths surrounding this incredibly brave and resilient
down-to-earth na‹f: Joan was surprised when a wound she “foretold” actually hurt, and shaken when confronted with war’s human
misery. A chronology stresses the enforced brevity of Joan’s career: a fitful tactician alive only in action (when Joan let “her
military judgment and her religious scruples” diverge), both her victories and her charisma vanished soon enough. Gordon (like
Joan’s rehabilitators) does not discuss “the difficult issues of inspiration and its verification,” however, leaving us to wonder about
the question that stands at the center of the legend: namely, whose heavenly directives are genuine? And who can we know? All
contention is focused upon that strong unviolated female body, remote from standard hierarchies of sex, class, deference, chivalry,
orthodoxy. Though analogies intended as timeless fall short (“Girls aren’t supposed to brag”), Gordon trenchantly discerns how
virginity granted autonomy, and one senses that Joan’s mission required neither gender. Surveying the manifold purposes served
by this idiosyncratic saint, Gordon characterizes her best: “the patroness of the vivid life.”
A bold “biographical meditation” that persuades the skeptic to meditate on the inexplicable something Joan made happen,
and keeps on happening, to this day. (First serial to Commonweal; author tour)
