Volume 28, Number 11 · June 25, 1981
A Working Girl
By Keith Thomas
Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism
by Marina Warner
Knopf, 384 pp., $17.95
Joan of Arc: The Legend and the Reality
by Frances Gies
Harper and Row, 306 pp., $14.95
The 550th anniversary of Joan of Arc's death in the flames at Rouen on May 30, 1431 can be relied upon to release a torrent of commemorative books and articles. But it is unlikely to add much of substance to the known facts of her career. The essential source remains the detailed record of her trial, which was published with many supporting documents by the French scholar Jules Quicherat in the 1840s. By printing the girl's own words in all their directness and tenacity, Quicherat did for Joan of Arc very much what Thomas Carlyle's edition of his letters and speeches did in the same decade for Oliver Cromwell. Since Quicherat's day, scholars have filled out the political background of her career, but they are still unable to do more than speculate about some of the baffling enigmas it presents.
Review, 3847 words
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