Tag Archives: Joan of Arc

Remembering Joan of Arc

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Joan of Arc by Amy Cools, about 1998. My mental image of her then was influenced by popular iconography and films, much of it which, as I did, portrayed her as tall, fair-skinned, and light-haired (think Ingrid Bergman’s 1948 film portrayal). In real life, she was somewhat short, dark-eyed with black hair, and had a sun-tanned, athletic body that, despite their describing it as attractive, aroused no lust in her fellow soldiers. Perhaps this resulted from their idealization of her as too godly for mere mortals to touch. Or perhaps, as I surmise, her indifference to sex with men was too manifest to give rise to that kind of chemistry. My drawing does, I think, manifest my youthful idea of her as a lovely tomboy, as an active, confident girl was then miscalled. Joan’s wearing the white shift which she wore to the stake and holding her cross made of two sticks tied together, which a sympathetic bystander quickly fashioned to comfort her on her way to execution

My fascination with Joan of Arc, born sometime in 1412 and put to death by fire on May 30th, 1431, is long-standing, beginning in my girlhood. Joan, as you likely know, is the French national heroine who fought to remove medieval France from English rule, whose exploits turned the tide and guaranteed France’s ultimate victory in the Hundred Year’s War.

She was the daughter of prosperous peasants in Domrémy, France. On a self-proclaimed mission from God to restore French rule to the rightful heir of the House of Valois, she convinced the local baron, military leaders, and eventually the crown prince to put her in charge of the dispirited French army, despite the fact that she was illiterate, militarily inexperienced, and a teenage girl.

By the time Joan reached the Dauphin, as the French crown prince was called, the French had long been in the habit of losing battles, even when they had the upper hand in numbers and defensive position, often because they were unable to cohere as a unified fighting force. French society was still feudal, highly stratified by class, and the army was no exception. Common soldiers were ill-equipped and underused, mistrusted and despised by aristocratic and wealthy knights jealous of their own superior rank. They could not bring themselves to give common soldiers opportunities for a share in the military glories of conquest. So French armies, fractured by class with everyone out for themselves, lost time after time to the more pragmatic and unified English forces. Troops of English longbowmen, for example, were made of up common soldiers highly valued for their strength and skill, and the English army made full use of them, to the detriment of the French. When Joan came along, a peasant in direct communication with Saint Micheal the Archangel, patron saint of French knights, she served as the much-needed unifier of French sympathies. Knights and commoners alike were united by their love of her and what she represented, and they began to fight as one, an army made holy and therefore equal: the aristocracy and chivalric order may have been respecters of persons, but the God who called Joan to lead them in their sacred quest was not.

Joan also whipped the army into shape, demanding that they train as hard as she did. She banned gambling, swearing, and prostitution from the camps, and required that soldiers attend religious services regularly. These reforms served the double purpose of further unifying soldiers through daily rituals that helped internalize their sense of holy, shared purpose, and of reducing the opportunities for alcoholism, venereal disease, and other ravages of hard living that could weaken her forces. She also prohibited raiding and pillaging which further unified French sympathies, especially of the common people and the countryside who had long suffered the predations of marauding English and French soldiers.

Joan of Arc, ca. 1450-1500, oil on parchment, artist unknown, public domain

Once she had raised the Seige of Orléans, drove the English from fort after fort, and led the Dauphin to be crowned King at Reims, her hawkish mission fell victim to what she considered dithering and intrigue, and what Charles VII considered diplomacy to save lives and capital. As Joan saw it, aristocrats and corrupt clerics, still jealous of their own social standing and opportunities for power either as leaders in the newly strengthened French order or as secret English collaborators, blocked her next great project: to deliver Paris from English control. She relieved her frustration and boredom by leading a series of minor skirmishes against the English, and was finally captured at one of these. She was handed over to an ecclesiastical court, led by French clerics symphathetic to the English cause, so they try her as heretic, ‘proving’ her in league with Satanic fiends, as the great English playwright William Shakespeare portrays her in Henry V. This would discredit her godly mission, her power to unite the French, and her assistance to Charles VII’s cause, thereby undermining his royal legitimacy. She was burned at the stake in Rouen, having accomplished the first part of her mission, the liberation of Orléans and the coronation of her King, and setting in motion the second part, the complete liberation of France from English rule, at only nineteen years old.

But it was clear to both French and English that the ‘holy’ court that condemned Joan was led and manipulated by political actors, not by men of God whose chief concern was to protect the Church from heresy. About twenty years after her death, the victorious French king Charles VII, who owed his crown and the reclamation of his kingdom to Joan, was finally reminded of his debt of gratitude by the realization that his hold on power was threatened if his rule was the result of the machinations of a heretic. A trial of rehabilitation and nullification commenced in the mid-1400’s, which formally vindicated her and proved to their satisfaction her mission came from God. Almost five hundred years after her death, Joan of Arc was proclaimed a saint by the Catholic Church.

Joan of Arc statue in Paris, France, photo 2015 by Amy Cools. This stylized depiction of her, in that Art Deco style I so love, makes me think of a green flame: green for the fields in which she roamed as a child shepherd, flame for her passionate intensity. Her attempt to liberate Paris by force from English rule was put to a stop by Charles VII’s diplomatic maneuverings, as well as by a wound she suffered in the failed assault. Paris was recovered by the French only a few years later by a means this inveterate warrior dismissed as a sign of weakness: by treaty. I believe, by the way, the fire she was wont to ignite in the hearts of soldiers also flamed in the breasts of the liberators of Paris five hundred years later in WWII.

I was religious as a child and a teenager, and admired her then as a Catholic saint. By my late teens, I had left religious belief behind, but my admiration for her has only grown and deepened over the years. She became something more to me, more rich, more mysterious, more complex. I think of her now as a native genius, with no other language or context in which to express, to herself and others, her political and military insights than the religion which infused her life and the life of the lives of her fellow countrypeople. And the way she was able to baffle, rebut, and defeat her interrogators at the show trial by those determined to discredit her before burning her at the stake remains a marvel. Her intellect was such that, despite her illiteracy and lack of formal education, she was able to see right through the legal deceptions of her judges and prosecutors, avoiding every verbal trap and pitfall they set for her, turning their attacks and arguments right back on them.

In preparation for this anniversary of her death, I’ve immersed myself in writing and art about Joan. Besides various histories, I’ve recently re-read Mark Twain’s historical novel Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, which was recommended to me by my devoutly Catholic grandmother. I’ve read it many times over the last two decades. It was Twain’s own favorite of all his novels; he proudly announced he spent twelve years researching it and two years writing it, which he did for no other novel. While Joan is as full of comical scenes and quips as any of his other works, it’s a tender book, channeling his love for his own wife and daughters, with much less sarcasm and much more earnest, overtly expressed sorrow and compassion than anything else he ever wrote. His Joan is suffused with the sweetness, purity, and honesty he perceived much of in young girls and too little of in the rest of the world. Twain’s ideas about young girls and women are, I think, hyper-sentimental, naive, even dehumanizing to the extent that his ideal of female virtue did not include the full range of human reason and passion. He, like most in his era, in Joan’s time, and in fact, Joan herself, fetishized female virginity. But I love his account of Joan’s brave life and tragic death nonetheless, just as we can be forgivingly fond of the quaint idealizations of our fathers, uncles, and grandfathers of the sweet purity of womanhood while secretly rolling our eyes.

Drawing of Joan of Arc by Clément de Fauquembergue, as a doodle on the margin of the protocol of the parliament of Paris, dated May 10th, 1429. It’s the only contemporary image of her

Unlike Twain’s tender ideal of Victorian-style womanhood and the Church’s monumental Saint, I find the complex, flesh-and-blood Joan, full of marvelous virtues, deep flaws, incredible natural abilities, inexplicable quirks, and ordinary human qualities, much more interesting. I admire her courage, audacity, bravery, energy, savviness, intelligence, trust in her own abilities, and independence of spirit. I’m disturbed and even at times repelled by her single-minded, sometimes bloodthirsty willingness to sacrifice so many human lives for her cause; her insistence that those things going on in her own mind were the absolute truth and must be believed and obeyed or else; her absolute allegiance to the divine right of kings as established by male bloodline (especially given that many of the French preferred the less ruthless, less feudal, more legally scrupulous style of English rule); and her hyper-religiosity which impelled her to write letters calling on others to put Muslims and religious dissenters to the sword.

The real Joan is such a compendium of attributes and mysteries that she’s become an icon and an inspiration to perhaps the diverse set of people I can think of:

Joan of Arc is a working person’s icon. She’s a self-made woman who got her start working with her hands in the fields, and given very little formal education. But with her own common sense, strong sense of self, and enterprising spirit, she pulled herself up by her bootstraps more quickly and to a greater height than nearly anyone else in history. She began as an illiterate peasant in a feudal society and ended up chief of the armies of France before she reached twenty, and after her death reached even greater heights as a Catholic saint, a military legend, and France’s eternal national hero.

Joan of Arc is a religious icon. She claimed an intimate knowledge of the will of God through the voices of his emissaries he sent to her, St Michael the Archangel, St Catherine, and St Margaret. She’s a treasured if difficult icon for Catholicism: she claimed that God spoke to her directly through heavenly messengers, even as the Church considered itself the divinely-appointed sole intercessor between humanity and heaven. Though she presented a challenge to Church hierarchy and to the Pauline conception of women as the silent, submissive inheritors of Eve’s great sin, Joan was re-reconciled to the very Church that had condemned her, for a variety of theological as well as (I think history makes clear) political reasons. (Re-reconciled because her first formal ecclesiastical examination at Poitiers, to establish the truth of her mission before she was allowed to meet the Dauphin, declared that she was devout, orthodox in religion, a true virgin, and free of deceit). Though she remained passionately loyal to the Church and hated religious dissent, she also embodied the independent spirit that inspired the Protestant revolution, centered on the conviction that God can, and does, speak directly to us in our hearts and through Scripture, no earthly intercessors required.

World War I lithograph poster, 1918. It’s rather a strange one, using the image of Joan to encourage women to help the war effort by attending to their domestic concerns; the US military still banned women from fighting. But Joan was all the rage then: Twain’s thoroughly researched novel, together with other renewed scholarly interest in her over the previous fifty years, made the story of her life much more widely known, and the Church had recently beatified her. She was made a saint two years after this poster was published.

Joan of Arc is a military icon. She loved fighting and spurned any diplomacy beyond plans to move the English out of France as quickly as possible. Though she initially wept at the sight of soldiers wounded and dead as a result of her aggressive tactic of direct assault, she continued to lead every charge in her favored, necessarily casualty-heavy way. Her rhetoric in letters and speech, though embellished with appeals to Christian forbearance and mercy, was violent, filled with threats to chop off heads and put to the sword all who did not obey the will of God as she proclaimed it to be. She inspired deep and enthusiastic devotion in her soldiers, even in her most hard-bitten, most skeptical generals, and quickly achieved a mythic stature among her countrypeople that even General Douglas MacArthur could only envy.

Joan of Arc is a queer icon. She was a cross-dresser who disdained sex with men. Her first simple style of male garb was a practical measure for a soldier who needed to move freely and for a woman often surrounded by men in a culture that regarded single women without escort as fair sexual prey. But over time, as she first encountered the delights of elegant and expensive clothing, showered upon her as gifts of admiration and gratitude, she became quite the clothes horse. She saw no problem with this: medieval sensibilities often conflated holiness with material richness just as the Old Testament did, and God, his favorites, saints, and angels were almost invariably portrayed in the richest of finery. But her enemies mocked her adopted style of wearing silken hose and richly embellished garments in fine fabrics as proof she was as vain, conceited, and driven by lust for personal fame and riches as they had always said. Another reputed French visionary, a young shepherd boy being groomed as Joan’s more convenient, less pugnacious replacement as saintly advisor to the king, blamed her capture on her having fallen prey to vanity and luxury. They claim that she was captured because of her finery, pulled off her horse by the fancy little cape she had grown fond of wearing.

Jeanne d’Arc by Albert Lynch, engraving from Figaro Illustre magazine, 1903, public domain

Joan of Arc is an art and fashion icon. Her exploits, her cross-dressing, her independence of spirit, and her short hair inspired centuries of creative people to capture this wondrously unique individual on canvas, in brass and wood, and in textiles. And songs, poems, stories, films, plays, and countless other forms of creative expression emphasize this, that, or the other facet of her varied and mysterious character. And the Joan-style, French-invented bobbed haircut of the 1920’s, the same decade which saw Joan’s canonization and women’s obtaining the full legal right to vote in the United States and Britain (it took France another twenty years), became a potent symbol, a public declaration that each cropped head recognized that:

Joan of Arc is the feminist icon, par excellence. She bested men in daring and stamina on the battlefield, in intellect time after time in the courtroom, in keeping her own counsel and determining her own destiny despite opposition from family, church, and society, in self-preservation from her would-be prison rapists, and in the courage she displayed on the day of her death. And yet, as she charmingly boasted near the beginning of her final trials, she was confident that she a better seamstress and spinner than just about any other woman! She wore armor, pretty dresses, rough men’s clothes, and over-the-top finery as it suited her. She sang, rode horses, adventured, communed with God and angels, told men and other women what to do, and drove thousands of people to distraction wondering what to make of this extraordinary, inspiring, difficult, inexplicable, and unforgettable person.

*Listen to the podcast version here or on Google Play, or subscribe on iTunes

It’s my dream and my plan, as soon as resources and time allow, to follow the life and ideas of Joan of Arc in France. Stay tuned, though it might be quite a while, and in the meantime, here are some great sources for learning more about this marvelous woman:

Ditié de Jeanne d’Arc (Song of Joan of Arc) ~ by Christine de Pizan, ed. Angus J. Kennedy and Kenneth Varty (Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 1977), trans. L. Shopkow

Henry VI, Part I ~ by William Shakespeare, 1591 via Open Source Shakespeare (website)

Jeanne d’Arc ~ by T. Douglas Murray, New York: McClure, Phillips & Co, 1902 (excerpts detailing her trial)

Joan of Arc ~ by Beckett Graham and Susan Vollenweider, The History Chicks podcast, episode 51

Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured ~ by Kathryn Harrison, New York: Doubleday, 2014

Joan of Arc ~ 1948 film directed by Victor Fleming, screenplay by Maxwell Anderson

Joan of Arc: A History ~ by Helen Castor, New York: HarperCollins, 2015

Joan of Arc: The Warrior Saint ~ by Stephen Wesley Richey, Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003

The Passion of Joan of Arc ~ 1928 film, screenplay by Joseph Delteil and Carl Theodor Dreyer, directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc ~ by Mark Twain, 1896

The Riddle Of Mark Twain’s Passion For Joan Of Arc ~ by Daniel Crown for The Awl, Apr 3, 2012.

Saint Joan ~ 1957 film adapted George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan, screenplay by Graham Greene, directed by Otto Preminger

*A version of this piece was previously published at Ordinary Philosophy

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Mark Twain, Joan of Arc, and a Letter to H.H. Rogers, Sunday, Apr. 29, 1895

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Mark Twain on the USS Mohican in the Seattle Harbor, about to embark for Europe, 1895

Excerpt from a letter from Mark Twain to H.H. Rogers in New York City: Sunday, Apr. 29, ’95:

…At 6 minutes past 7, yesterday evening, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake.

With the long strain gone, I am in a sort of physical collapse today, but it will be gone tomorrow. I judged that this end of the book would be hard work, and it turned out to be so. I have never done any work before that caused so much thinking and weighing and measuring and planning and cramming, or so much cautious and painstaking execution. For I wanted the whole Rouen trial in, if it could be got in in such a way that the reader’s interest would not flag—in fact I wanted the reader’s interest to increase; and so I stuck to it with that determination in view—with the result that I have left nothing out but unimportant repetitions. Although it is mere history—history pure and simple—history stripped naked of flowers, embroideries, colorings, exaggerations, inventions—the family agree that I have succeeded. It was a perilous thing to try in a tale, but I never believed it a doubtful one—provided I stuck strictly to business and didn’t weaken and give up: or didn’t get lazy and skimp the work. The first two-thirds of the book were easy; for I only needed to keep my historical record straight; therefore I used for reference only one French history [Michelet] and one English one [Tuckey]—and shoveled in as much fancy work and invention on both sides of the historical road as I pleased. But on this last third I have constantly used five French sources and five English ones and I think no telling historical nugget in any of them that has escaped me.

Possibly the book may not sell, but that is nothing—it was written for love.

There—I’m called to see company. The family seldom requires this of me, but they know I am not working today.

Yours sincerely,

S.L. Clemens

When reading a book of Mark Twain‘s letters to select one for an intellectual history seminar presentation last year (this is a lightly edited version of that very presentation) this letter to H.H. Rogers jumped right out at me. As many of my long-time readers may know, I’ve long had a fascination with Joan of Arc and with Mark Twain’s book about her. 1896’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc was, and still is, a mystery to many. Why did this hard-bitten cultural critic, cynic and skeptic write a tender and hagiographic historical novel about a medieval French Catholic warrior-saint? From his own comments over the decades, he wasn’t especially fond of the French; he thought the medieval period was an age of superstition and ignorance; he mocked patriotism as just another brand of thoughtless provincialism; and he certainly was no fan or defender of organized religion. And why did this novelist and humorist decide to write a history …well, again, a historical novel, but heavy on the history nonetheless? And why did he insist it was the best thing he’d ever written?

First Edition of Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, 1896, cover

In some ways, Twain’s fascination with and tenderness for Joan of Arc isn’t hard to explain. His biographer Dixon Wecter writes that ‘the heroine of his inmost heart is Joan of Arc, a virgin of unapproachable purity’ (Wecter 172). He was noted, even then, as a writer with unusually sentimental ideas about women and girls, convinced that by nature they were tender and pure, of some plane higher than that of rough, vulgar, venal, lustful men. If we set aside the bloodshed and partisanship, it’s not too much of a stretch to characterize Joan as a model of virtuous womanhood, above the ordinary concerns and desires and accomplishments of men. And Joan appears in Twain’s book as just such a woman, with a ready wit and a strong sense of humor (Twain’s Joan laughs and pals around a lot) to redeem her from being a ‘tinsel saint,’ as he complained that the Catholic Church was about to make her with her canonization proceedings.

And when Twain wrote that his Joan book was ‘was written for love,’ he’s likely thinking not only about his love of Joan, he’s thinking of Susy. With the exception of his wife Livy, Susy was the dearest person in the world to Twain’s heart, and he made no secret of it. His daughter was vivacious, sentimental, affectionate, and the year after he finished Joan, dead. She died on August 15th, 1896, at age 24, in the same year Joan was published in book form (it was originally published as a serial in Harper’s Weekly). But throughout the first years he was writing Joan, Susy was as big a fan as he was, and had high praise, like Twain himself, for the work. It’s commonly accepted that Susy was a major inspiration for his characterization and idealization of Joan. It seems that he was in many ways unable, in fact, to put Susy aside so he could really consider Joan herself, on her own terms.

Although Twain wrote that he was recounting ‘mere history …stripped naked of flowers [and] embroideries,’ Joan’s story could not have been more fascinating on its own merits and Twain, inventor of fantastic tales and prolific creator of clever lines, could not have surpassed it in either. The fact that a seventeen-year-old illiterate peasant girl could run away from home; convince Church authorities that the voices in her head telling her to deliver France from England came from God and not the devil; convince war leaders and the King to give her troops and arms; lead the French army to a series of victories delivered by cunning military strategy as well as a new sense of united, sacred purpose; and once she was captured by the English and handed over to an ecclesiastical court in hopes they could discredit her as a sorceress and heretic, conduct her own case so skillfully that we still wonder at her prudent and adroit responses.

In early 1895, Twain wrote in his notebook that it was ‘across [France’s] firmament that those two prodigies swept, astonishing the world, Napoleon and Joan of Arc—that wonderful man and that sublime girl who dwarf all the rest of the human race.’ (Notebook 241) A little while after I read this passage and as I was looking for more references to Joan of Arc in his letters, I came across another to H.H. Rogers, written on Sunday, Sept 9th, 1894. Twain wrote: ‘..In those two days I reached and passed—successfully—a point which I was solicitous about before I ever began that book: viz., the battle of Patay.’ (Notebook p 616) The Battle of Patay, I remembered, was perhaps the most decisively victorious as well as an especially bloody battle from Joan’s campaign—which was so bloody overall that during her trial she was accused of ‘cruelly thirsting for human blood and encouraging its shedding’ (Trial 124)—and to refresh my memory of Twain’s account of it, I flipped through his Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. On page 250, chapter XXX begins ‘When the morning broke at last on that forever memorable 18th of June’; I did a quick Google search of the date to see if this was the Patay account, since it’s not in the chapter title and there’s no index, and instead, I came up with a list of results for the Battle of Waterloo, where Napoleon met his defeat.

Jeanne d’Arc by Albert Lynch, engraving from Figaro Illustre magazine, 1903, public domain

I wonder: is this link between these two French objects of his admiration a coincidence? Twain often told an anecdote about the first time he encountered Joan of Arc: in 1849, when he was still a printer’s apprentice, a loose page from a biography of Joan blew right off the sidewalk and into his face (Harrington and Jenn 64). But I wonder how much of this is thanks to the romance our imagination often drapes our memories in, and how much are the links between ideas and events we inevitably find when we pursue our interests diligently enough. Perhaps he encountered the historic Battle of Patay when researching the military history of Napoleon, a more likely secular hero, and thereby found Joan again.

‘For I wanted the whole Rouen trial in, if it could be got in in such a way that the reader’s interest would not flag—in fact I wanted the reader’s interest to increase; and so I stuck to it with that determination in view—with the result that I have left nothing out but unimportant repetitions. Although it is mere history—history pure and simple—history stripped naked.’ To return to Twain’s ‘mere history’ of Joan, he’s referring to the account of her trial at Rouen that lasted from January 9th, 1431 until she was burned at the stake on May 30th of the same year. Originally, Twain was going to tell the story of her childhood through her military career, ending with the Bloodless March, in which English stronghold after stronghold, hearing of Joan’s victories, surrendered without a shot, and the King’s coronation at Rheims, where his now sole reign over his French kingdom was confirmed. But I, for one, am glad he didn’t end there, because I agree with her biographer Jules Quicherat and not Jules Michelet in that Joan’s trial is as important a part of her legacy as any of her accomplishments. I don’t really agree with Twain that his account of the trial is ‘history pure and simple’ without ‘embroideries’, but he does stick closely to the many sources he refers to for this part of the books for the essential facts. The embroideries consist of his extremely negative characterization of Pierre Cauchon, the English-sympathizing bishop who led her trial; and the thoughts, reactions, and emotions of Louis de Comte, the fictionalized recorder of the trial and Joan’s lifelong friend, and channeler of Twain’s own sympathies.

Twain was wise in his ‘cautious and painstaking execution’ of the trial scenes, I think: instead of sprinkling his Joan account with amusing tales about the colorful characters, invented or historically-based, who surround her, he focuses closely on the exchanges between Joan and her inquisitors. There’s rich material here for pathos and drama, too much to bring into this brief presentation in any detail. Twain stays true both to his own idealization of women and to Joan’s native cleverness when he highlights her seemingly artless, direct answers, which, though simple, were so spot-on that she deftly avoided the legal traps set for her. Her smarts, then, were showcased without her appearing haughty or show-offy in the slightest.

If I were to write a new biography of Joan of Arc, I’d hope to pursue her through the archives and written histories as carefully and as prolonged as Twain did—in fact, his intense and detailed research for the book made him important in the scholarly discussions about her life, times, character, and legacy—but I’d try to write it with less idealization, though I am at least half as enamoured of her as Twain is. Twain’s Joan is beautiful and compelling, but not quite real. I’d like to see for myself how closely I can approach her across the span of nearly six hundred years.

Here are some examples of questions I’d ask that Twain did not, or at least, left unanswered:

– Is Joan as unlikely a product of her time as so many of her biographers, her early ones especially, seem to believe? From Helen Castor’s history of Joan of Arc, I know that France was riddled at the time with visionaries, prophets, holy maids, seers, and the like. While none of them led the army of France, it’s true, perhaps people were not entirely surprised to hear someone like her making the claims she did, and so were more ready to listen to her. I think many of these would have ended up in ecclesiastical courts as well, so I’ll look for records of these, and examine them to see what kind of religious ideas these people shared. Could Joan have been inspired by any of them?

– Does her adroit handling of her own case in her trial really reveal simplicity and naiveté, where she was lucky to avoid legal traps only because her answers were short and to the point, or an exceptional intelligence at work? Are their patterns in the style and substance of her answers that reveal a tactical approach? She would have had plenty of time to work on this while imprisoned. I’d like to look at other court records of people from Joan’s social class to see how these court cases were generally conducted, if Joan had to face a degree of questioning any more intensive, severe, complex, etc then did others.

– The court made much of her adopting men’s dress and haircuts and wearing weapons as an affront both to religion and to modesty, while Joan herself dismissed these concerns. Was the wearing of men’s clothes so unusual for a woman in Joan’s circumstances? Joan was a peasant and did a lot of work with animals and keeping of the property, which may have allowed for women to adopt dress at time more like men’s. However, her family was actually well-do-do for people of her social class, so there may have been a stricter dress code for her than for the poorest workers. I’d like to see if there were other examples from her time of people adopting the dress of the other gender, of other social classes, etc and see what kind of controversy this did or did not arouse.

Perhaps when I get the chance to follow in the footsteps of Joan of Arc throughout France, as I’ve long planned to do, I’ll be able to answer these questions and many more.

Sources and Inspiration:

Castor, Helen. Joan of Arc: A History. London: Faber & Faber, 2014

Harrington, Paula and Ronald Jenn. Mark Twain & France: The Making of a New American Identity. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2017

Hobbins, Daniel. The Trial of Joan of Arc. Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Michelet, Jules. Joan of Arc: Or, The Maid of Orleans. From Michelet’s History of France. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1858.

Quicherat, Jules. Procès de Condamnation et de Réhabilitation de Jeanne d’Arc, Dite La Pucelle. Paris: J. Renouard et Cie, 1841

Twain, Mark, and Paine, Albert Bigelow. Mark Twain’s Letters (Definitive ed., Writings of Mark Twain, v.34-35). New York: G. Wells, 1923

Twain, Mark. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (Oxford Mark Twain). New York, [N.Y.] ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996

Twain, Mark, and Paine, Albert Bigelow. Mark Twain’s Notebook (Second ed.). New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935

Wecter, Dixon. Sam Clemens of Hannibal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952

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New Podcast Episode: Hannibal and Florida, Missouri, in Search of Mark Twain

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Mark Twain Memorial Bridge on the Missouri River, view from the riverside at the foot of Hill St, Hannibal, Missouri

Listen to this podcast episode here or on Google Play, or subscribe on iTunes

Journal: Hannibal, Missouri, evening of July 31st, 2017

I’m sitting here on the waterfront between the Mississippi River and the train tracks, facing northwest. My back is leaning against a stone wall. The train whistle was deafening, but now the engine has passed and the freight cars are rumbling slowly by. The low, warm, dark peach last light of sunset is glowing gently through the steel truss bridge. I have a bottle of wine at my side and my laptop computer on my lap. The night is warm and humid. I’ve found a dark alcove beneath the park’s perimeter footpath so I can better see the last light of the sunset, and to avoid the clouds of mayflies swarming in the light around every post lamp.

Old town Hannibal is very old-timey America. Lots of brick, and false fronts, and clapboard siding. Look to the west end of the street and you’ll see a steep tree-covered hill with a perfect little white lighthouse perched on its side. The main street’s storefronts are mostly full, with antique and novelty shops, souvenir shops, cafes, ice cream and candy parlors, and bars and restaurants… Read the written version here

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Hannibal and Florida, Missouri, in Search of Mark Twain

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Mark Twain Memorial Bridge on the Missouri River, view from the riverside at the foot of Hill St, Hannibal, Missouri

Journal: Hannibal, Missouri, evening of July 31st, 2017

I’m sitting here on the waterfront between the Mississippi River and the train tracks, facing northwest. My back is leaning against a stone wall. The train whistle was deafening, but now the engine has passed and the freight cars are rumbling slowly by. The low, warm, dark peach last light of sunset is glowing gently through the steel truss bridge. I have a bottle of wine at my side and my laptop computer on my lap. The night is warm and humid. I’ve found a dark alcove beneath the park’s perimeter footpath so I can better see the last light of the sunset, and to avoid the clouds of mayflies swarming in the light around every post lamp.

Hannibal, Missouri, view towards the lighthouse from Main Street, evening

John Marshall Clemen’s office across from the family home on Hill St, Hannibal, Missouri

Old town Hannibal is very old-timey America. Lots of brick, and false fronts, and clapboard siding. Look to the west end of the street and you’ll see a steep tree-covered hill with a perfect little white lighthouse perched on its side. The main street’s storefronts are mostly full, with antique and novelty shops, souvenir shops, cafes, ice cream and candy parlors, and bars and restaurants. Walk only a block or two south up the hill and it’s half ghost town. The economy of the historic downtown, like so many in America, appears to be driven by tourism.

I walked to the old town’s main sights earlier this evening: the great American author Mark Twain’s boyhood home, his father’s law office, and so on, and photographed their exteriors. I’ll go inside these places tomorrow.

I must go now, the mosquitoes have found me and they’re swarming, out for my blood. I’ll camp tonight near the caves, in the campground that a local man I chatted with earlier directed me to.

Samuel Clemens’ family home on the side facing Hill St, Hannibal, Missouri

Hannibal, Missouri, evening of July 31st, 2017

When I arrive in Hannibal (from New Salem via the 72 West), it’s in the soft light of early evening. It’s still pretty warm, the road food I brought with me, celery, peanut butter, apples, are softened, wilted from the heat of the day. The car’s air conditioning is good but I find I need to alternate with fresh air, even when it’s hot. The conditioned air is refreshingly dry on these muggy midwest summer days but after sitting in it for too long, I feel suddenly as if I’m desiccating. Then the windows come down.

I’m in an excited mood. There’s always a feeling of discovery in crossing a river, I think, even in these days when wide, smooth highway bridges can make you forget to notice what you’re passing over one. When you do notice, though, you get the feeling that a river crossing is significant, like an anniversary or a holiday. River crossings used to be difficult, and something deep within us remembers that. Anniversaries, holidays, rivers are all markers that remind us, with a jolt, that though we once came from someplace, sometime, we’re now somewhere else, sometime later. We humans like these markers and boundaries. They place us so that, for a moment at least, we’ve on one shore or another, no longer adrift.

And I recall that young Samuel Clemens, like young Abraham Lincoln, had once been a river craft pilot: Lincoln of flatboats, Clemens of steamboats. Both took their crafts to New Orleans, and both were amazed, delighted, and impressed by what they saw there… and sometimes dismayed. As President during the great American war over slavery, Lincoln had many occasions to recall his first sight of chained slaves on their way to market in New Orleans. While his parents hated slavery and taught him that it was wrong, it was this experience that revealed its horrific reality to him, especially upon recollection and reflection. After Samuel Clemens renamed himself Mark Twain, a riverboat pilot’s term indicating a safe depth for passage, he realized that the slavery he grew up with and took for granted was a great moral wrong. Few works of scholarship, art, or literature reveal this to the moral imagination as impactfully and durably as his magnum opus Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Home of Tom Blankenship on North St, Hannibal, Missouri. Blankenship was the inspiration for Huckleberry Finn’s character in the novel of the same name; there’s a placard in the window identifying it as the ‘Huck Finn House’.

Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn sculpture, Hannibal, Missouri

I pull off on the side of North St, just north of N. Main St to stretch and look around. To my right, there’s a clapboard building on little grassy slope. I approach: there’s a plaque in the window identifying it as the ‘Huck Finn House.’ A little ahead of me to my left, there’s a little park with a sculpture on a pedestal in its center. I clamber onto the low wall surrounding it for a closer look. Yes, the two figures do portray Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. I return to the car, pull it into a nearby parking lot, tuck my laptop into my bag, and head towards Main Street. Before I leave the parking lot, a man and I exchange greetings. He’s organizing a town revitalization event. I can’t accept his kind invitation to attend, however, since I’ll be leaving town before it happens. But we chat awhile about Hannibal, its past and its future, and I follow his pointing finger to the main Twain sites. I visit and map them out in my mind so I can explore them tomorrow during business hours, and chat with some local ladies hanging outside of the Main Street Wine Stoppe.

Journal: Hannibal, Missouri, night of July 31st,  2017

I reach the campground. There are no lights on in the registration office; it’s clearly no longer staffed for the night. I enter the campground and choose a spot among many that lack registration cards clipped to the signs. I’ll pay in the morning. I set up my simple camp to the parking lights of the rental car. In my little niece’s cast-off backyard camping tent, I feel like Abraham Lincoln in a guesthouse. I sleep at an angle so I don’t have to double up my legs. Invariably, however, I wake up in this tent with my head pressing one corner and my feet another.

As I write, the sweat is rolling over me in big drops though this tent is lightweight and all the flaps are open, allowing the mesh panels to let in all the air that they’ll allow through. I unzip the tent’s front opening and stick my head out. It’s much cooler outside but I dare not leave the flap open given the ferocity of the mosquito attack earlier. Hope I can sleep.

Mark Twain Cave Campground, Hannibal, Missouri

Journal – Hannibal, Missouri, Tuesday morning, August 1st, 2017

I woke up rather early this morning and emerged from my tent to retrieve my little thermos of coffee and a bagel from the car. It was a beautiful morning. I felt very lazy and sat on the picnic bench for quite awhile watching my fellow campers rise, make breakfast, and walk their dogs. It’s one of the best campgrounds I’ve stayed in, spacious with roomy campsites, very well kept, lush with lots of trees. My coffee and bagel long finished, though, I finally bestirred myself and went for a jog, my stiffness and minor backache reminding me I haven’t gotten nearly enough exercise in the past week.  Then I took a shower, washing some of my clothes along with myself. This is one of my road trip tactics which allows me to travel without carrying along too much clothing. I went and paid for the campsite, since I arrived too late last night to do so, but decided against visiting the caves. They’re privately run and the entrance fees are higher than I want to pay; I’ve already seen some incredible caves on this trip and I’m trying to keep a lid on what I spend. After all, right now, I’m both homeless and jobless for the first time in a very, very long time. Somehow, that state of affairs feels okay.

View of Hannibal, Missouri, from the Mark Twain Memorial Lighthouse

Mark Twain Memorial Lighthouse, Hannibal, Missouri

Right now, I’m at the Mark Twain Memorial Lighthouse, a little white wood structure built to honor the great author in 1935. It’s reached by 244 steps, which makes me happy. I’ve been missing my California hills and this climb is a break from the nearly unrelenting flatness of the Great Plains and the Midwest. My legs welcome the gentle, pleasant burn. I’m drenched with sweat before the exercise even begins; in fact, I never really dried off after my shower. It’s very humid and already very warm at 11 am.

I’m going down to go on the tour of Mark Twain’s childhood home, the fee there is very reasonable. I’m still deciding where I’ll head just after that…

Hannibal, Missouri,  August 1st, 2017

Descending from the Mark Twain Memorial Lighthouse, I stop at a sort of brick- and concrete- paved little park with a concrete railing on the southeast end. There’s a plaque on the railing that identifies it as the abutment of the first Mark Twain Memorial Bridge, built in 1935 to mark the centennial of his birth, dedicated in September 1836 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The one that crosses the Mississippi here now and which I gazed at the sunset through last night opened in 2000.

Paved park and remaining railing at the foot of the original 1936 Mark Twain Memorial Bridge, Hannibal, Missouri

I continue my descent to Main St, then buy my tour ticket at the Mark Twain Interpretive Center on Main St between North and Hill. It costs $11.00 and gives access to the Mark Twain, Huck Finn, and Becky Thatcher houses, the John Marshall Clemens law office and eventually, when it re-opens after restoration, Grant’s Drug Store. John Marshall Clemens, Sam’s father, was in turn (and sometimes, concurrently) a lawyer, farmer, land speculator, shopkeeper, court clerk, attorney general, and justice of the peace, and failed to succeed financially at all of them. He was a stern man with a cold and upright demeanor, very different than his vivacious, emotive wife Jane Lampton. The story that Twain later repeated was that this unlikely pair married upon Jane’s whim to spite another suitor, a move she later regretted. Husband and wife were respectful to one another but never warm or demonstrative. John died in 1847, leaving his family very badly off. It was up to the children to support the family then. Like all of his brothers, Samuel went to work in the newspaper trade at age twelve as a printer’s apprentice. He earned no wages then, only his board, food, and clothing, but this at least eased the burden on the family’s finances. Sam was able to continue his studies independently, part-time, so between that and his work immersed in communication, his skills in the English language apparently didn’t suffer a bit.

Model for a planned 1935 Mark Twain Centennial sculpture at Mark Twain Interpretive Center, Hannibal, Missouri

Samuel Clemens at fifteen, holding a printer’s composing stick with letters SAM. Daguerreotype, Hannibal, Missouri, 1850

In the Interpretive Center, I peruse photographs and informational placards about Samuel Clemens’ and his later alter ego Mark Twain’s life and work. I’m especially taken by a model for a planned 1935 centennial sculpture that never materialized. It features characters from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper, and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. I’m a bit surprised that since the artist chose to memorialize characters from only four novels, they chose to include many from Joan of Arc. It’s probably the most overlooked of all of his works to this day.

Twain’s fascination with Joan of Arc began, he reminisced, while he was still a printer’s apprentice. A loose page from a book about her blew off the sidewalk and into his face. He was intrigued by what he read, and when his bookworm older brother Henry assured him that Joan was a real person, young Sam sought out and read everything about her that he could find. She remained a lifelong fascination for him. Joan, written many, many years later between 1892-1895, was Twain’s own favorite of his own works, or among his favorites, depending on which of his statements you go by. But it was widely dismissed by critics and still baffles readers and scholars well over a century later. Why did this hard-bitten cultural critic, cynic, and skeptic write a tender and hagiographic historical novel about a medieval French Catholic warrior-saint, and why did this master of American English so love this child of his pen? Parts of the explanation can be provided by Twain’s romantic notions about the delicacy and purity of feminine nature, and his relationship to his daughter Susy. It was no secret that Susy was his favorite daughter, and this daughter, who largely inspired his conception of Joan, also favored this work of her father’s.

First Edition of Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, 1896, cover

But Joan’s story is not only one of sweet, pure womanliness: it’s also a story of rebellion and staunch individuality. After all, she defied her parents, the local authorities, and the church to take up her greater task of defying and defeating the English in the Hundred Years’ War. After she was captured in battle, she remained steadfast in her unique sense of purpose, defying her judges in the court which finally sentenced her to death for heresy when she was only nineteen years old. This story must have resonated deeply with Clemens’ rebellious nature. Since his days as a teenaged printer’s apprentice under Joseph Ament, then as assistant printer and editor for his older brother Orion’s paper, then as a cub pilot on Mississippi steamboats after he left Hannibal, young Sam chafed under authority. After less than three years at his brother’s paper, which included his first published work, Clemens left Hannibal for St Louis early in the summer of 1853.

Like Twain, I’ve also had a lifelong fascination with Joan of Arc. I watched Ingrid Bergman’s portrayal of her innumerable times with my grandmother, who also insisted I read Twain’s Joan novel, which despite its flaws, I love to this day. Joan is the subject of one of my earliest portraits, and recently, I’ve brought her into my studies here at the University of Edinburgh. Like Twain, I also identify with her rebellious nature and staunch individualism.

Huck Finn / Tom Blankenship house, south view, and interpretive plaque historic photo, Hannibal, Missouri

I leave the Interpretive Center and take the self-guided tour, first to the ‘Huck Finn’ house where Tom Blankenship lived. Tom was young Sam’s playmate and the inspiration for Huckleberry Finn’s character. The Blankenship family was plagued by alcoholism and poverty, but Sam envied what seemed to him to be their free and easy lifestyle. The tidy clapboard structure atop its stone half-underground basement that stands here today only resembles the original dirty, ramshackle house of the Blankenship’s time here in shape and size.

Samuel Clemen’s home, right, and A.L. Hawkins Frazer’s, née Laura Hawkins (Becky Thatcher) home, left

Mark Twain visits his old family home in Hannibal, Missouri in 1902

Then I cross the picket-fenced lawn by the brick-paved walkway to the Clemens family home. Unlike the ‘Huck Finn’ house, this is the original building, thoroughly restored. However, I notice, it’s missing the window shutters that it had when Twain returned to Hannibal to visit his old family home in 1902 (see above). Perhaps the shutters were added after he lived here as a child. The rooms are furnished and decorated with period-correct furniture, textiles, clothing, and other objects. Each room also features a life-size sculpture of Twain as he appeared during his later years with his trademark bushy mustache and casual white suit with bow tie. The sculptures portray Twain in attitudes of reminiscing: sitting with his hands folded while gazing into space in one room, standing with one hand behind his back while gazing out of the window in another. Twain’s novels are heavily autobiographical, his characters based on members of his family, his friends, neighbors, employers, and teachers, mostly from Hannibal. This is especially true of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. I notice that the historical signs outside of the buildings included in this tour, which date to the 1930’s, present Twain’s characters as if they took part in the real-life history of the place. Here in Hannibal, as in Twain’s novels, life and artifice are presented together with no clear indication of which is fact, which is fiction.

Young Samuel Clemens’ bedroom, Mark Twain Boyhood Home, Hannibal, Missouri

‘Slavery in the Clemens Household’ placard in the Mark Twain Boyhood Home

Jane and John Marshall Clemens’ bedroom, Mark Twain Boyhood Home, Hannibal, Missouri

View of Becky Thatcher / Laura Hawkins house and John Marshall Clemens law office from the front bedroom, Mark Twain Boyhood Home

Left: a display in Laura Hawkins’ house. Right: interior view of Justice of the Peace Clemens’ office. Hill St, Hannibal, Missouri

Building at the southeast corner of Main and Hill which stands on the site of the second location of Joseph Ament’s paper the Missouri Courier. The offices were moved to the second floor of the building which originally stood here shortly after Samuel Clemens left his employ as a printer’s devil, from 1848-1850.

Mark Twain Museum on Main St, Hannibal, Missouri

Next, I briefly tour the ‘Becky Thatcher’ house. It was the home of Annie Laurie Hawkins, who most people called Laura. She was the neighbor and friend who Twain based the character of Becky Thatcher on in Tom Sawyer. Twain described Laura on many occasions as his first childhood love. They remained friends and kept in contact for life; Laura Hawkins, later Annie Laurie Hawkins Frazer outlived Twain by 18 years. The house has not been set up, like the Clemens house, to reflect how it may have appeared when little Laura lived here. It’s more like a gift shop – slash – museum, but according to the website, the planned decor and permanent exhibits are not installed yet.

I continue my tour next door to John Marshall Clemens’ Justice of the Peace office building. The one room open to the public is set up with some old furniture and books behind glass. If the furnishings reflect historical reality, it was a small and simple affair. Placards on the wall recount anecdotes from Clemens’ tenure there as a stern but fair man of common sense.

I continue east down Hill St towards the river, passing Grant’s Drug Store, which is under reconstruction, and turn right on Main St. Two blocks down, on my left, I enter the Mark Twain Museum at 120 N Main St.

The museum’s exhibits open with large blue-and-white gallery walls dedicated to original Norman Rockwell paintings and drawings for special editions of Tom Sawyer (1936) and Huckleberry Finn (1940). Rockwell was thrilled to be chosen to illustrate these new editions of what were already considered great American literary classics. It seems to me, as I’m sure it did then, that Rockwell was the obvious choice. His paintings were as nostalgically American as Twain’s resurrections of idyllic small-town childhood in these novels, and sure enough, he perfectly captured the tenderness and humor in Twain’s tales and characterizations. I remember my grandmother (the same one who urged me to read Twain’s Joan) sputtering with indignation when telling me of a woman who said that Rockwell was not an artist, but an illustrator. The woman not only considered these separate professions with different purposes but implied that the latter was inferior to the former. This was unforgivable to my grandmother, both in its snobbery and its slight to her favorite painter. I understand what the woman was getting at but I tend to agree with my grandmother. Rockwell has become unfashionable, to many, because of the nostalgia and sentimentality which pervade his work, but if we exclude Rockwell as an artist on those grounds, wouldn’t we be forced to exclude much of Twain? What people create who consider themselves artists, and who are considered as such by other people, has changed at least as many times over the centuries as opinions of what art really is and what it’s for. The woman seemed to have accepted a redefinition of art that excludes Rockwell, but I think any definition that succeeds in doing this is far too narrow. My grandmother did the same thing with the term music so that it excluded that wicked, sex-driven rock and roll.

Norman Rockwell exhibit at the Mark Twain Museum, Hannibal, Missouri

Beyond the Rockwell exhibit, I find one of Mark Twain’s white suit jackets in a glass case. With a small tear at the front, it’s draped on a form in front of a photograph of a mature Twain wearing it, or one very like it. According to the museum, it’s the only one known to exist. The white suit has become iconic of Twain since he wore one off-season to deliver a speech in support of copyright laws at a 1906 congressional committee meeting. The eloquent orator with his bushy white hair, flaring white mustache and eyebrows in a glowing white suit before a room of wintry black-clad men made a quite an impression. Twain was delighted with the effect and replicated it at other occasions where dark or formal clothing was expected. He wore a white suit for portrait sessions which resulted in some of the best-known images of him, and was buried in one as well. Though he adopted this devil-may-care look only for a short while before his death, it made an indelible impression on our collective memory of this oh-so-American personality. To this day, nearly all Twain impersonators wear a similar white suit.

Mark Twain’s top hat, baby Langdon’s death mask, and Olivia Clemens’ jewelry box, Mark Twain Museum, Hannibal, Missouri

Objects from Mark Twain Museum including top hat, pipe, miniature of Susy Clemens, and cast of Mark Twain’s hand

The museum is full of interesting objects and accompanying placards with anecdotes from the life of Twain and his family and friends. I look and read to my fill, then decide it’s time continue my journey following Twain. I return to the car and head southeast of Hannibal. Forty-five minutes or so later, I arrive in Florida, Missouri, the birthplace of Samuel Clemens.

Mark Twain Memorial Shrine at Mark Twain State Park, Florida, Missouri

Florida, Missouri, afternoon of August 1st, 2017

To be more precise, I visit Samuel Clemens’ two birthplaces. How can this be? Unusually for birthplaces, the building in which he was born has been moved about half a mile from its original foundation and now resides in an enormous structure built around and over it. Preserved from the elements, the faded, drooping, two-room little blue cabin is located within the Mark Twain Memorial Shrine at the Mark Twain Birthplace Memorial Site, next to Mark Twain Lake, in Mark Twain State Park. Clearly, the state of Missouri loves her illustrious native son.

Cabin in which Samuel Clemens was born, Mark Twain Memorial Shrine at Mark Twain State Park, Florida, Missouri

Interior of the cabin in which Samuel Clemens was born, Mark Twain Memorial Shrine at Mark Twain State Park

As with the Clemens’ home in Hannibal, the rooms are decorated with furniture and other period-correct items. The Clemenses didn’t live in the tiny village of Florida for long. The family had moved there in mid-1835 after briefly stopping in St Louis. They intended to settle there after John Marshall’s multiple failed attempts at farming and storekeeping, but the cholera epidemic raging through the city likely spurred them to move on again. They chose Florida because many members of Jane’s family had settled there. When they arrived, Jane was already pregnant with her sixth child. John Marshall earned his living here yet again by storekeeping, this time together with his brother-in-law, John Quarles, a man Mark Twain admired greatly. On November 30, 1835, Samuel was born, premature and sickly. Though many feared he wouldn’t last long, he would be among the four of the seven Clemens children that survived childhood.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens and his family at their Hartford, Connecticut home in healthier and wealthier times, Mark Twain Birthplace Memorial museum placard photo in Florida, Missouri

Besides the cabin, I find a wealth of artifacts from the life of Mark Twain with his wife and children. The artifacts together with the exhibits, the photographs and informational placards, tell of a life of harmony and plenty followed by sorrow and financial hardship. By the late 1860’s, Twain was making a decent living as a newspaper editor and in 1870, he married progressive, wealthy Olivia Langdon. Together, they established a lavish home in Hartford, Connecticut. It was designed by Edward Tuckerman Potter, ornately decorated by Louis Comfort Tiffany, filled with hand-carved and elaborate furnishings from all over the world, and occupied by Mark Twain and Olivia Clemens, their three daughters Susy, Clara, and Jean (their infant son Langdon died of diphtheria in 1872), and a bevy of servants. The family moved into the house with little Susy and baby Clara in the fall of 1874. While living here, Twain became a successful author and made an excellent income, he and his family enjoying the life of plenty with which they surrounded themselves. However, Twain’s enthusiasm for innovative scientific gadgets and hunger for more wealth led him to make a series of very costly and very unsuccessful financial investments, in which the family lost nearly all their money. To pay off their substantial debts and support the family, the Clemenses were forced to close down the Hartford home and move to Europe, where living expenses were generally much lower. There, Twain restored the family finances by a grueling series of speaking tours. Sadly, however, Susy contracted meningitis while she and Jean stayed behind with family in Elmira, New York. When learning of Susy’s illness, Olivia and Clara hurried back the United States to join her. However, they didn’t make it back in time. On August 18, 1896, Susy died at the Hartford home she so loved and missed. Thirteen years later, Jean also died, aged only 29, during an epileptic seizure.

Collection of objects from the Clemens’ family home in Hartford, CT, at the Mark Twain Birthplace Memorial Site Museum in Florida, Missouri. Clara, the only daughter to outlive Mark Twain and Olivia Clemens, provided the stories of the family memorabilia here

Pedestal marker at the original site of the cabin where Samuel Clemens was born, on what was South Mill St, Florida, Missouri

Granite pedestal marker at original site of Samuel Clemens’ birth cabin, South Mill St, Florida, MO, 2017 Amy Cools

Twain lost his beloved Olivia, or ‘Livy’ as he called her, in 1904. She was his constant and close companion, his main editor and critic, and the love of his life. For the six years he outlived her, Twain wandered, living sometimes in Europe, sometimes in New York City. Twain and his daughter Clara always had a fraught relationship: both were stubborn, strong-willed, and independent. But Clara had to do much of the emotional heavy work in the family. She looked after Olivia in her final illness while also helping to look after Jean, whose epilepsy rendered her both fragile and violent. She was also the go-between when her dying mother was kept separate, sometimes unsuccessfully, from her emotionally charged husband and his outbursts. Since her father’s death in 1910, Clara served as the caretaker and promoter of Twain’s legacy. Many of the artifacts I see here today are here thanks to Clara’s fundraising efforts, as are those that are preserved in the Hartford home and museum.

I leave the Birthplace museum and drive the half mile down the little county road that leads to the remnants of tiny Florida. Just off the road in a grassy field at what was once South Mill St, there’s a carved granite pedestal which marks it as the original site of Samuel Clemens’ birth. The pedestal used to support a bust of Twain, but the bust was also moved to the Birthplace museum to protect it from the elements. It’s a quiet, peaceful place here, with a few scattered homes and a church in view. It is now, as it was then, an improbable place to produce the restless, cosmopolitan iconoclast and self-created character Mark Twain.

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Sources and Inspiration:

The Mark Twain House and Museum website

‘Mark Twain Memorial Lighthouse,’ Hannibal Parks and Recreation website

Paludan, Phillip Shaw. ‘Lincoln and Negro Slavery: I Haven’t Got Time for the Pain‘. Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association,
Volume 27, Issue 2, Summer 2006, pp. 1-23

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Mark Twain. Ed J.R. LeMaster, James D. Wilson. London: Routledge, 2013

Twain, Mark. The Autobiography of Mark Twain. Adapted for American English, an educational resource of The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State

Twain, Mark. Autobiography, Volume 1 and Volume 2, with an introduction by Albert Bigelow Paine. EBook produced by Don Lainson for Project Gutenberg Australia, 2002; original publication New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1924

Twain, Mark. Life On The Mississippi. EBook produced by David Widger for Project Gutenberg, 2006; original publication Boston: James Osgood & Co, 1883

Twain, M., & Paine, A. (1923). Mark Twain’s Letters (Definitive ed., Writings of Mark Twain ; v.34-35). New York: G. Wells.

Wecter, Dixon. Sam Clemens of Hannibal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1952

Wecter, Dixon. ‘Lincoln, Mark Twain, and the Human Race.’ The Abraham Lincoln Quarterly, Jan 1, 1942, Vol.2, p.157

Christine de Pizan’s Song of Joan of Arc: A Defense of a Political Heroine

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Jeanne d’Arc by Albert Lynch, engraving from Figaro Illustre magazine, 1903, public domain

This is a paper I recently submitted for one of my classes at the University of Edinburgh. I was very glad for the opportunity to bring Joan into my studies here!

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Song of Joan of Arc (Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc) is the medieval Italian-French writer Christine de Pizan’s paean to the teenage visionary who led the French army to stunning victories in the Hundred Years War against the English and their French allies. Prior to Song, from about 1399 to 1429, de Pizan authored forty-one works of poetry, prose, and praise and earned her own living doing it, the first European woman to do so.[1] Many of her works are called proto-feminist not because she advocated changing the social and political roles of women, but because she used her pen so often to defend the moral and intellectual worth of women against misogynist literary attacks, notably Jean de Meun’s The Romance of the Rose and Matheolus’ Lamentations.[2] Nadia Margolis describes de Pizan’s magnum opus The Book of the City of Ladies as ‘the first recorded history of women by a woman author, …one of the first deliberate, systematic refutations of male assertions of women’s inferiority ever written.’[3]

De Pizan draws on her canon for her Song of Joan. She marshals her characterizations of great female heroes and saviors of the past from her prolific body of work in celebration of this amazing heroine of her own time. She draws on the Bible and the classics for her Song as well. Nor does de Pizan stop with great women: a mythic and historic, Biblical and Greek array of great male and female figures march triumphantly before Joan in Song. Written in 1429, the year of de Pizan’s death and two years before Joan’s execution by fire, it’s the last of her works. This epic poem is not only a hagiography nor even, as we’ll see, is it interspersed with mere patriotic digs at the English foe and their allies. Like so many of her works, it’s also a defense, not of all women in this case, but of one particular woman. Specifically, it’s a defense of Joan against politically motivated attacks on her personal and religious character. Thus, I argue, de Pizan’s Song is a political work as well.

As the introductory stanzas give way to the main topics of the Song, de Pizan calls on God to help her tell her story well and truthfully.[4] This is reminiscent of the openings of ancient Greek works such as Homer’s Odyssey[5] and Hesiod’s Theogony[6], in which they call on the Muses to do the same. De Pizan draws this classical theme throughout her Song, calling on the ancients as well to help demonstrate the type and significance of Joan’s heroism. This device serves to underscore Joan’s monumental role in history as well as to make the God-ordained nature of her mission more believable: after all, God has called on people to do great things many times before. De Pizan portrays Joan as the fitting culmination for her own time of the great lineage of heroes and saviors from the Bible and the classics. And not only is Joan like them, she is superior to them: “She frees France from its enemies, …not even Hector – Nor Achilles could withstand her.”[7] In stanza XXIII, Joan is a Moses, leading her people out of subjugation.[8] In stanza XXV, Joan is a Joshua, a conqueror. In stanza XXVII, Joan is a Gideon, a simple shepherd called by God to be a warrior. But these were men, de Pizan points out, and Joan was a young girl. Not only did she perform brave and marvelous feats, she did so without the naturally greater physical strength of grown men.[9] Because this rendered her task more difficult, her feats were all the greater.

And de Pizan has no shortage of great female heroines to associate with Joan. Some of these associations are named: Judith, Esther, and Deborah. The exploits of these great heroines of the Bible would have been widely known to her Christian audience: Judith cuts off the head of the general Holofernes before he can destroy her city; Esther risks her life to reveal a plot that would have led her husband-king to destroy her people; and the prophet and judge Deborah arranges a battle to free her people, then cements the victory by hammering a tent pin into the enemy general’s head as he rests in defeat. Some of the women de Pizan associates with Joan, however, are not identified by name. Nevertheless, many of these latter associations would have been readily identifiable for the educated reader and especially for readers of de Pizan’s earlier work since they were drawn from the classics. For example, in stanza XIV, De Pizan attributes Joan’s military success to her intelligence as well as God’s help: “Once it was lost but now it is yours – …And all due to – the intelligence of the Maid who, thanks – to God, most expertly played her part.”[10] In earlier works, such as Letter of Othea to Hector and The Book of the City of Ladies, de Pizan lauds Minerva and Pallas Athena, two aspects of the same Greek goddess. Minerva is associated with war, as the wise woman who invents armor and iron weapons; Pallas is associated with wisdom and knowledge generally. As the wise warrior woman extraordinaire, Joan is Minerva-Pallas, personified.

The clearest and most-repeated association I find between Joan and an unnamed great woman is with the Virgin Mary. In one stanza, de Pizan praises Joan as both virgin and a moral mother “You are virgin, very young, – To whom God grants the strength and power – To be both woman and champion, – Who offers France the gentle breast, – the food of peace…”[11] Later on, de Pizan continues the Marian theme: “Aha!! What honor for the female – Sex! God shows how he loves it, – …By one woman [the nobles and realm] were fortified, No men could do this deed….”[12] If these parallels aren’t clear enough, de Pizan portrays Joan as the vessel through which salvation comes (to France) and through which the king comes to rule his kingdom (Charles’ coronation at Reims). And just as it was in Nazareth, God could have saved France any way he chose, and he chose to save both through women.

Some of de Pizan’s hagiographic characterizations of Joan do not relate to her virtues as a woman, such as those which reflect her earlier works such as City of Ladies and Letter of Othea, or as a savior, such as those which compare her to Old Testament and mythic heroines and heroes. It appears, rather, that they relate to her superiority over her foes. Angus J. Kennedy and Kenneth Varty, in the interpretive essay which accompanies their publication and translations of Song, identify the strong anti-English sentiment found throughout the work.[13] As they point out, de Pizan characterizes the English and their allies as evil, wicked, traitors, and before Joan and her army’s power, helpless as dead dogs.[14] De Pizan also uses the term l’Englecherie, which Kennedy and Varty describe as a pejorative term for the English in that place and time.[15]

Yet this patriotic poem goes beyond ‘heaping scorn’[16] on her foes. De Pizan offers a defense of Joan’s character by offering descriptions of her virtues and intentions that contradict the negative characterizations of her spread by the English and their French allies, the Burgundians. We have a contemporary record of these in the transcripts of her trial in Rouen. Joan was captured on May 23rd, 1430 at Compiègne, and after lengthy negotiations, was handed over to an ecclesiastical court in exchange for 10,000 livres.[17] Despite her being subjected to a purportedly religious trial, she was not, as was customary in those kinds of cases, kept in a religious prison looked after by nuns. Rather, she was kept in an English military prison, chained to a wall, with male guards inside and outside her cell.[18]

The trail at Rouen was widely understood to be both a character and a literal assassination carried out by means of a show trial,[19] carried out with elaborate procedure to make it seem as impartial as possible.[20] Her judges, led by Pierre Cauchon, a French judge in the pay of the English, set out to prove Joan was so depraved, morally and religiously, that she could not have been sent by God. The opening statement of the trial reads: “The reputation of this woman had already gone forth into many parts: how, wholly forgetful of womanly honesty, and having thrown off the bonds of shame, careless of all the modesty of womankind, she wore with an astonishing and monstrous brazenness, immodest garments belonging to the male sex…”.[21] The issue of men’s clothing, which Joan habitually worse since going to war, was a major theme throughout the trial. It was used as evidence not only of her immodesty but her heresy as well, since the Bible forbids women to wear men’s clothing[22]. The judges did not address the fact that imprisoning her in a cell with male guards exposed her to the continual threat of sexual assault and rape[23]; Joan may have found it expedient to wear men’s clothing to preserve her virginity[24], a status which these judges were so intent to undermine. After many sessions of testimony and questioning, twelve formal Articles of Accusation were drawn up and read aloud. One accuses her of staying in a house “with unguarded women” where soldiers liked to hang around[25]. Another accuses her of “having intimate relations” with Captain Robert de Baudricourt and promising to bear him one pope, one emperor, and one king[26].

In defense of Joan’s moral purity, De Pizan refers specifically to Joan’s virginity no less than 13 times in her Song, besides numerous allusions throughout to Joan’s generally virtuous character. De Pizan might have used this description to describe any great woman since de Pizan considers virginity as sacred a designation for women as any Christian of her time[27].

But aside from the sometimes rather startling charges pertaining to her sexual behavior, the imputations of witchcraft and heresy were more serious. The opening statement continues, “her presumptuousness had grown until she was not afraid to perform, to speak, and to disseminate many things contrary to the Catholic faith and hurtful to the articles of the orthodox belief. And by so doing, as well in our diocese as in several other districts of this kingdom, she was said to be guilty of no inconsiderable offenses[28].” Her judges expand on this theme in another statement read over a month later at the first public session[29].

De Pizan goes well beyond defending Joan as personally pious: she presents Joan as a defender of the Christian faith itself. De Pizan writes that not only will Joan defend the faith, but “The Christian faith and Holy Church, – Will both be set to rights through her…”[30] This was one of the passages which alerted me to the political elements in Song. The Hundred Year’s War and de Pizan’s Song long predate England’s schism with the Catholic Church; it so happened that the Pope bestowed the title ‘Defender of the Faith’ nearly one hundred years later on the English monarch Henry VIII before Henry broke England’s ties to the Catholic Church[31]. There were no particular reasons to charge England with being at odds with the Christian faith except as far as they refused to lay down their arms before Joan. Still, even if Joan were on God’s side in the quarrel between the French and the English, this wouldn’t imply that Joan was defender of the Christian faith at large. What, then, explains de Pizan’s remarks here?

The English and their allies certainly did not see themselves as enemies of God or the true faith[32]. They saw themselves as rightful heirs to the throne of France; indeed, as a result of the habit of monarchs creating alliances by marrying their children off to one another only to have these heirs to the crown die off in inconvenient succession, the English monarch did have a real claim to the French throne[33]. It was not in the English interests for their claim to be invalidated as against the will of God. It was in their interests to demonstrate that Joan was not on God’s side. If she had a reputation as indecent, immodest, unwomanly, or a woman of loose morals with a penchant for soldiers, that would weaken Joan’s reputation for holiness. It was even more in their interests that Joan be perceived as a witch, a heretic, or both: if this could be demonstrated, then Joan’s claim to be sent by God could not[34]. Therefore, de Pizan mounts a strong defense of Joan’s godliness, claiming her not only as a pious Christian but as a defender of the faith itself. But the role as a defender of the faith doesn’t seem necessary to add to Joan’s already impressive resume of Christian greatness in Song except as an additional qualifier, a sort of icing on the cake. But de Pizan goes even beyond that: “Yet destroying the English invader – is not, indeed, her primary concern. – For her calling is in preserving – the Faith….”[35]

Once again, we can ask: what impels de Pizan to make the claim that Joan’s primary concern is defending the Christian faith, on behalf of the impressive warrior-saint for whom she’s already claimed so much? When de Pizan mounts her defense of Joan, she could not have known that Joan would be tried by an ecclesiastical court that would seek to officially undermine Joan’ claim that she was doing the will of God on behalf of France. But while de Pizan wrote her Song, Joan was on trial in the court of public opinion. Both trials were political trials, each side out to win the public’s support for their legitimacy to rule. God had chosen a side in this political contest, and Joan said that was France. Therefore, de Pizan added, Joan, as God’s chosen champion of God’s chosen France, was also the champion of the faith itself. In Song, de Pizan places France, France’s king, Joan, God, and the Christian faith itself on one side, the English and their allies on the other. There was only one side, therefore, that the faithful could join, and that was Joan’s. The faithful was transformed, in Song, to the political.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[1] Redfern, Jenny. “Christine de Pisan and The Treasure of the City of Ladies: A Medieval Rhetorician and Her Rhetoric” in Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women and in the Rhetorical Tradition, ed. Lunsford, Andrea. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995, p. 74

[2] De Pizan, Christine. Letter of Othea to Hector (1399-1400). Trans., ed., and interpretive essay by Jane Chance. 1997, pp. 8, 14

[3] Margolis, Nadia. “A Feminist-Historical Citadel: Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies.” Feminist Moments: Reading Feminist Texts. Ed. Katherine Smits and Susan Bruce.: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 11–18. Bloomsbury Collections. Accessed 28 Nov. 2017 at http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474237970.ch-002, paragraph 1

[4] De Pizan, Christine. Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc (1429). Ed. and trans. by Angus J. Kennedy and Kenneth Varty. Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1977, pp. 41-42

[5] Homer, Odyssey. Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University. Accessed 6 December 2017 at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0136, v. 1-10

[6] Hesiod, Theogony. Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University. Accessed 6 December 2017 at www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0130, v. 1-5, 20-25

[7] De Pizan, The Song of Joan of Arc. Trans. by Leah Shopkow. Retrieved 20 November 2017 from www.indiana.edu/~dmdhist/joan.htm, stanza XXXVI

[8] Margolis writes that De Pizan sees herself in this role in the City of Ladies as well: ‘First, it echoes the Old Testament (2 Kings 17: 7) in comparing women constrained by misogyny to the Jews enslaved by Pharaoh, thereby likening Christine to Moses (Exod 1; Deut 34). Just as Moses was chosen to lead the Israelites to freedom, so Christine was chosen to lead women to better destinies.’ – paragraph 6

[9] Song, all translations, stanza XXVII

[10] De Pizan, The Song of Joan of Arc. Trans. by Ben D. Kennedy. Retrieved 20 November 2017 from www.maidofheaven.com/joanofarc_song_pisan_contents.asp. Leah Shopkow translates the phrase to ‘wise Joan’, but the Middle French dictionary I consult translates the adjective sensible as closer in meaning to ‘intelligent.’ As Shopkow notes, in some places she sacrifices a little accuracy for overall coherence and poetic rhythm. See the introduction to her translation at www.indiana.edu/~dmdhist/joan.htm

[11] Song, trans. Shopkow, stanza XXIV

[12] Song, trans. Shopkow, stanza XXXIV

[13] Ibid., p. 13

[14] Song, trans. Shopkow, stanzas XXIII, XXIV, XXXIV, XLV, and XXXIII, respectively

[15] Song, Kennedy and Varty, p 87

[16] Ibid., p. 13

[17] The Trial of Jeanne D’Arc. Trans. By W. P. Barrett. Originally published New York: Gotham House, Inc., 1932. From Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University. Accessed 29 November 2017 at https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/joanofarc-trial.asp, p. x

[18] Ibid., p. x

[19] Michelet, J. Joan of Arc: Or, The Maid of Orleans: From Michelet’s History of France. New York: Stanford & Delisser, 1858. Accessed 28 November 2017 from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433071375152, pp. 115-116; Robins, P. R. “Discerning Voices in the Trial of Joan of Arc and ‘The Book of Margery Kempe’.” Fifteenth-Century Studies 38, 2013, pp. 177, 187-188

[20] Robins, p. 183

[21] Ibid., p. 2

[22] Bible, King James Version. [online], Accessed 29 November 2017 at: www.bible.com/en-GB/bible, Deuteronomy 22:5

[23] On at least one occasion, though she was in chains, Joan successfully fought off a rape attempt: Michelet, p. 207-208

[24] Men’s clothing was somewhat time-consuming to remove: hose and chausses were laced to a belt and/or the upper garments to hold them in place – Houston, Mary G. Medieval Costume in England and France: The 13th, 14th and 15th Centuries. (1939). New York: Dover, 1996, p. 53, 80-81. Joan’s ability to fight off her would-be rapist may have been aided by her protective covering of laced-together, difficult-to-remove clothing

[25] Trial, Article XIII, p. 154

[26] Ibid., Article XI, p. 159

[27] De Pizan, Christine, The Book of the City of Ladies (1405). Trans. and intro. Brown-Grant, Rosalind. London, Penguin Books, 1999, p. xix, xxiii

[28] Trial, p. 2-3

[29] Ibid., p 34, 36 ‘Since she was appearing in judgment before us we began to explain… how many of her actions, not in our diocese alone but in many other regions also, had injured the orthodox faith, and how common report of them had spread through all the realms of Christendom…. Therefore, considering the public rumor and common report and also certain information already mentioned, after mature consultation with men learned in canon and civil law, we decreed that the said Jeanne should be summoned and cited by letter to answer the interrogations in matters of faith and other points truthfully according to law and reason….’

[30] Song, trans. Shopkow, Stanza XLII

[31] ‘Defender of the Faith’. Ed.s, Encyclopædia Britannica, 2011. Accessed 29 November, 2017 at http://www.britannica.com/topic/defender-of-the-faith

[32] Robins, p. 177

[33] Vale, M. G. A. The Origins of the Hundred Years War: The Angevin Legacy, 1250-1340. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996, pp. 227, 266

[34] Trial, p. xi, Robins, p 177

[35] Song, trans. Kennedy, stanza XLV

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New Podcast Episode: Remembering Joan of Arc

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Joan of Arc by Amy Cools, about 1998

Listen to this podcast episode here or on Google Play, or subscribe on iTunes

My fascination with Joan of Arc, born sometime in 1412 and put to death by fire on May 30th, 1431, is long-standing, beginning in my girlhood. Joan, as you likely know, is the French national heroine who fought to remove medieval France from English rule, whose exploits turned the tide and guaranteed France’s ultimate victory in the Hundred Year’s War.

She was the daughter of prosperous peasants in Domrémy, France. On a self-proclaimed mission from God to restore French rule to the rightful heir of the House of Valois, she convinced the local baron, military leaders, and eventually the crown prince to put her in charge of the dispirited French army, despite the fact that she was illiterate, militarily inexperienced, and a teenage girl…. Read the written version here

Ordinary Philosophy and its Traveling Philosophy / History of Ideas series is a labor of love and ad-free, supported by patrons and readers like you. Please offer your support today!

Remembering Joan of Arc

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Joan of Arc by Amy Cools, about 1998. My mental image of her then was influenced by popular iconography and films, much of it which, as I did, portrayed her as tall, fair-skinned, and light-haired (think Ingrid Bergman’s 1948 film portrayal). In real life, she was somewhat short, dark-eyed with black hair, and had a sun-tanned, athletic body that, despite their describing it as attractive, aroused no lust in her fellow soldiers. Perhaps this resulted from their idealization of her as too godly for mere mortals to touch. Or perhaps, as I surmise, her indifference to sex with men was too manifest to give rise to that kind of chemistry. My drawing does, I think, manifest my youthful idea of her as a lovely tomboy, as an active, confident girl was then miscalled. Joan’s wearing the white shift which she wore to the stake and holding her cross made of two sticks tied together, which a sympathetic bystander quickly fashioned to comfort her on her way to execution

My fascination with Joan of Arc, born sometime in 1412 and put to death by fire on May 30th, 1431, is long-standing, beginning in my girlhood. Joan, as you likely know, is the French national heroine who fought to remove medieval France from English rule, whose exploits turned the tide and guaranteed France’s ultimate victory in the Hundred Year’s War.

She was the daughter of prosperous peasants in Domrémy, France. On a self-proclaimed mission from God to restore French rule to the rightful heir of the House of Valois, she convinced the local baron, military leaders, and eventually the crown prince to put her in charge of the dispirited French army, despite the fact that she was illiterate, militarily inexperienced, and a teenage girl.

By the time Joan reached the Dauphin, as the French crown prince was called, the French had long been in the habit of losing battles, even when they had the upper hand in numbers and defensive position, often because they were unable to cohere as a unified fighting force. French society was still feudal, highly stratified by class, and the army was no exception. Common soldiers were ill-equipped and underused, mistrusted and despised by aristocratic and wealthy knights jealous of their own superior rank. They could not bring themselves to give common soldiers opportunities for a share in the military glories of conquest. So French armies, fractured by class with everyone out for themselves, lost time after time to the more pragmatic and unified English forces. Troops of English longbowmen, for example, were made of up common soldiers highly valued for their strength and skill, and the English army made full use of them, to the detriment of the French. When Joan came along, a peasant in direct communication with Saint Micheal the Archangel, patron saint of French knights, she served as the much-needed unifier of French sympathies. Knights and commoners alike were united by their love of her and what she represented, and they began to fight as one, an army made holy and therefore equal: the aristocracy and chivalric order may have been respecters of persons, but the God who called Joan to lead them in their sacred quest was not.

Joan also whipped the army into shape, demanding that they train as hard as she did. She banned gambling, swearing, and prostitution from the camps, and required that soldiers attend religious services regularly. These reforms served the double purpose of further unifying soldiers through daily rituals that helped internalize their sense of holy, shared purpose, and of reducing the opportunities for alcoholism, venereal disease, and other ravages of hard living that could weaken her forces. She also prohibited raiding and pillaging which further unified French sympathies, especially of the common people and the countryside who had long suffered the predations of marauding English and French soldiers.

Joan of Arc, ca. 1450-1500, oil on parchment, artist unknown, public domain

Once she had raised the Seige of Orléans, drove the English from fort after fort, and led the Dauphin to be crowned King at Reims, her hawkish mission fell victim to what she considered dithering and intrigue, and what Charles VII considered diplomacy to save lives and capital. As Joan saw it, aristocrats and corrupt clerics, still jealous of their own social standing and opportunities for power either as leaders in the newly strengthened French order or as secret English collaborators, blocked her next great project: to deliver Paris from English control. She relieved her frustration and boredom by leading a series of minor skirmishes against the English, and was finally captured at one of these. She was handed over to an ecclesiastical court, led by French clerics symphathetic to the English cause, so they try her as heretic, ‘proving’ her in league with Satanic fiends, as the great English playwright William Shakespeare portrays her in Henry V. This would discredit her godly mission, her power to unite the French, and her assistance to Charles VII’s cause, thereby undermining his royal legitimacy. She was burned at the stake in Rouen, having accomplished the first part of her mission, the liberation of Orléans and the coronation of her King, and setting in motion the second part, the complete liberation of France from English rule, at only nineteen years old.

But it was clear to both French and English that the ‘holy’ court that condemned Joan was led and manipulated by political actors, not by men of God whose chief concern was to protect the Church from heresy. About twenty years after her death, the victorious French king Charles VII, who owed his crown and the reclamation of his kingdom to Joan, was finally reminded of his debt of gratitude by the realization that his hold on power was threatened if his rule was the result of the machinations of a heretic. A trial of rehabilitation and nullification commenced in the mid-1400’s, which formally vindicated her and proved to their satisfaction her mission came from God. Almost five hundred years after her death, Joan of Arc was proclaimed a saint by the Catholic Church.

Joan of Arc statue in Paris, France, photo 2015 by Amy Cools. This stylized depiction of her, in that Art Deco style I so love, makes me think of a green flame: green for the fields in which she roamed as a child shepherd, flame for her passionate intensity. Her attempt to liberate Paris by force from English rule was put to a stop by Charles VII’s diplomatic maneuverings, as well as by a wound she suffered in the failed assault. Paris was recovered by the French only a few years later by a means this inveterate warrior dismissed as a sign of weakness: by treaty. I believe, by the way, the fire she was wont to ignite in the hearts of soldiers also flamed in the breasts of the liberators of Paris five hundred years later in WWII.

I was religious as a child and a teenager, and admired her then as a Catholic saint. By my late teens, I had left religious belief behind, but my admiration for her has only grown and deepened over the years. She became something more to me, more rich, more mysterious, more complex. I think of her now as a native genius, with no other language or context in which to express, to herself and others, her political and military insights than the religion which infused her life and the life of the lives of her fellow countrypeople. And the way she was able to baffle, rebut, and defeat her interrogators at the show trial by those determined to discredit her before burning her at the stake remains a marvel. Her intellect was such that, despite her illiteracy and lack of formal education, she was able to see right through the legal deceptions of her judges and prosecutors, avoiding every verbal trap and pitfall they set for her, turning their attacks and arguments right back on them.

In preparation for this anniversary of her death, I’ve immersed myself in writing and art about Joan. Besides various histories, I’ve recently re-read Mark Twain’s historical novel Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, which was recommended to me by my devoutly Catholic grandmother. I’ve read it many times over the last two decades. It was Twain’s own favorite of all his novels; he proudly announced he spent twelve years researching it and two years writing it, which he did for no other novel. While Joan is as full of comical scenes and quips as any of his other works, it’s a tender book, channeling his love for his own wife and daughters, with much less sarcasm and much more earnest, overtly expressed sorrow and compassion than anything else he ever wrote. His Joan is suffused with the sweetness, purity, and honesty he perceived much of in young girls and too little of in the rest of the world. Twain’s ideas about young girls and women are, I think, hyper-sentimental, naive, even dehumanizing to the extent that his ideal of female virtue did not include the full range of human reason and passion. He, like most in his era, in Joan’s time, and in fact, Joan herself, fetishized female virginity. But I love his account of Joan’s brave life and tragic death nonetheless, just as we can be forgivingly fond of the quaint idealizations of our fathers, uncles, and grandfathers of the sweet purity of womanhood while secretly rolling our eyes.

Drawing of Joan of Arc by Clément de Fauquembergue, as a doodle on the margin of the protocol of the parliament of Paris, dated May 10th, 1429. It’s the only contemporary image of her

Unlike Twain’s tender ideal of Victorian-style womanhood and the Church’s monumental Saint, I find the complex, flesh-and-blood Joan, full of marvelous virtues, deep flaws, incredible natural abilities, inexplicable quirks, and ordinary human qualities, much more interesting. I admire her courage, audacity, bravery, energy, savviness, intelligence, trust in her own abilities, and independence of spirit. I’m disturbed and even at times repelled by her single-minded, sometimes bloodthirsty willingness to sacrifice so many human lives for her cause; her insistence that those things going on in her own mind were the absolute truth and must be believed and obeyed or else; her absolute allegiance to the divine right of kings as established by male bloodline (especially given that many of the French preferred the less ruthless, less feudal, more legally scrupulous style of English rule); and her hyper-religiosity which impelled her to write letters calling on others to put Muslims and religious dissenters to the sword.

The real Joan is such a compendium of attributes and mysteries that she’s become an icon and an inspiration to perhaps the diverse set of people I can think of:

Joan of Arc is a working person’s icon. She’s a self-made woman who got her start working with her hands in the fields, and given very little formal education. But with her own common sense, strong sense of self, and enterprising spirit, she pulled herself up by her bootstraps more quickly and to a greater height than nearly anyone else in history. She began as an illiterate peasant in a feudal society and ended up chief of the armies of France before she reached twenty, and after her death reached even greater heights as a Catholic saint, a military legend, and France’s eternal national hero.

Joan of Arc is a religious icon. She claimed an intimate knowledge of the will of God through the voices of his emissaries he sent to her, St Michael the Archangel, St Catherine, and St Margaret. She’s a treasured if difficult icon for Catholicism: she claimed that God spoke to her directly through heavenly messengers, even as the Church considered itself the divinely-appointed sole intercessor between humanity and heaven. Though she presented a challenge to Church hierarchy and to the Pauline conception of women as the silent, submissive inheritors of Eve’s great sin, Joan was re-reconciled to the very Church that had condemned her, for a variety of theological as well as (I think history makes clear) political reasons. (Re-reconciled because her first formal ecclesiastical examination at Poitiers, to establish the truth of her mission before she was allowed to meet the Dauphin, declared that she was devout, orthodox in religion, a true virgin, and free of deceit). Though she remained passionately loyal to the Church and hated religious dissent, she also embodied the independent spirit that inspired the Protestant revolution, centered on the conviction that God can, and does, speak directly to us in our hearts and through Scripture, no earthly intercessors required.

World War I lithograph poster, 1918. It’s rather a strange one, using the image of Joan to encourage women to help the war effort by attending to their domestic concerns; the US military still banned women from fighting. But Joan was all the rage then: Twain’s thoroughly researched novel, together with other renewed scholarly interest in her over the previous fifty years, made the story of her life much more widely known, and the Church had recently beatified her. She was made a saint two years after this poster was published.

Joan of Arc is a military icon. She loved fighting and spurned any diplomacy beyond plans to move the English out of France as quickly as possible. Though she initially wept at the sight of soldiers wounded and dead as a result of her aggressive tactic of direct assault, she continued to lead every charge in her favored, necessarily casualty-heavy way. Her rhetoric in letters and speech, though embellished with appeals to Christian forbearance and mercy, was violent, filled with threats to chop off heads and put to the sword all who did not obey the will of God as she proclaimed it to be. She inspired deep and enthusiastic devotion in her soldiers, even in her most hard-bitten, most skeptical generals, and quickly achieved a mythic stature among her countrypeople that even General Douglas MacArthur could only envy.

Joan of Arc is a queer icon. She was a cross-dresser who disdained sex with men. Her first simple style of male garb was a practical measure for a soldier who needed to move freely and for a woman often surrounded by men in a culture that regarded single women without escort as fair sexual prey. But over time, as she first encountered the delights of elegant and expensive clothing, showered upon her as gifts of admiration and gratitude, she became quite the clothes horse. She saw no problem with this: medieval sensibilities often conflated holiness with material richness just as the Old Testament did, and God, his favorites, saints, and angels were almost invariably portrayed in the richest of finery. But her enemies mocked her adopted style of wearing silken hose and richly embellished garments in fine fabrics as proof she was as vain, conceited, and driven by lust for personal fame and riches as they had always said. Another reputed French visionary, a young shepherd boy being groomed as Joan’s more convenient, less pugnacious replacement as saintly advisor to the king, blamed her capture on her having fallen prey to vanity and luxury. They claim that she was captured because of her finery, pulled off her horse by the fancy little cape she had grown fond of wearing.

Jeanne d’Arc by Albert Lynch, engraving from Figaro Illustre magazine, 1903, public domain

Joan of Arc is an art and fashion icon. Her exploits, her cross-dressing, her independence of spirit, and her short hair inspired centuries of creative people to capture this wondrously unique individual on canvas, in brass and wood, and in textiles. And songs, poems, stories, films, plays, and countless other forms of creative expression emphasize this, that, or the other facet of her varied and mysterious character. And the Joan-style, French-invented bobbed haircut of the 1920’s, the same decade which saw Joan’s canonization and women’s obtaining the full legal right to vote in the United States and Britain (it took France another twenty years), became a potent symbol, a public declaration that each cropped head recognized that:

Joan of Arc is the feminist icon, par excellence. She bested men in daring and stamina on the battlefield, in intellect time after time in the courtroom, in keeping her own counsel and determining her own destiny despite opposition from family, church, and society, in self-preservation from her would-be prison rapists, and in the courage she displayed on the day of her death. And yet, as she charmingly boasted near the beginning of her final trials, she was confident that she a better seamstress and spinner than just about any other woman! She wore armor, pretty dresses, rough men’s clothes, and over-the-top finery as it suited her. She sang, rode horses, adventured, communed with God and angels, told men and other women what to do, and drove thousands of people to distraction wondering what to make of this extraordinary, inspiring, difficult, inexplicable, and unforgettable person.

*Listen to the podcast version here or on Google Play, or subscribe on iTunes

It’s my dream and my plan, as soon as resources and time allow, to follow the life and ideas of Joan of Arc in France. Stay tuned, though it might be quite a while, and in the meantime, here are some great sources for learning more about this marvelous woman:

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Sources and inspiration: 

Castor, Helen. Joan of Arc: A History. New York: HarperCollins, 2015

Crown, Daniel. ‘The Riddle Of Mark Twain’s Passion For Joan Of Arc‘. The Awl, Apr 3, 2012.

De Pizan, Christine. Ditié de Jeanne d’Arc (Song of Joan of Arc), ed. Angus J. Kennedy and Kenneth Varty (Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 1977), trans. L. Shopkow

Graham, Beckett and Susan Vollenweider. ‘Joan of Arc‘, episode 51 of The History Chicks podcast

Harrison, Kathryn. Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured. New York: Doubleday, 2014

Joan of Arc, 1948 film directed by Victor Fleming, screenplay by Maxwell Anderson

Murray, T. Douglas. Jeanne d’Arc. New York: McClure, Phillips & Co, 1902 (excerpts detailing her trial)

The Passion of Joan of Arc. 1928 film, screenplay by Joseph Delteil and Carl Theodor Dreyer, directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer

Richey, Stephen Wesley. Joan of Arc: The Warrior Saint. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003

Saint Joan, 1957 film adapted George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan, screenplay by Graham Greene, directed by Otto Preminger

Shakespeare, William. Henry VI, Part I, 1591. Via Open Source Shakespeare (website)

Twain, Mark. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, 1896.

~ Ordinary Philosophy and its Traveling Philosophy / History of Ideas series is a labor of love and ad-free, supported by patrons and readers like you. Please offer your support today!

Goodbye, Dear Leonard Cohen!

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leonard-cohen-2008-by-rama-own-work-cc-by-sa-2-0-via-wikimedia-commons

‘I’ve been listening
To all the dissension
I’ve been listening
To all the pain
And I feel that no matter
What I do for you
It’s going to come back again
But I think that I can heal it
But I think that I can heal it
I’m a fool, but I think I can heal it
With this song’

– Leonard Cohen, ‘Minute Prologue’ from Live Songs, 1973

I heard of Leonard Cohen’s death when I returned home from work yesterday evening. Thursdays are my long day at the doctor’s office, and by the time I left, we had cared for about sixty patients, and I had just enough time on my short break to do a little reading and quickly tuck a little lunch away. No time for social media or news and no interest in them either, weary from election coverage and its aftermath.

So I learned of his death not from the cold glow of a screen but from the living face of my husband Bryan, who is also one of my oldest friends. We’ve sung Cohen’s songs together countless times over the years as he played guitar, or a capella while driving, which I especially love to do. Bryan had his guitar out, in fact, likely expecting I would want to sing his songs together at that moment. But after feeling stunned and for some reason …well, what I can best describe as wounded, after a few moments I felt the urgent need to go out to a place where people gather. I felt that being in the presence of warm, vibrant life might prevent me from sinking backing into the glum pessimism that had overshadowed the last two days, a mood so at odds with Cohen’s own life and spirit. We went to Cato’s, a favorite gastropub on Piedmont Ave in Oakland, where the lights glow warmly, the food and beer are very good, the wooden tables are deeply carved with graffiti, there’s often live music, and always the pervasive sense of neighborly camaraderie.

Just one friend, it turned out, was free to meet with us on such short notice, and we passed a happy evening, talking about the arts (mostly music and film), politics, and work. And we talked about Cohen, his wisdom and his humor and his life and his poetry, about what his music meant to us and did for us, and we swapped favorite songs, my own which I’ll share with you below. And we talked about how we came to know his work.

For me, it was from a guy whose name, I think, is Brad. Certainly begins with a ‘B’. I worked with him a very long time ago at a vintage clothing store; I think I was eighteen or nineteen at the time. He usually wore rather close-fitting plain tee shirts with plaid shorts from the 1960’s and early 1970’s, of madras cotton, wool blend, or polyester, and had little round glasses. I loved his style. He was tall, blond, had good taste in everything, and was a linguistics major. ‘Brad’ put on 1975’s The Best of Leonard Cohen, a collection for which Cohen picked the songs, wrote liner notes, and designed the packaging. I was stunned at what I heard, and very soon afterward bought several of his albums on tape. I wore them out, especially in the little boombox I kept with me; it served as my car stereo from the backseat of my little hatchback. In Southern California, you can’t get much of anywhere without driving, especially then, so I spent a lot of time in that car listening to music, especially Cohen’s at that time, sometimes rapt in attention, sometimes singing along.

Sometime in 1996 or ’97, I learned that Cohen was living at Mount Baldy’s Zen Center and that he would often visit the Village, the artsy little town center of nearby Claremont. So, being the ardent fangirl that I was, I began to hang out in the Village even more often than I had been, hoping I would find an opportunity to meet him. With its Folk Music Center (founded by Ben Harper’s grandparents), Rhino Records (one of the very best music stores ever), funky little stores, coffee shops, live music, and nearby drum circles at one of Claremont’s many colleges (I’ve forgotten which one), the Village was already one of this then-hippie-girl’s regular haunts. But, alas, that meeting was never to occur, not even a sighting from afar.

My Leonard Cohen tribute album I'm Your Fan

My well-played, yellowed copy of the Leonard Cohen tribute album I’m Your Fan

I’m quite sure I purchased my copy of I’m Your Fan at Rhino Records. This 1991 Cohen tribute album features prominently in Malcolm Gladwell’s discussion of the history and evolution of one of Cohen’s masterpieces, the majestic Hallelujah, in a recent Revisionist History podcast episode. I must admit, I experienced a moment of music-nerd smug self-congratulation when Gladwell speaks of being one of the enlightened few who bought this album. Anyway, it has some good covers on it. Geoffrey Oryema does a lovely performance of Suzanne; the Pixies rock I Can’t Forget; R.E.M. and David McComb with Adam Peters are true to the urban-decay spirit of First We Take Manhattan and the self-deprecating, odd creepiness of Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On, respectively; Dead Famous People do a sweetly pop-py take on True Love Leaves No Traces; and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds recast the reflective Tower of Song into a raucous tour of musical styles. (‘I was born like this, I had no choice, I was born with the gift of a golden voice’ remains one of the sneakiest, funniest witticisms I’ve ever heard.) But best of all, John Cale does a glorious version of Hallelujah. I very much recommend you listen to Gladwell’s telling of the story of how Cale came to create the definitive version of Hallelujah which, in turn, became one of the most-covered and most-loved songs in popular music. And, you’ll likely learn some other nice little music history tidbits you didn’t know, too. Thanks, Malcolm Gladwell!

My Leonard Cohen concert ticket from Apr 13, 2009.

My Leonard Cohen concert ticket from Apr 13, 2009. It’s pictured on the notebook that became my concert diary, which records every concert I’ve gone to which issues tickets that I could keep and was a gift from my first love, who broke up with me to prepare for the priesthood though he ultimately decided to remain a layperson. I feel this little anecdote fits in with this story, though I’m not sure how.

I did, finally, get to see Leonard Cohen in the flesh, in concert at Oakland’s Paramount Theater on Monday, April 13th, 2009. How lucky I felt that I would get to see him perform at one of my favorite theaters, a gorgeous Art Deco temple to the arts, its gold-and-green interior replete with sleekly ornate stylized figures of animals and humans, real, mythological, and archetypal. He sang, danced, told stories, kneeled then stood then kneeled again very like we used to do at Mass, and gesticulated for two and a half hours. I marveled at his vigor while I was transported by his beautiful performance, and I thrilled and smiled throughout, here and there weeping just a little.

If you’ve read this, thank you for allowing me to share this story with you, and if you’ve read this all the way here, you likely love Leonard Cohen too. I would love for you to share your stories and favorite Leonard Cohen songs, poems, and other things too.

Here’s to you, Leonard Cohen!

Sincerely, A. Cools

Listen the podcast version of this story here, on Google Play, or subscribe on iTunes. 

Here are some of my favorite songs and works from Leonard Cohen, those which first spring to mind that I must share with you. This list is by no means definitive and I will add to it over time, freely, as I am inspired to.

Please enjoy, and let Cohen transport, arouse, entertain, amuse, and enlighten you as he helps you find a little redemption here and there, as he has me.

‘God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot‘, poem from Beautiful Losers, 1966 reading by Leonard Cohen. When I read it to myself, it sounds more like a chant, with a study drumbeat behind it

The description of a dream feast in Beautiful Losers, where Kateri Tekakwitha spills a glass of wine which spreads everywhere. I discovered it’s missing from my bookshelf, I loaned it out and never got it back, and Google Books doesn’t include that chapter. I’ll borrow it from the library.

My illustration of Leonard Cohen's Lady Midnight, from about 1997 - 1998

My illustration of Leonard Cohen’s Lady Midnight, from about 1997 – 1998 according to my best guess; I was about 20 or 21

Suzanne, 1967

Sisters of Mercy, 1967

So Long Marianne, 1967

Bird on the Wire, 1969

Story of Isaac, 1969. The story of Abraham and Isaac has long fascinated and repelled me.

Lady Midnight, 1969. Has long delighted my romantic heart, this cry to the arch, cruel, enchanting, ageless, mythical woman who’s capured his heart, Cohen’s Helen

Famous Blue Raincoat, 1971

Joan of Arc, 1971. Like Mark Twain and Cohen, I’ve long been fascinated by Joan of Arc. My portrait of her hangs in my dad’s living room.

Minute Prologue, 1972.

Passing Through, 1972. Written by Richard Blakeslee, I love Cohen’s performance

Nancy, 1972. Originally titled Seems So Long Ago, Nancy in 1969’s Songs from a Room. I love this version best.

At the Chelsea Hotel in July of 2011, before they kicked everyone out to remodel

At the Chelsea Hotel in July of 2011, before they kicked everyone out to remodel it

Chelsea Hotel #2, 1974.

Why Don’t You Try, 1974. A feminist song

Take This Longing, 1974. Melts me every time

A Singer Must Die, 1974.

Leaving Green Sleeves, 1974. Only Cohen would think to write about a breakup with Henry VIII’s love interest

Paper Thin Hotel, 1977. The first song to make me empathize with a sex-starved voyeur. The next and last one to do so was Randy Newman with his You Can Leave Your Hat On. The Telegraph listed Death of a Ladies’ Man as one of Cohen’s least-good albums, but I don’t agree. It’s wonderful, though it’s true it’s very weird.

The Window, 1979.

The Traitor, 1979.

Night Comes On, 1984.

Hallelujah, 1984.

The Captain, 1984. The production’s odd and rather cheesy, but I still love it

If It Be Your Will, 1984. Oh, the beauty!

First We Take Manhattan, 1988.

Everybody Knows, 1988.

Take This Waltz, 1988. …And only Cohen is brilliant enough to realize that Federico García Lorca’s great poem had be to set to music

Tower of Song, 1988.

… to be continued…..

Traveling Philosophy / History of Ideas series is a labor of love and ad-free, supported by patrons and readers like you. Please offer your support today!

On Martyrdom

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Memorial at Ben Gurion High school in Afula for students murdered in a suicide bombing in April 1994, by Almog (cropped), public domain via Wikimedia CommonsThe school shooting at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College on October 1st, 2015 ended with nine dead and many more injured. The shootings may have been religiously motivated: according to some reports, the gunman commanded some of the students to stand up, asked if they were Christian, and when they responded ‘yes’, he shot them down.

Some have praised these murder victims as Christian martyrs dying for their faith. In one sense, it’s a plausible, and in any sense, an understandable interpretation of what happened: the gunman shot them down after they responded ‘Yes’ to his question ‘Are you a Christian?’ Other survivors tell the story a little differently. In any case, the martyr interpretation is tricky: if it did happen as described above, the murder victims wouldn’t have known ahead of time whether ‘yes’ or ‘no’ was the right answer, as at least one survivor pointed out. Though they may have intended to defy death rather than deny their faith, they could instead have thought that the truthful answer of ‘yes’ would save them from death. Sadly, we can never really know.

I’ve found myself discomfited at the way many have used the horrific murders at Umpqua as a vindication of their own world view, often by portraying it as a tale of heroic martyrdom triumphing over evil. The account of the shooting itself is a very important story to tell: it’s one in a series of so many others in our country and around the world where disturbed young men channel their obsessions and their rage through the barrel of a gun and into the bodies of other people. There are so many similarities between the circumstances and motivations of the shooters that we have no choice, if we’re honest, but to acknowledge there’s a serious problem. We’ve seen too many times that maleness, youth, ideological extremism, mental disturbance, social alienation, and obsession with guns are a deadly mix. But when examples of mass killings and terrorism such as the Umpqua shooting are recast as tales of martyrdom, the motivation they should inspire in us, to do all we can to stop the killing, can for others become lost in the romanticism of idealized self-sacrifice.

Detail of a miniature of the burning of the Grand Master of the Templars and another Templar. From the Chroniques de France ou de St Denis, Public Domain via Wikimedia CommonsThat’s because we’re still under the influence of a very old, even primal idea: that death is rendered not only glorious but a worthy goal if it’s for a cause. Nearly all ideologies and belief systems still prize their martyrs, and we see, worryingly, the resurgence of this idea in some parts of the world are leading to ever more deadly results. Martyrdom has long been such a potent symbol of belief and an effective recruitment tool that if there aren’t any genuine ones to hold up for emulation, it’s a sure bet some will be created. The Umpqua tragedy may be an example of this, of recasting the horrific murder of innocent people as a romantic tale of holy self-immolation in defiance of evil personified. The memory of the lives of the innocents who died there, and the heroism of those who risked themselves to protect others from harm, can become lost in the ideological rhetoric.

But what of beautiful, inspiring, authentic examples of martyrdom? How about Father Damien of Hawaii’s Molokai Island, who ministered to the leper colony quarantined there until he died from contracting the disease himself? How about Quảng Đức, who immolated himself in protest of the South Vietnamese government’s persecution of Buddhists? How about Joan of Arc (who’s long been an subject of my admiration and fascination), who was executed for refusing to betray her own beliefs about her mission to deliver the French from English rule? How about countless soldiers who have thrown themselves on mines and grenades and dashed through enemy fire to save innocent civilians and their comrades in arms? There are so many moving accounts of people who suffer and die because they will not compromise or allow themselves to speak or act otherwise than their sense of self and honor will allow. I, too, am deeply moved by the beauty and strength of their courage.

Joan of Arc statue in Paris, France, photo 2015 by Amy CoolsYet I am simultaneously wary of glorifying these cases of martyrdom for martyrdom’s sake, even when the circumstances of deaths such as these appear most moving, most noble, and most beautiful. That’s because I can’t forget, and I believe none of us can afford to forget, that what makes death or suffering count as martyrdom depends entirely on your frame of reference. My martyr may be your heretic; your martyr may be my traitor who deserved death; my martyr may be the holy warrior who attacked your corrupt and sinful country in the name of all that’s holy and your deadly foe it’s your patriotic duty to destroy. Martyrdom of this sort, understood as the ultimate sacrifice of the death-defying, uncompromising champion of the ultimate good, knows no side and every side. Every side claims their own, and every side who has martyrs to claim (creating them if necessary) treats them as their trump card, the ultimate demonstration of the rightness and superiority of their own beliefs. There’s Father Damien, and there are kamikaze pilots. There’s Quảng Đức, and there are suicide bombers. There’s Joan of Arc, and there are Crusaders, jihadists, those who carried out pogroms, and youth who still flock every day to join the ranks of ISIS and fight to deliver sacred territory from the hated infidels.

But surely there’s a distinction between those whose form of martyrdom imposes death and suffering on others, and those who choose suffering and death for themselves alone?

Kamikaze attack left HMS Formidable burning, 1945, by Royal Navy photographer aboard HMS Victorious (cropped), public domain via Wikimedia CommonsBut here’s the problem: if it’s okay to sacrifice one person, even if that person is one’s own self, then it’s more than just a slippery slope to thinking it’s okay to sacrifice others. As we can see in such cases as kamikaze pilots, crusaders, holy warriors, and suicide bombers, the glorification of martyrdom has always had the unfortunate tendency to inspire willingness to sacrifice others along with ourselves. After all, if it’s good to sacrifice one person for the greater good, isn’t it at least as good or even better to sacrifice more people? But self-inflicted martyrdom which simultaneously kills others is generally not driven by this sort of calculation, of each side just upping the ante. When we consider martyrdom, we must also consider the ideologies and belief systems that inspire or at least allow for it. And nearly all not only involve a belief in an afterlife, they believe this world is merely a proving ground for that afterlife, so death counts for little in comparison to eternity. Furthermore, most ideologies and faiths who glorify martyrdom base their beliefs on sacred books in which holy war and violent destruction of the nonbeliever, the godless, the idolator, and the infidel is celebrated as much or even more than personal martyrdom. In the end, we end up with the same old world full of mutually hostile martyr/holy warrior belief systems that have led to centuries of violent religious and ideological conflict and ethnic cleansing.

Martyrdom of Four Crowned Martyrs by Mario Minniti, San Pietro dal Carmine, at Siracusa, Sicily, public domain via Wikimedia CommonsAnd who’s to say who’s right? Which religion, which ideology has the correct view of martyrdom? Which, if any, can be demonstrated to inspire true martyrdom, to the exclusion of others? Bertrand Russell, philosopher and ardent pacifist, is often quoted as saying ‘I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong’. Many have described this as cynical or revealing a weakness of character, an inability to form convictions. I think a more fair and charitable interpretation is that Russell believed everyone should practice proper epistemic humility. Especially when it comes to such a momentous question as preserving human life, our own and others: we should do so whenever possible, since whatever our other beliefs, we can all readily demonstrate, whatever our other beliefs, that other human beings suffer grief when we die and that we can surely help others when we’re around to do so. It’s far more difficult to demonstrate, for example, that God likes it even better when we die in his name or that we can help those on earth from beyond the grave, as believers in intercessory prayer or spiritualists hold. Better all around, when it comes to our safety as well as our chances of not believing in things that are terribly wrong, when we’re accountable to one another for the larger consequences of our beliefs.

But how if we take religion and ideology out of it, and consider only those cases where the martyr’s entire cause is the well-being of others? Even in these cases, the problem is a simple matter of justice: it’s difficult to see how one can truly believe that all persons have equal rights and dignity and are therefore deserving of care, and still believe it’s okay to sacrifice one’s own well-being when that sacrifice can be avoided. There are times in which it can’t be: the example of heroic soldiers throwing themselves on grenades to save others comes to mind as a paradigm example of justifiable self-sacrifice, since equal concern for all logically allows for sacrificing one’s self to save many. Others are not so clear: Father Damien was clearly motivated by a noble desire to help his fellow human beings as he ministered to the exiled lepers at Molokai. He made it a point to embrace and kiss the lesions of patients to show a Christlike love, but the ideology of martyrdom that also drove him may have robbed him of an even better opportunity, the opportunity to show that love to more of his fellow human beings by keeping himself alive to serve them. If he had taken reasonable precautions to care for his own well-being and avoid contracting the disease, known in his time to be contagious, he likely would have lived much longer to serve the people who loved and counted on him; kissing of lesions and other reckless exposure to contagion is not an unavoidable requirement for showing our deep concern for others. Martyrdom, though it may not be apparent, involves at least to some degree the inequitable valuing of the lives of persons, at the very least our own.

And this leads us to consider whether martyrdom is really the ultimate altruistic, selfless act it’s so often characterized to be. It’s hard to see how there can be such a thing as truly selfless martyrdom in a world in which human lives are so intertwined. Through death, parents are deprived of a child, children of a parent, siblings of a sibling, friends of a friend, citizens of a fellow citizen, the needy of a benefactor, the world of a unique life that has something to offer. It seems to me, then, our lives are not fully our own: they are given to us by others, are largely sustained by the efforts of others, and provide emotional support for others, and vice versa. There is no human being that doesn’t rely on the support and contributions of others to sustain it and make it secure and happy. As in the case of Father Damien, when we choose death over life, we remove ourselves from the human community of inter-reliance we all belong to. I’m speaking here in the worldly sense; according to many religions, we can help others after death by interceding with God or by providing personal supernatural guidance, such as in spiritualist beliefs. But as we’ve already considered, this view of martyrdom as a holy thing is hard to justify consistently, and even worse, it necessarily values supernatural concerns over worldly ones, allowing for the same disdain for life that underlies all forms of martyrdom, from the self-sacrificer to the jihadist. So even when it appears that a martyr is sacrificing nothing but their own life and happiness, this is rarely if ever the case. And if this is so, our right to sacrifice our own life and well-being appears very tenuous in all but those very special circumstances, such as the case of those grenade-blocking soldiers who can’t help others unless they risk themselves.

Eleanor Roosevelt and Human Rights Declaration, public domain via Wikimedia CommonsIn a world where religiously-, politically-, and ideologically-motivated terrorism and mass shootings are again on the rise, we need to let go of our old cherished ideal of martyrdom as the ultimate holy and noble act. If we want to instill in ourselves and others the value that all lives matter, the glorification of any kind of martyrdom appears as toxic to this as the old belief in the curative powers of bleeding and purging was to health. This seems like a call for rejecting our long-loved heroes, our Joans and Quảngs and Damiens, but I don’t believe it is. We have a robust capacity for understanding that context matters, and just as we can believe George Washington’s doctors did their best to cure him the only (turns out wrong) way they knew how, we can simultaneously revere the courage and conviction of martyrs of the past while believing that in the age of universal human rights and ethics of care, martyrdom is the wrong way to go and should not be glorified, praised, or used as evidence of the superiority of our own beliefs over others.

*Listen to the podcast version here or subscribe on iTunes

Ordinary Philosophy and its Traveling Philosophy / History of Ideas series is a labor of love and is ad-free, entirely supported by patrons and readers like you. Please offer your support today!

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Sources and Inspiration:

‘The Death of George Washington‘, The George Washington Digital Encyclopedia

‘Father Damien‘. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.

Sidner, Sara and Kyung Lah, Steve Almasy and Ralph Ellis. ‘Oregon Shooting: Gunman was Student in Class Where He Killed 9’. CNN (online), October 2, 2015. 

‘The “Werther-effect”: Legend or Reality?’ (abstract). Neuropsychiatr. 2007;21(4):284-90. Source: PubMed.gov http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18082110

Turkewitz, Julie. ‘Oregon Gunman Smiled, Then Fired, Student Says’
The New York Times (0nline), Oct. 9, 2015

Vanderhart, Dirk and Kirk Johnson and Julie Turkewitz. ‘Oregon Shooting at Umpqua College Kills 10, Sheriff Says’, The New York Times (0nline), Oct. 1, 2015.