Review by New York Times Review
FAME IS LIKE a parasite. It feeds off its host - infecting, extracting, consuming its victim until there's nothing left but an empty husk. For the lucky (or unlucky, depending on your point of view), with the emptiness comes the possibility of a long afterlife as one of the blowup dolls of history. These women - and they're almost always women - become the public's playthings in perpetuity. Stripped of truth, deprived of personhood, they can be claimed and used by anyone for any purpose. Exhibit A is Joan of Arc, simultaneously canonized by Pope Benedict XV and the women's suffrage movement; sometime mascot of 19th-century French republicans, 20th-century Vichy France and the 21st-century National Front. She has over a dozen operas and several dozen movies to her name. And she's the single thread that unites a bewilderingly diverse crowd of playwrights, writers, philosophers, poets and novelists, from Shakespeare to Voltaire, Robert Southey, Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Vita Sackville-West and Bertolt Brecht. No wonder the British historian Helen Castor begins her highly satisfying biography of Joan of Arc by stating the obvious: "In the firmament of history," the Maid of Orléans is a "massive star" whose "light shines brighter than that of any other figure of her time and place." Indeed, Castor insists, Joan's star still shines. But what a travesty if all people can see is the reflected vainglory of their own desires. Castor's corrective approach to the problem of Joan's fame is to turn the mirror outward, changing the point of view from Joan herself to the times in which she lived. Follow her too closely, Castor argues, and "it can seem, unnervingly, as though Joan's star might collapse into a black hole." To those who think they know her story, this statement might seem unnerving. But Castor doesn't mean the facts are wrong or need revising. Joan was born to a moderately prosperous tenant farming family around 1412. In February 1429, against all the odds, she persuaded Charles VII to allow her to lead an army to relieve the city of Orléans from its seven-month-long siege by the English. Over the next few months, she enjoyed a series of spectacular victories. Galvanized by her presence on the battlefield, the French took back their cities and towns from the English (and their French allies) one after another, beginning with Orléans. Charles was crowned king on July 17 in the cathedral at Reims with Joan standing proudly beside him. But then, on Sept. 8, the Joan juggernaut came to a grinding halt before the gates of Paris. The following May, she was captured by pro-English French forces at Compiègne. The last phase of her life began in November 1430 when she was sold to the English for 10,000 francs. They wanted her for the simple reason that killing her would not be enough to undermine Charles VII's claim to the throne: They had to destroy her reputation and any hint of divine legitimacy she had conferred on him. The interrogation and show trial by handpicked French clerics lasted until May 1431. Central to the charge of heresy was her transgressive behavior against medieval gender roles, particularly with regard to her wearing of men's clothes. After the sentence was announced, she was paraded through Rouen before being burned with slow deliberation in front of thousands of spectators. FOR SHEER DRAMA, the story of Joan of Arc needs no embellishment, but without proper context its meaning is easily twisted. Castor's great coup is in framing this biography within not just one but two contexts. The first, explaining the culture and politics that created the opportunity for a militaristic maid, takes up roughly a third of the book, leaving Joan herself to appear on Page 89. By working forward from the early decades of the Hundred Years' War, as the Anglo-French struggle for the French throne is called, Castor is able to demonstrate the varying degrees of gravitational force exerted by contingency, expediency, sectarianism and nationalism on the people who determined Joan's fate. The siege of Orléans was the turning point. After more than 90 years of bloodshed, treachery and civil strife, Joan's demonstrable promise that she could deliver France back to the French seemed to show that God was on their side. But what did that mean if the population was divided between two factions, the Burgundians and the Armagnacs, each with its own vision of dynastic power and national boundaries? Castor argues that those who opposed Joan believed they had a moral cause, from the Roman Catholic Church, which shuddered at her claim of individual conscience over blind obedience, to the bourgeois citizens of Paris, who felt more affinity with the commercial cities of Flanders than with the southern provinces ruled by the Armagnacs. All this is entirely convincing and gripping, but what makes Castor's biography notable is the other context she subtly weaves through the narrative. Related with little fanfare or highlighting, it puts the women back into the story. The only time Joan's life became truly an all-male affair was during the orgy of misogyny that passed as her trial. Contrary to the sword-and-crucifix chronicles of the Middle Ages, there was more to the Hundred Years' War than the blood spilled on the battlefield. The women were there too. And Castor focuses on two whose actions were crucial: Isabeau, the mother of Charles VII, and Yolande, Duchess of Anjou, his mother-in-law. Yolande, Castor observes, "had what Armagnac France needed ... the insight to perceive God's plan that France should be reunited under Charles's kingship, and to comprehend how it might be brought about." That plan involved both helping Joan to reach Charles and upholding her claim to be the handmaiden of God. After Joan's death, Yolande used her formidable talent for deal-making to shore up Armagnac support. In Castor's words, "a queen's gambit was already in play." Earlier this year, the city of Rouen opened a new museum dedicated to Joan of Arc, intended in part to rescue her image from the myths that have surrounded it. Castor's book is another important way of returning Joan's "star" to the realm where it belongs, the human one. The stories of famous women like Joan of Arc can be claimed for any purpose. AMANDA FOREMAN is the author, most recently, of "The World Made by Women: A History of Women From the Apple to the Pill," to be published in 2017.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 5, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
Arguing that previous accounts of the life of Joan of Arc are told backward, from the perspective of her battles and trial, Castor takes a forward approach, from the context of France before Joan of Arc became the iconic figure she was then and remains today. Fifteenth-century France was wracked with civil war and infighting that weakened it to incursions from England's King Henry V. After 15 years of bitter war and strife, the 17-year-old peasant girl Joan asserts that she has been divinely sent to drive the English from France and install the dauphin Charles as rightful king of France. Castor details the enormous contest of wills and military might between the warring parties, with the added complication of a young woman defying all social and religious conventions. Amid the political intrigue, princes, bishops, and soldiers struggled to discern whether Joan was a messenger of God or a heretic. Castor brings keenly observed historical details to the grandeur and drama of the political and religious turmoil of medieval Europe and an extraordinary young woman.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Now a legendary symbol of France, Joan of Arc began her life as a 15th-century peasant girl who, after hearing the voice of God, donned "armour as though she were a man" and inspired the army of the dauphin Charles to victory over the English before leading him to his coronation at Reims as Charles VII. Castor (She-Wolves) recreates the heady atmosphere of a period when rival French, English, and English-Burgundian claims resulted in two claimants to the French throne. Her detailed, lengthy, and well-written account relates the fighting between primary dynastic houses before Joan arrives on the scene. Joan remains enigmatic throughout much of Castor's work, but as she faces death at the hands of her English-Burgundian captors, her extraordinary will shines through. Castor increasingly uses Joan's words during her trial, and quotes from the testimony of her friends and family members in the posthumous re-examination of her cleric-orchestrated trial. Surprisingly, Castor doesn't mention post-WWI French nationalism and the desire of competing factions to appropriate Joan's story in the brief discussion of Joan's canonization in 1920. Castor creates a strong introduction to the courageous girl who swore she heard saints' voices, but also to the nation-rending struggle for power so fiercely waged that only that singular, obsessive teenager could finally save France. Illus. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Though many listeners may be familiar with the later life of Joan of Arc (1412-31)-leading an army to victory after hearing the voice of God, burned at the stake at age 19, and made a saint 500 years later-most of them have likely have not given any serious thought to the events of her childhood or her coming of age. In this new work, which draws on transcripts of Joan's two trials, allowing listeners to hear performances of Joan and her friends and family in their own words, Castor (history, Cambridge Univ; Blood and Roses) reminds listeners of the passion in the woman who became an icon. Anne Flosnik narrates the book with great sensitivity. Verdict This finely written book is recommended for listeners who are interested in history, biography, or Joan of Arc herself. ["Readers interested in history, rather than folklore, will find this detailed framing of Joan's story very rewarding": LJ 4/1/15 review of the Harper hc.]-Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A fresh attempt to put young, willful Joan the Maid squarely back at the center of the French-English drama of early- to mid-15th-century France.If readers can wade through the mystifying details of the struggle for supremacy between the Burgundians (allied to the English and King Henry V) and the Armagnacs (devoted to Charles of Valois), a reward awaits when Joan finally appears midway in British author Castor's (She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth, 2010, etc.) historical account. Deciding which side God was on seemed to be the order of the day, and after their humiliating defeat by the English at Agincourt in 1415, the French were hard-pressed to understand why God had chosen the aggressive English invaders to punish them for some unspecified sin. Indeed, Joan was not the first female visionary to appear to advocate for the cause of France. Both Marie Robine (d. 1399) and Jeanne-Marie de Maill (1331-1414) had broadcast their visions to urge an end to schism. Joan, an illiterate shepherdess at age 16, had left her home village to set out on a mission to speak with the dauphin, housed at Chinon. Her astonishing claims to have been instructed by God to raise an army and drive the English from France so that Charles could be properly crowned required some testing of her integrity, including her virginity. Her adoption of male clothing seemed both an aid in riding and waging war and a way to thwart the sexual advances of men, which plagued her constantly up until her imprisonment. Her victories at Orleans, Jargeau, Patay and Meung, sending the English fleeing in confusion, galvanized the soldiers and townspeople, while her capture at Compigne suddenly indicated that God had forsaken her. Castor carefully combs the record of her interrogation then and rehabilitation 25 years later. An unorthodox yet erudite and elegant biography of this "massive star." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
