Title: The Second Coming of Joan of Arc
Author: Carolyn Gage
Type: Theatrical Play
First Publication: 1994
MHDB Article ID: RTSCOJOA20201001
MHDB Article date: 1 October 2020
MHDB Article Author(s): Staff
Abstract:
"The Second Coming of Joan of Arc" imagines Joan of Arc coming back to speak to modern women. The play has the stated goal of presenting the "real" Joan of Arc based (ostensibly) on the trial transcript and the eyewitness depositions during the posthumous investigations of the case in the 1450s; however, Gage's description and interpretation of that evidence is erroneous on virtually every important point, including basic events such as battles and issues such as the nature of Joan of Arc's military campaigns and trial, her alleged lesbian relationships (which are fictional since the eyewitnesses did not describe anything similar), and her alleged motives and viewpoints which are likewise unhistorical. A significant percentage of the play presents an imagined set of opinions which Joan is supposed to have developed after death, seemingly drawn from the playwright's own political views and often the diametric opposite of the historical Joan of Arc's recorded statements and personality described so vividly in the same eyewitness accounts which Gage allegedly drew her material from.
Analysis:
It appears likely that the play's basic conception of the subject was probably based - very loosely - on novelist Vita Sackville-West's book "Saint Joan of Arc", which contained many misrepresentations of historical issues which appear to have been echoed and further embellished in the play, as if Sackville-West's viewpoints and innuendos were exaggerated either deliberately or through gradual unintentional extrapolation.
The claims made in the play or the author's standard summary include the following:
• A central theme of the play is the idea that Joan opposed, and was opposed by, all men; and was killed by the "patriarchy" due to her gender while going up against "the entire Church" after being abandoned by her own side, which manages to misrepresent history almost beyond recognition on all these points. Historians have long pointed out that English government records and the eyewitness accounts prove that the trial transcript's version of the subject - i.e. the idea that the "Church" opposed her on theological grounds - was an element of English propaganda utilized by her judge, Pierre Cauchon, a pro-English collaborator who had served as an advisor on the English Regent's council in Rouen for over a decade before the trial and was placed as a judge by the English government itself, as stated explicitly in English government records from 1430 and 1431, much as the English also executed a boy named Guillaume le Berger for making the same types of statements against them as Joan of Arc did. If Joan had been male (like Guillaume le Berger) they would have killed her just the same, and for the same motive. Many of the tribunal members later admitted that the trial was motivated by revenge for English defeats and that the charges were deliberately false or misleading, the transcript was deliberately falsified on crucial points, and the purpose of charging her with heresy was to undermine her assertion that God supported Charles VII against the English. This manipulation of an inquisitorial trial by a secular government and its partisans is one of the reasons the tribunal itself was later condemned for heresy during the postwar investigations (which Gage claimed to be familiar with) conducted by the Chief Inquisitor, Jehan Brehal, after the English were expelled from Normandy. Brehal's ruling reflected a common view that had been held by many clergy during Joan's lifetime, since she had gained the support of many high-ranking clergy including the Inquisitor for Southern France (Pierre Turelure), the Archbishop of Rheims, the Archbishop of Embrun, the prominent theologian Jehan Gerson, and many others. She was likewise supported by numerous other men rather than being opposed by a male conspiracy: the Royal army gained a large number of new volunteers who signed up because she was there (according to letters from these men themselves such as Lord Guy XIV de Laval). Many men died carrying out her suggested military campaigns; her bodyguard (Jehan d'Aulon) and one of her brothers (Pierre) were captured along with her while trying to protect her (Pierre subsequently spent eight years of misery as a prisoner-of-war for her sake); and large numbers of men took part in the four attempts to rescue her during her captivity, taking heavy losses deep within enemy territory to try to save her. Eyewitnesses said Charles VII was so upset by her death that he contemplated killing English civilians in retaliation. Joan of Arc's own stated motives and views were likewise the opposite of Gage's portrayal, since the eyewitnesses said she continued to defend Charles VII, even shortly before her death, by describing him as "the noblest Christian of all Christians" (and similar statements) rather than turning against him. Joan said at her trial that God "greatly loved" the Duke of Orleans, and she said she had been hoping to free him from captivity in England through either a prisoner exchange or direct invasion of England. The same eyewitnesses whom Gage is ostensibly invoking said repeatedly that Joan of Arc supported the Catholic Church rather than opposing it, which is also borne out in the letters she dictated to scribes, eleven of which have survived. These provide the most vivid glimpses of her authentic viewpoints and manner of speaking since some of the text was written phonetically to represent her dialect while retaining her peasant grammar and village slang terms; but the views expressed in these letters are the opposite of Gage's version. Gage would likely argue that she is presenting what Joan "truly thinks" now after her death, but these posthumous opinions are, by definition, invented out of whole cloth from Gage's imagination. Most of the views attributed to Joan in the play are recognizable as Gage's own stated personal views rather than anything that Joan of Arc actually said.
• Related to the above issue is the idea that Joan opposed traditional gender roles and "broke all the rules", which is based on a number of misconceptions about her role in the army and her reasons for wearing "male clothing" (i.e. soldiers' clothing that had been given to her) and is directly contradicted by her own statements, including those relayed by the eyewitnesses which Gage claimed to have read. The idea that Joan of Arc fought in combat is contradicted by her own statements during the fourth session of her trial (27 February 1431) : “during assaults I carried the banner, so as to stay out of any killing; and I have never killed anyone.” She did not lead directly since the Royal records give the full command structure (which consisted of noblemen) and the eyewitnesses said the commanders often did not even tell her their plans. Her "male clothing" was nothing more than the outfits given to her by the soldiers or the Royal government or nobles, and which she said she continued wearing in prison for practical reasons (an issue that will be dealt with in the next paragraph). Her actual role was that of a religious visionary like so many other young female visionaries and mystics in the medieval era: e.g. St. Catherine of Siena advised Pope Urban VI, and religious figures sometimes accompanied armies. Moreover, one of the soldiers, Jehan de Metz, quoted Joan as saying : "I would rather stay home with my poor mother and spin wool" rather than having anything to do with the war, explaining that the saints in her visions kept goading her against her will. At her trial, she boasted about her skill at sewing and spinning wool. The eyewitnesses from her village said she enjoyed those tasks rather than being a tomboy as is often stereotypically assumed. She was therefore somewhat analogous to another reluctant famous woman, Queen Victoria, who is often held up as a feminist despite her stubborn efforts to give the throne to her husband and her vocal denunciation of the early feminist movement as "this mad, wicked folly of 'Women's Rights' with all its attendant horrors", and similar statements such as "Feminists ought to get a good whipping". Joan of Arc was also reluctant to serve in the role that she is now best known for.
• Connected to this issue is Gage's claim that Joan "died for the right to wear male clothing", which is contradicted by the eyewitness descriptions of the circumstances under which she was convicted for an alleged "relapse" into cross-dressing which was deliberately engineered by her captors rather than the result of her own choice. To understand her circumstances, it is necessary to examine the context: she first put on "male clothing" when the soldiers who escorted her to Chinon gave her an outfit suitable for the long horseback journey : two of them (Jehan de Metz and Bertrand de Poulengy) later said they brought up the idea and gave her the clothing. The reason was partly because the long leather hip-boots protected her legs from abrasion against the horse's flanks and partly because the large cloak and hood disguised her features in case the group was captured by enemy troops, in which case she might be raped if the enemy knew she was a girl. The eyewitnesses said she additionally used this clothing's laces to securely fasten the various parts of the outfit together to discourage rape by her own side's soldiers when camped with the army, and likewise she continued wearing it in prison for protection against her English guards. This is because this type of clothing had dozens of thick cords that were drawn through metal eyelets in the tunic in order to lace and knot the long hip-boots, trousers, and tunic together, which made it more difficult for someone to pull her clothing off. The eyewitnesses said she told the judge she would switch back to a dress if they placed her with female guards (meaning nuns, following standard Inquisitorial practice for female prisoners) instead of abusive English soldiers, and they said she also protested that she was not violating the Church's rules since standard medieval theology stated explicitly that a motive of necessity (such as protection against rape) would merit an exemption from the normal prohibition against cross-dressing. The tribunal deliberately ignored this principle, and their final act involved the use of a particularly reprehensible method to manipulate her into a "relapse" via a two-stage process: she was forced to give up this protective clothing under threat of summary execution on 24 May 1431, after which the bailiff, Jean Massieu, said the guards took away the dress she had agreed to wear and then gave her the soldiers’ outfit again, forcing her to put it back on for lack of anything else. She was then declared "relapsed" and given a death sentence. This sequence of events was not the result of her choice and hence does not indicate any motive to "die for the right to wear male clothing".
There were several reasons for this standard sleeping arrangement: large family sizes combined with the cramped, narrow scale of both peasant houses and also town homes which city laws generally limited to specific dimensions; lack of central heating which forced people to sleep together for warmth; the tendency for travelers to arrange lodging in a private home because many people viewed inns as disreputable places and others could not afford the cost; and other practical factors. |
•Gage claims (or strongly implies) that Joan of Arc was a lesbian by misinterpreting several issues, such as the common medieval practice of sleeping with multiple people per bed for several practical reasons [see sidebox]. Gage claims that Joan ran off to join the army in disappointment when her "girlfriend" Hauviette got married after reaching the age of puberty, which alters history on every point by inventing a romance which Hauviette never described and by making Hauviette the same age as Joan (in contradiction to Hauviette's own description) while additionally ignoring Joan's actual statements about her motives and also replacing the actual history with an impossible sequence of events given that Hauviette said she was "three or four years" younger than Joan and hence only about twelve years old (below the age of puberty for peasants in that era) when Joan left the village for the first time in May 1428. Twelve was a bit young to marry even in that era, and her young age also makes it very unlikely that Joan and Hauviette were lesbian lovers unless Joan was a pedophile. Perhaps more to the point, Hauviette merely described childhood sleepovers at "Joan's parent's house" (a common practice among little girls) in the years before Joan left and hence when Hauviette was perhaps eleven, ten, or younger, in which case Joan, her sister Catherine and Hauviette would have all been in the same bed since Joan and her sister shared a bed. Are we supposed to believe that the two sisters were having three-way sex with a child and Hauviette later voluntarily described this to an appellate court of the Inquisition in front of her own family, acquaintances and the local Bishop, or was Hauviette merely describing the common practice of childhood sleepovers? Another girl who shared a bed with Joan and later testified at the appellate trial was Charlotte Boucher, who had been only nine years old in 1429 when the government placed Joan and her group in the house of Charlotte's father (Jacques Boucher) at Orleans, where Joan was assigned to share a bed with Charlotte and her mother while Joan's bodyguard Jehan d'Aulon slept on a couch next to them (as he described in his own testimony). This circumstance is very unlikely to have led to sex with a child and her mother while the bodyguard looked on from a few feet away, and Charlotte does not describe or imply anything of the sort in her testimony. Marguerite la Thouroulde was in a similar circumstance when the government placed Joan and her group in the house of Marguerite's husband (a treasury official), again with the bodyguard sleeping next to them. Marguerite said Joan never had sex with anyone to the best of her knowledge, and she does not describe anything except common activities with Joan when she stayed at her house at Bourges. A fourth person who is sometimes erroneously assumed to have been a lesbian lover, Catherine de la Rochelle, was actually opposed by Joan as a fraud after Joan stayed up with her for two nights to see if Catherine's alleged apparition ("the White Lady") would show up, and again Jehan d'Aulon would have been with them in the same room since he said that was the standard arrangement as part of his duties. None of these circumstances are likely to have involved any sexual or romantic encounter; and since sharing a bed with multiple people was the norm in that era it therefore tells us nothing about a given person's sexuality unless one is going to claim that virtually the entire population was gay or lesbian.
• The play has Joan say: "watching the fire come closer and closer, I realized that God the Father was a lie", which is virtually the opposite of her actual public statements right before she died, described by eyewitnesses who were at her execution : they said she remained a devout Catholic to the end, asking Friar Isambart de La Pierre to hold up a crucifix so she could look upon it as the fire rose and then she invoked the name of Jesus several times before she went unconscious. Gage is claiming to know Joan's inner thoughts and claiming that those inner thoughts contradict her final spoken statements.
• The play's characterization of Joan's personality bears little resemblance to the historical Joan of Arc. None of her recorded quotes contain any complaints against "the patriarchy" or similar, not even any objections to France's law which barred women from inheriting the throne. On the contrary, her main recurring pronouncements - her main theme - involved the promotion of two specific men: she said God supported Charles VII's claim to the throne and "greatly loved" the Duke of Orleans. When she had a scribe record a letter to the government of Navarre in 1429, the letter was addressed to the husband of the reigning queen rather than the reigning queen herself, which would certainly be an odd thing for a feminist to do. Gage claims Joan was "irreverent", despite her usage of the standard respectful formalities even when addressing enemy commanders and the tribunal members who put her on trial (whom she respectfully called "my lords"). Gage seems to be misinterpreting some of her bluntly honest statements, which can probably be best understood by what the eyewitnesses described as her "simple" nature (i.e. non-calculating, open, direct) which is one of her most thoroughly established personality traits due to the large number of people who described her in that manner. And yet, Gage's standard description / introduction of the play argues against the "traditional" portrayals of Joan as "simple" despite how often this term was used by eyewitnesses when describing her. Gage also claims that Joan would object to "making women feel ashamed of their own body" but Joan's recorded statements never state anything similar, nor did she represent the archetype of "the angry woman" as Gage alleges since the eyewitnesses repeatedly described her as "sweet-natured" (which in fact was one of the most common terms they used to describe her) and indicated that she was more given to crying (even when English troops were killed by the Royal army) than being angry. They described her becoming angry "whenever she heard the name of God being blasphemed" (according to one eyewitness) and other more common circumstances, but this hardly qualifies her as a perpetually angry person.
• Gage claims that Joan's father Jacques was an incestuous alcoholic, which has no historical basis and was clearly based instead on Carolyn Gage's own abusive father, and likely partly (it would seem) on a bit of unwarranted speculation originated by novelist Andrew Lang and repeated by Vita Sackville-West (whom Gage clearly borrowed many of her ideas from). As Sackville-West tells it (on p. 28 of her book "Saint Joan of Arc"), Lang claimed that Joan's father allegedly stayed alone in Rheims for "two months" after Charles VII's coronation to supposedly indulge in the secret pleasure of trying the wines there rather than coming home right away, which is just as fictional as Lang's other work. Jacques was not there alone since his wife was with him, and the surviving medieval records of the municipal government of Rheims for the year 1429 mention that the city paid for their lodging at an inn called the "Ane Rayé" for up to two months, hence they naturally stayed there as long as the government was willing to pay. This has nothing to do with "sampling the wines" in the city (a claim which is never mentioned in any of the 15th century sources) and certainly does not prove that Jacques was an alcoholic since the two issues have no possible connection.
The claim of incest is entirely fictional since no historical evidence would justify the claim, and in fact even Sackville-West herself never alleges anything of the sort. Joan of Arc certainly never made a claim of this type in any of her recorded statements, nor did any of the eyewitnesses. In fact Joan implied she had a good relationship with her father since she said she cherished two rings which her father had given her and she would look at the rings to calm herself down before battle (which she would not have done if the rings had been given to her by an abuser), and the eyewitnesses from Domrémy who testified at the postwar appeal were unanimous in agreeing that Jacques was a decent and trusted neighbor whom the other villagers respected. While this may not prove him innocent, neither is there any evidence whatsoever to suggest he was guilty. It is never a permissible procedure to invent charges of serious crimes against someone without any evidence to back it up.
• The play casts Joan's "voices" as just her own thoughts, in stark contrast to Joan's repeated descriptions of them as external visual and tactile apparitions which she said she and certain other people could perceive at the same time, and she maintained until death that they were specific saints, according to eyewitnesses who were at her trial and execution. Moreover, the idea that she described only "voices" (rather than visions or apparitions) is partly the result of the propaganda of her enemies: one of the tribunal members, Thomas de Courcelles, systematically mistranslated this issue from the original French testimony into Latin by using the wrong Latin word repeatedly. We have both French and Latin versions of her testimony for most of the hearings, and a comparison proves that the Latin version is consistently mistranslated on that issue often enough to be clearly deliberate (likely because the judge implied that she was experiencing auditory hallucinations due to fasting and hence the final Latin version attempts to buttress his assumption by claiming Joan described "voices" rather than visions).
• The play routinely misrepresents battles and other basic events. For example, Joan's capture during a sortie against the Burgundian camp at Margny on 23 May 1430 is presented in the play as
if the Armagnac troops [i.e. Joan's faction] had fled at the first approach of Burgundian forces and then simply shoved Joan aside in their haste to flee across the drawbridge, then her own men allegedly raised the drawbridge and left Joan to single-handedly fight off the entire Burgundian army by herself; which is not what she or the eyewitnesses described. Historically, the Armagnacs retreated because the Burgundians came at them from two directions in a pincers movement using a unit of 500 cavalry concealed behind the Mont-de-Clairoix hill to attack them from behind while another unit approached them from the east, which induced the commanders to order a retreat to avoid being surrounded. Joan was pulled back by the soldiers, some of whom formed a rearguard to protect the rest. Joan decided to stay with the rearguard but, as usual, was carrying her banner rather than fighting. The entire rearguard was trapped outside Compiègne (not just Joan by herself) when the drawbridge was drawn up by members of the city's garrison who may have thought the enemy would enter the city right behind the rearguard. Joan's bodyguard Jehan d'Aulon and one of her brothers (Pierre) were both captured with her, as were other soldiers. Gage rewrites this battle to suit her typical narrative, painting Joan as a "Xena, Warrior Princess" character while portraying all the men as both useless and perfidious, including men in the rearguard who in reality died or accepted capture and long imprisonment to try to protect her. Historians have debated who was to blame for the premature lifting of the drawbridge - the garrison commander Guillaume de Flavy is the most common suspect - but we do not have any evidence to indicate why it was raised or who made the decision.
• Gage claims there were several attempts to prove whether Joan was a man or a woman, which is a mischaracterization of the virginity tests which were designed to determine whether she was telling the truth when she routinely called herself "the maiden" or "virgin" ("la pucelle"); and these virginity tests were done at Joan's insistence
to put the matter to rest. The idea that there was any need to determine her sex is contradicted by eyewitnesses who said she was very feminine: "beautiful and shapely" according to her bodyguard, Jehan d'Aulon, and similar descriptions by other soldiers and commanders; hence she was not likely to be mistaken for a man except when her outfit concealed the shape of her body and enough of her face to make it difficult to see very much of her (as was the case during her ride to Chinon when she had a loose-fitting cloak and hood that concealed most of her features).
• Gage claims that Joan's family turned against her when she was "seventeen", before she left the village, which does not correspond to anything that Joan or the eyewitnesses ever mentioned. The closest would be Joan's statement that her father had a dream in which he saw Joan leaving for the army, which he misinterpreted to mean she was planning to become a prostitute (since women who followed armies were usually either prostitutes or the mistresses or wives of soldiers), and he said it would be better to drown her rather than to allow her to become a prostitute; but this was merely his misinterpretation of a dream followed by a hypothetical statement that he never acted upon. Treating this as a rift in her family would be ironic given that Joan herself opposed prostitutes to the point of sometimes hitting them with her sword to drive them away from the troops, hence she and her father had similar views on that subject.
• The play's standard description (given on Gage's website and in the various announcements of performances) claims Joan was a "runaway", which is misleading. Joan herself said she left home after getting permission from her parents to visit relatives in Burey-le-Petit, specifically her cousin Jehanne and the latter's husband Durand Laxart (whom she called her "uncle"), who brought her to his house and then took her to see Lord Robert de Baudricourt at Vaucouleurs in May 1428 and January 1429. After Joan left Vaucouleurs with a military escort to travel to Chinon, she said she sent a message to her parents to explain the situation and they forgave her. Her mother sent two of her brothers (Jehan and Pierre) to watch over her in the army, and also seems to have sent a clergyman named Jehan Pasquerel to serve as her chaplain and scribe. Joan's stated reason for leaving home was obedience to a Divine command which she said she had to obey above all else since God was the ultimate authority, which is certainly not the normal circumstances for a "runaway", a term which implies rebellion against authority and this clearly seems to have been Gage's intention for choosing that term.
• The play claims Joan's practice of religious fasting would mean she suffered from anorexia, which Gage claims Joan was using as a means of delaying puberty (based on the play's claim that she viewed puberty, marriage and childbearing as the beginning of a woman's problems), which mischaracterizes her practice of religious fasting while inventing a motive that she never described. As with certain other extremely devout people in that era, Joan fasted frequently by eating only twice a day, similar to the standard Lenten requirement in that era and similar to the practice of many medieval saints. None of her recorded statements contain any rejection of puberty nor childbearing nor marriage, in fact she made statements that would seem to approve of marriage and child raising: e.g. she helped Heliote Poulvoir with her wedding arrangements by asking the municipal government of Tours to provide money, and she told Catherine de La Rochelle to "return to her husband, do her housework and feed her children" rather than trying to help out with the military campaigns. The only tenuous justification for claiming she rejected marriage was her rejection of one specific man who claimed she had pledged to marry him but she denied having made any such pledge. The dispute came before the local Bishop of Toul who ruled in Joan's favor by agreeing that she had never made a binding vow to marry this man. This was one specific instance rather than a wholesale rejection of marriage as an institution, and the incident merely proves that she hadn't promised to marry that specific man.
• Gage claims that Joan bore her mother's "maiden name" (which Gage claims was "Romée") and implies this was part of some type of feminist / matriarchal practice, which is misleading on all counts. People in that era were almost always known by only a first name plus a nickname or place of origin, and Joan of Arc said at her trial that she was just called "Jehanne" or "Jhennette" ("little Joan" or "Joannie") in her home village of Domrémy, and during her campaigns she always called herself "Jehanne la Pucelle" ("Joan the Maiden" or "Virgin") as her chosen nickname and she is usually described that way in the chronicle sources, government records, private letters, and so forth. When she was asked about her surname at her trial, she initially said she did not know of any - because surnames were not used with any consistency in the 15th century - then she later said her surname was either "d'Arc" or "Rommée" rather than insisting on the latter as Gage claims. Joan never called herself by either of those names, and the implication that the latter name was part of a matriarchal practice is dubious : Joan merely said that her region had a local tradition of sometimes labeling girls after their mother, but the eyewitnesses from her village who testified during the posthumous investigations generally labeled the women in the village using the formula: "[name], the wife of [husband's name]" if that was needed to differentiate the woman from others who had the same personal name. It can be debated whether "Rommée" was her mother's surname or rather a nickname, but it is unlikely to be classifiable as a "maiden name" since the closest thing her mother had to the latter seems to have been "de Vouthon" (which was also used by her relatives such as her brother Jehan de Vouthon and cousin Nicholas de Vouthon).
• The play claims Joan was tortured during her trial, and then has her compare torture to "fat shaming", wearing a bra, making a woman "afraid of sex", ignoring women or interrupting them, etc. On the first point: both the trial transcript and the eyewitness depositions during the posthumous investigations state that Joan was merely threatened with torture, which the judge decided not to actually carry out after the assessors voted eleven to three against the use of torture (the transcript lists their votes in the section for 12 May 1431). On the second point: asking us to believe that Joan of Arc would extend the definition of torture to include wearing a bra or being ignored is a tremendous stretch; and claiming she would link the issue to the disapproval of sex is even more of a stretch given her documented views on sex. Eyewitnesses said she hated unwed mistresses and prostitutes enough to hit them with her sword in order to drive them away from the army's camp, and she constantly called herself "the virgin" because she said she took an oath of virginity.
Related to this issue is the play's claim that her English guards called her "fat" (presumably as a form of "torture"). The eyewitnesses described English soldiers calling her a "whore" ("ribaude"), "cow herder" ("vachere") and similar names, but not "fat" as far as we know. Fat-shaming would have been the very least of her worries in any event, and she was very unlikely to have struggled with obesity especially given her frequent fasting and the fact that she spent a year in prison on a minimal diet. Medieval women as a whole were not generally worried about getting fat due to a societal attitude that tended to favor a more plump, curvy ideal for women if they could manage such a figure despite a relatively poor diet. The modern fashion industry's promotion of an extremely thin body type had no counterpart in that era.
• There are many other, more minor errors, such as the claim that Joan's parents testified at the appellate trial (a claim made in the play's standard description). None of her immediate family members testified, but rather only her cousin's husband Durand Laxart. The surviving members of her immediate family (her mother Isabelle and her brothers Jehan and Pierre) were listed as plaintiffs, and the rest of the family had died by that point including her father. The witnesses (a total of 115) included twenty-two of the people from her home village or environs, including childhood friends; but her parents were not called as witnesses. Likewise, Gage claims that Joan is the "most thoroughly documented figure of the fifteenth century", which is an exaggeration since the kings, dukes, and other government leaders are almost certainly better documented except perhaps in terms of their childhood (which may be better documented in Joan's case due to the appellate testimony of her childhood acquaintances).
In summary: the playwright's claim of presenting the "real history" drawn from eyewitness accounts is itself part of the fiction. There are of course many detailed eyewitness accounts of Joan of Arc's life, not just in the appellate testimony but also in many private letters; and additional details are provided by government records and other sources. This play, however, does not accurately represent the evidence and in many cases does not even make an attempt.
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