Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured

Product Description

The profoundly inspiring and fully documented saga of Joan of Arc, the young peasant girl whose “voices” moved her to rally the French nation and a reluctant king against British invaders in 1428, has fascinated artistic figures as diverse as William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Voltaire, George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, Carl Dreyer, and Robert Bresson. Was she a divinely inspired saint? A schizophrenic? A demonically possessed heretic, as her persecutors and captors tried to prove?

Every era must retell and reimagine the Maid of Orleans’s extraordinary story in its own way, and in 
Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured, the superb novelist and memoirist Kathryn Harrison gives us a Joan for our time—a shining exemplar of unshakable faith, extraordinary courage, and self-confidence during a brutally rigged ecclesiastical inquisition and in the face of her death by burning. Deftly weaving historical fact, myth, folklore, artistic representations, and centuries of scholarly and critical interpretation into a compelling narrative, she restores Joan of Arc to her rightful position as one of the greatest heroines in all of human history.

Review

Praise for
Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured:

“It is impossible for Harrison to write an uninteresting book. She is too skilled a prose writer, too good a storyteller, too alert to passions and the human heart to produce a work that ever flags. But read
Joan of Arc for what it tells you about the world in which the subject lived and the half-millennium of culture that has continued to mythologize her. In this striking volume, it is clear that Joan fell victim to more than an era’s intolerance. She became a victim to other dreamers’ dreams.”

—Marie Arana, The Washington Post

“[Harrison] awes us with her incisive intelligence, her fierce curiosity, her literary prowess. These qualities, along with years of meticulous research, are on stunning display in Harrison’s latest work of nonfiction, which focuses, fittingly, on two aspects of the cross-dressing teenaged warrior: her sanity, and her sexuality. Harrison sets the scene, painting a layered portrait not only of Joan’s life, but of her times.”

—The Boston Globe

“Most people know the outline of Joan’s story and remember that it ends badly for her, at a stake in the marketplace at Rouen. Harrison’s book helps us see how it came to that. It goes beyond that to show how her true story morphed with each retelling through the centuries, by such luminaries as Shakespeare, Mark Twain and Cecil B. DeMille. In Harrison’s telling, Joan loses her mythic accessories, but the unadorned truth is more than enough.”

—
Minneapolis Star Tribune
”
Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured, by Kathryn Harrison, is a passionate portrait of the heroic peasant who led France against the British in 1429 only to be martyred at age 19. Harrison superbly teases out the politics and paradoxes of the Maid of Orleans’ wildly improbable saga, shedding fresh light on her visionary faith and ultimate sacrifice.”

—Elle, “The 5 Must-Read Books of November”
“The engaging text, combined with a generous array of color plates and photos, engrosses like a good Hallmark Channel made-for-television movie, which makes it perfect for holiday reading.”
—
Austin Chronicle

“The versatile Harrison—novelist, biographer, memoirist and true-crime writer—becomes the most recent in a long list of authors to tell the story of the unusual warrior… Harrison knew, of course, about the daunting list of previous interpreters, including William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht and Mark Twain. She wisely examines some of those previous interpretations, finding some of the speculation and historicism plausible but some of it wanting. Harrison examines Joan as a sexual being as well as a warrior and perhaps a schizophrenic. The sexuality angle becomes especially provocative when Harrison discusses how God may have favored Joan due to the virginity she advertised so bo