![]() 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. 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. ![]() 1399) and Jeanne-Marie de Maillé (1331-1414) had broadcast their visions to urge an end to schism. Indeed, Joan was not the first female visionary to appear to advocate for the cause of France. 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. ![]() 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. ![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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