 last hundred years, Oman champions Joan at the expense of his own English forebears. As sincere as he is in his admiration of Joan, he is rightly careful to point out that English mistakes made a large contribution to her successes on the battlefield.
Pernoud, Régine. Joan of Arc By Herself and Her Witnesses. Translated by Edward Hyams. New York: Scarborough House, 1982.
Pernoud, who died in 1998, remains the dominant figure in scholarship about Joan of Arc since World War II. This book consists of innumerable and lengthy quotations taken from Joan’s trial and retrial, from contemporary or nearly contemporary chronicles, and from letters and other documents by people who knew Joan. Along with the book listed immediately below, this book provided the essential basis of documentary evidence for this paper.
This book consists almost entirely of massive block excerpts from the original transcript of Joan’s retrial. Pernoud writes connective and explanatory tissue between the excerpts and she offers a narrative of the conduct of the retrial. Katherine Anne Porter’s foreword to this book includes a brief but fine meditation on the difficulty of fully understanding Joan’s life. This book and the one listed immediately above formed the foundation of source material for this paper.
This book was primarily useful to me as a source of background information such as the composition and conduct of Joan’s two trials, the involvement of d’Alençon and Dunois in the plot against Charles VII, and so forth. This book also contains full translated texts of every letter that Joan dictated to her scribes and then had sent to the recipients.
Perroy, Edouard. The Hundred Years War. Translated by W. 13. Wells. New York:
Capricorn Books, 1965.
This book is the definitive treatment of the Hundred Years’ War as a whole. Surprisingly, Perroy, a Frenchman, seems a good deal less than enraptured by Joan. He admits that her impact was vital, but he qualifies this admission to such an extent that it seems grudging.
Phillips, Gervase. Electronic mail message to the author, August 5, 1999.
Dr. Phillips, who is the Admissions Tutor of the Department of History and Economic History of the Manchester Metropolitan University, possesses special expertise in the field of medieval warfare. ln the course of our electronic mail conversation about military practices during Joan’s era, Dr. Phillips reminded me that during an era when many high-ranking military men held deep religious beliefs, such men would have been predisposed to accept Joan as at least the spiritual leader of the army.
Sackville-West, V. Saint Joan of Arc. Revised edition. London: Michael Joseph LTD, 1948.
Though seriously dated, this book remains the standard and most thorough general biography of Joan available in English. As such, all the standard scenes and anecdotes of Joan’s life that have entered the common currency are presented in this book in their greatest detail. Still, her rendition of these famous stories is based on the same trial transcripts and old chronicles that are so ably excerpted and presented by Pemoud. Sackville-West provides a depth of detail about Joan’s family that other works lack and the day by day chronology of Joan’s career that she provides at the end of her book is a Godsend. Yet, I still have strenuous disagreements with Sackville-West’s analysis of some of Joan’s battlefield moves. For example, she opines that Joan’s refusal to attack the fully deployed English field army on the last day at Orléans was based solely on the fact that it was Sunday and that this decision was a mistake. I agree with Lucie-Smith (see previous page) that Joan and Dunois were at least partly motivated by a desire to not attack an English army that was clearly ready for them and that was set up in the Englishmen’s favorite formation with which they had defeated the French so many times before.
Scott, W. S. Jeanne d’Arc. London: Harrap, 1974.
This book is an academically respectable but highly compressed narrative of Joan’s life. Its main value to me was to confirm me ln my opinion tha