esy trial and her retrial and the old chronicles have not been translated into English in their entirety, but extensive excerpts of the most crucial passages have been translated and are easily found in several current works. It is these excerpts that I used to establish the foundation of facts about Joan’s career upon which I built the superstructure of my own interpretation.
I list and describe the works I used to write this paper below. Two of the books by Régine Pernoud, Joan of Arc By Herself and Her Witnesses, and The Retrial of Joan of Arc give their reader massive excerpts from the trial transcripts and the chronicles quoted
en bloc. These two books provided me with the great bulk of the factual foundation of this paper. The other works listed, inevitably, also contain dozens and hundreds of quotations from the trial transcripts and chronicles, but only as a sprinkling mixed into any given author’s own words.
Bernard Shaw, George. Saint Joan. New York: Brentano’s, 1924.
Bernard Shaw’s preface to his play is almost half as long as the play itself. The preface consists of one of the best essays ever written that dares to try to bring Joan’s personality back to life. 1 found his observation that Joan’s prudishness had military value most helpful.
DeVries, Kelly. "A Woman as Leader of Men: Joan of Arc’s Military Career." In Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc, ed. Bonnie Wheeler and Charles T. Wood, 3-18. New
York: Garland Publishing, Inc. 1996.
My essay, like DeVries’, begins by listing the different ways Joan has been portrayed by different people with different agendas over the past five centuries. My list is different. DeVries’ topic is essentially the same as my own and we are nearly identical in the quotations we choose to cite. However, I conducted my analysis and reached my conclusions independently of DeVries.
Dupuy, R. Earnest and Trevor N. Dupuy. The Harper Encyclopedia of Military History, Fourth Edition. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.
This massive volume that presents the military history of the entire world gives Joan three pages out of 1654. In these three pages, the authors stress Joan’s importance in igniting French nationalism and partisan warfare.
Gies, Frances. Joan of Arc: The Legend and the Reality. New York: Harper & Row, 1981.
This is probably the most dispassionate and analytical of recent general biographies of Joan. In it, Gies offers a long meditation on Joan’s military leadership role that greatly influenced me and that served as my starting point. I confirmed her views to my own satisfaction by going back to the original testimonies in Joan’s retrial.
Jobé, Joseph, ed. Guns: An Illustrated History of Artillery. New York: Crescent Books, 1971.
This book instructed me in one of the fine points of late medieval cannon aiming technique when attacking castles.
Lucie-Smith, Edward A. Joan of Arc. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.
This book is an example of "psychological" biography but, notwithstanding this, it still does a thorough job of rehashing all the standard stories about the standard episodes of Joan’s life that have become so familiar. What I found most useful was Lucie-Smith’s analysis of the popular nationalism that Joan aroused and how Charles VII saw this as a threat. In contrast to my opinions about Sackville-West’s interpretations (see next page), I agree with Lucie-Smith on why Joan made some of the battlefield moves she did, such as refusing to attack the deployed English field army on the last day at Orléans.
Margolis, Nadia. Joan of Arc in History, Literature, and Film. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1990.
This massive annotated bibliography that lists 1516 works concerning Joan that have been produced over the last five centuries is simply indispensable for the Joan scholar.
Oman, Charles. A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages. 2d. ed. Vol. 2, 12 78-.1485. Reprint, New York: Burt Franklin. (The original printing was by an unnamed firm in 1924. Page references are to the reprint edition.)
This classic tome pays due homage to Joan. As is typical of British authors of the