 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 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