Joan of Arc: Icon of Modern Culture (Icons of Modern Culture) - Hardcover

Hugh Trevor-Roper once memorably described Enid Starkie as the Joan of Arc of the Resistance . That neither legendary don figures in this excellent book, any more than the anecdotal context of the remark (the 1951 election to the Oxford Chair of Poetry), simply confirms John Flower s thesis that the proliferating references to his subject are unamenable to definitive recording and that even distinguished historians casually subordinate facts to imaginative stylisation. His sparkling and erudite study starts with the process whereby those of 1425-31 were immediately subject to the latter. Joan s trial and execution, so frequently compared to those of Socrates and Christ, catalysed it. What she wore and what she said, or retracted, are open to invention. Whether one believes she suffocated from inhaling smoke or was given a kindly coup de grâce at the stake is beyond validation. To successive versions of the events themselves, Flower brings forensic questions not so much to resolve contradictory speculation as to explore the accretion of implausibilities, superstition, enigmas, exaggeration and uncertainties subsequently exploited and embroidered by all those rewriting its (in every sense) partial narratives. The scope of annexation is as astonishing as the iconography is eye-opening. Flower includes well over one hundred illustrations, from fifteenth-century French engravings to contemporary Japanese comic-strips. Joan is the subject of ballads and pop-songs, paintings, films, documentaries, poems, plays, operas, pantomime, chronicles, posters, monuments, statuettes, kitsch. And, of course, many thousands of books, whether for children or adults. From oral tradition to supposedly scientific dimensions of the story (such as medical explanations of a controversial virginity), the variations are infinitely played out. Tragic drama and ludicrous hypotheses are equally entertaining. Joan is alternatively military genius or incompetent, dictated to by voices either satanic or divine. Shakespeare (Henry VI) and Voltaire (La Pucelle d Orléans) are exceptional in their refusal to subscribe to heroic myths. From hagiography to vilification, Warrior, Saint or Harlot? (as one of Flower s chapters puts it), Joan is adapted for, and adopted by, incompatible causes, and remains to this day at the mercy of artists, cartoonists and politicians. Her annual Fête (8 May) has been created, revoked and reinstated according to its ideological usefulness . The rehabilitation hearings 1456 are constantly reduplicated and renewed over the ages. If the Restoration unsurprisingly restored Joan s status as saviour of the monarchy, even Napoleon had used her to seek a compromise with the Church. Indeed, if there is a consistent thread to her multiple representations (at least in France), it is her value to the Right, exemplified by the appropriation which is given momentum by the 1869 move to have her canonised (finally authorised by Benedict XV in 1920) and which extends from Barrès and Maurras to Vichy and Jean-Marie Le Pen. Mystery becomes mystification as easily as the inexplicable (or the miraculous ) is put to the service of religion. But she is no less a national republican figurehead, a heroine for Michelet, progressive educators and the Resistance. Symptomatically, she is championed by both sides in the Dreyfus Affair. At the beginning of the twentieth century, she is at the centre of continuing debates about the rational and secular state. ... But the book s challenge to both assimilate previous work and make an original contribution is met by the close focus on individual texts, silent movies, television soaps and musical incarnations. ... What is beyond doubt is that Joan of Arc fits superbly into this series. --Journal of European Studies

Why does Joan of Arc continue to fascinate us? Who was she? How did others react to her? What kinds of values has she come to represent? Is she a religious or a political figure? What are we to make of her in the twenty-first century? The subject of countless books and articles, of films and paintings, of songs and operas, of poems, plays and novels and at the same time of the most trite advertisements, Joan remains ever present not just in France but throughout the world. This book asks questions and explores by way of extracts and illustrations some of the many and different ways she and her deeds have been depicted and appropriated during the last five centuries.