Scott Alexander (author/host)
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
There lives a maid between Cousy and Vaucouleur that will see the king crowned within a year.
When Joan was 13, she started hearing voices.
Footnote, our source for this is her own testimony.
Up until her journey to Vaucouleur, she didn't tell anyone angels spoke to her.
The most she managed was the cryptic hinting to a friend of hers that we get the section title from.
The voices told her that she should be good and remember to always go to church and obey her parents, which I understand is not exactly the default thing for hallucinations to tell you to do, though they are, of course, culture-dependent.
She reported they were angels, that they came with a great light, that they came from the direction of the church, and that they were often accompanied by a sweet or good smell.
She had not had a very eventful life, and no one particularly noticed.
The father had bad dreams that she'd go run off and join the army, which can be put down to the perfectly normal worries of a father for his daughter, considering the men-at-arms.
Her family were partisans of the Armagnac faction, so far as we can tell on the grounds that they weren't collaborators, and she mostly spent her time helping her mother in the house.
When she was 15, quote,
The voice told me twice or thrice a week that I, Joan, must go away, and that I must come to France, and that my father must know nothing of my leaving.
The voice told me that I should go to France, and I could not bear to stay where I was.
The voice told me that I should raise the siege laid at the city of Orlan, and me, I answered it that I was a poor girl who knew not how to ride nor lead in war.
One of the persistent problems with the language of every figure in this period, Joan included, is that France wasn't very well defined, in rather the same way an American could say New York to mean New York State or New York City, except worse.
So France could mean either all of the territory held by the King of France and his vassals, all of the territory rightfully held by the King of France and his vassals, all of the territory in the ancient Kingdom of France, which had more different borders and I could shake a stick at, or just the Ile de France, the region surrounding Paris that was the heart of the domain of the French kings.
Joan talks about herself as French and also talks about going into France from Lorraine, and plenty of others from this period talk about going to Normandy from Normandy into France, or France into Flanders.