Scott Alexander (author/host)
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
She was legally allowed a defence attorney, which she didn't get.
She was spied on during the confessional.
Two of the judges vanish halfway through, and at the trial of rehabilitation the witnesses report that they were fired for being too sympathetic to the defendant.
She was guarded in a military prison by English men-at-arms instead of by churchmen or respectable women, and the list goes on and on and on.
Footnote about defense attorney.
The technical term is advocate.
They were supposed to have her tried in her home territory so everyone who knew her could give testimony, but they couldn't do that because it was held by the other side, so they declared that the room she was being tried in was, legally speaking, part of the diocese in which she was captured, and pretended that was good enough.
They were supposed to interview everyone in her home province to see if she had a good reputation, but somehow they never recorded their results.
Twenty years later, at the trial of rehabilitation, a Lorraine merchant recounted that one of his countrymen in Rouen came to him full of bitterness that Colchon hired him and then refused to pay him because, quote, in the course of his inquiries he had learned nothing about Joan that he would not have liked to hear about his own sister, end quote.
This did not stop the trial from being a great show.
It really is one of the great achievements of this or any age.
I could say great artistic achievements, but that would suggest that everyone was aiming at art.
It's beautiful not in that it was made to be beautiful, but in that watching someone, anyone, perform at the top of a game, any game, is beautiful.
Of the 400-odd pages in my edition, about 130 or so are the introduction in the background, including biographies of everyone mentioned in the trial, then another 100 or so are the bureaucratic minutiae of listing who is present at the start of every day of the trial, and then the remaining 170 pages is Joan of Arc being lobbed tricky questions by the best theologians the English government can hire, and, without saying anything heretical, spending these 170 pages trolling them.
As opposed to Discord conversationalists who say things that I as an agnostic can be pretty sure are heretical like every six seconds, I bet a Catholic could get it down to two or three.
Asked if the people of Dom Remy sided with the Burgundians or another party, she answered that she only knew one Burgundian and she would be quite willing for him to have his head cut off.