Scott Alexander (author/host)

Maybe you add the epilogue about how eventually the church made her a saint.

All completely impossible and all guaranteed to be nonsense.

The funny thing is the extent to which it isn't.

Around 1412, a female child, quote, named Jean or Jeannette, end quote, was born in the tiny village of Don Remy in the Marches of Lorraine in eastern France.

She appears to have had half the village as her godparents, based on the number of people who testified later.

This many godparents wasn't actually unusual.

The job of godfather or godmother was half, it takes a village to raise a child, and half, witness that this person actually exists.

but it helpfully means that we know more about the birth of Joan of Arc than we do about the birth of Alexander.

Footnote, we have no histories from contemporaries of Alexander the Great, just inscriptions, fragments quoted in later histories, etc.

There were histories written, to be clear.

We know they were written.

We even know his general Ptolemy wrote one claiming to be his half-brother.

We just don't have them anymore because all existing copies have been lost or destroyed.

Blame the Huns and the Goths, I suppose.

Back to the text.

She grew up in an ordinary way.

She was quiet and pious and quiet and pious.

It didn't matter which side was asking questions about her, people had real trouble coming up with other things to say about her.

A few stories leak through, though, about her being more than the normal kind of pious.

Her village priest reported that she bribed him with wool to stop slacking off at his job.