Scott Alexander (author/host)
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
1455 saw the second trial unleashed in full, with 115 witnesses being interviewed, including everyone in Joan's village old enough to know her and all the people who had conducted the first trial and were willing to accept an offer of safe conduct.
The trial, the trial of rehabilitation after its result, the overturning of the verdict of the first trial, is the source of the interviews that comprise most of our evidence.
We have the records of the original trial, but the only reason we have the original handwritten notes is that the trial of rehabilitation found them.
The scribe who wrote them down at the first trial offered them up to the court at the second.
I can't tell if it was a genuine patriotism, desire to avenge an injustice, desire to have the authorities owe him a favour, or if he was worried he'd be in a court case ten years later and someone would ask him, did you collaborate with the English occupation?
And he wanted to be able to defend himself.
All the records of the trial of rehabilitation are still there, and we've quoted them regularly in the essay.
This means there's a giant vulnerability in our sources.
What if the trial of rehabilitation was a show trial, but in the opposite direction?
What if all that evidence was made up?
In that case, most of what I've quoted would be unreliable.
We'd be down to the Orleans Burgers Journal and the Venetian Letters and those other sources, most of which aren't eyewitnesses.
All I can say is, I don't think so.
I'm not a forensic linguist, but I've read a lot of it, and it sounds like it's in different voices, and I've read a lot of histories, and they take it seriously as a source.
And I bet a forensic linguist could get a lot of citations for publishing a paper saying, retrial of Joan of Arc proved fraudulent.
But if we're going to take our sources seriously, that means we need to try to grapple with what our sources say.
And our sources describe a lot of miracles.