Scott Alexander (author/host)

Remember when I said I was reviewing the evidence for Joan of Arc?

I lied.

Footnote Except to those of you who read the footnotes.

Back to the text.

I reviewed the evidence for Joan of Arc, available in English.

We've got two translations of the trial of condemnation, I read the free one, and then a couple of books pasted together from primary source quotes, mostly from the trial of rehabilitation.

And then we have like 50 different modern popular historians writing books about how cool Joan of Arc is, that I read a bunch of.

I didn't review all the evidence for Joan of Arc, and I invite someone else to, because the evidence was in a mixture of medieval French, modern French, and Latin, and in spite of all my efforts, I am tragically monolingual.

Still, with the evidence we've seen, let's try to come up with some solutions for this.

First though, there's one more thing I need to cover.

One thing which kept coming up in earlier sections, and I kept cutting so it wouldn't interfere with the flow, is that Joan of Arc keeps making predictions about the future, and they keep happening.

Footnote.

I also want to cover one non-prophetic miracle she testified about, which is that she prayed a stillborn child would live and had woke up and breathed for exactly long enough to be baptised, which is one of these miracles that says frankly appalling things about the state of the world.

Back to the text.

Most of them are pretty explicable.

Quoth the Duke d'Alençon, quote, When I left my wife to come to the army with Joan, my wife said to Joan that she was very much afraid of me, that I had been taken prisoner before, and that they had had to pay so much money for my ransom that she would have liked to beg me to stay.

Then Joan answered her, Have no fear, I will return him to you safe and sound, and in the state he is in now, or in a better one.

During the attack on the town of Jago, Joan told me, at one moment, to retire from the place where I was standing.

For if I did not, that engine, and she pointed to a piece of artillery in the town, will kill you.

I fell back, and a little later on, that very spot where I had been standing, someone by the name of the Lord de Lude was killed.