Scott Alexander (author/host)

To you.

I, on the other hand, encountered her in a perfectly ordinary history book talking about perfectly ordinary history, so the evidence is somewhat stronger for me than for you.

And the other footnote after how miraculous people seem?

To a monolingual English speaker.

Back to the text.

I am genuinely conflicted.

There seems to me to be sufficient evidence that I can't just hand-wave it as, well, sometimes people will make shit up.

No!

Making shit up doesn't do this.

Is this really just coincidence?

Is this really just mania?

Did God exist and stretch out his hand for this war in particular?

Why?

I genuinely can't say.

But since I can't say, let's move on from the question of my spiritual agonies to useful lessons we can learn from this historical incident.

First, Pierre Cauchon doesn't seem to have been a very wicked man.

Wikipedia warns against rounding him off to a cartoon villain, and I'm inclined to agree.

He seems to have been a perfectly ordinary politician in bishop's clothes, loyal to a great Renaissance prince and patron of the arts, who in many ways deserved men's loyalty, interested in preserving the authority of church councils against the unchecked authority of the Pope.

Therefore, he murdered a saint because she was politically inconvenient for his goals and was furious with her when she wouldn't go along with it and just die, and celebrated when he finally managed to find a way to kill her off.

Great evils aren't done by extremely wicked men.