Shin-kickers From History: Joan of Arc
Several months ago, I asked a group of family and friends to tell me what they knew about Joan of Arc, aka St. Joan, aka the Maid of Orleans--no stopping to look up the details. I needed to know how familiar the average smart, well-read, non-specialist is with her story.* The accuracy and detail of the answers varied, though everyone knew she was French and no one said “Joan who?” ** As I read the answers, one thing stood out: the people who remembered the most were all women who had been fascinated by her story at that age, somewhere between 9 and death, when smart girls look for historical role models to tell them that it’s okay to be tough/mouthy/opinionated/different.***
I was one of those girls. I’m still fascinated by Joan, and other warrior women. And I was delighted when two new biographies of the Maid of Orleans landed on my book shelves in recent months.
In Joan of Arc, historian Helen Castor returns to the subject of powerful medieval women that she explored so successfully in She Wolves. Castor brings a new twist to a familiar story, signaled in the use of "a history" rather than "a biography" as a sub-title. Instead of starting with Joan, she begins with the turbulent history of fifteenth century France, placing Joan's achievements within the context of the bloody civil war that began with the assassination of Louis, Duke of Orleans, at the instigation of his brother, the Duke of Burgundy, in 1407. ****
Castor takes the reader step-by-step through the labyrinthine story of a France divided between Burgundians, the supporters of the French royal family, and the opportunistic claims of England's Henry V to the French crown. Joan appears in the narrative one-third of the way through the book, when all hope of the French dauphin claiming his throne seems lost. Even after she appears, Castor never loses sight of the larger picture, placing Joan's story within the context of previous French visionaries, politics within the French and English courts, and the realities of fifteenth century warfare.
Written with both scholarly rigor and the narrative tension of a historical thriller, Castor's Joan of Arc makes the story of St. Joan more understandable, more complex, and more extraordinary. Or as cultural historian and mythographer Marina Warner put in in her own study of St. Joan: “so grand, so odd, so stirring.”
One of these days I’ll get to Kathryn Harrison’s Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured. Then it will be time for compare and contrast.
* Note to self, next time you have this kind of question, post it on the blog. *Headsmack*
**My favorite answer captured the essence of the legend without reference to historical detail: “She was that sturdy girl that wore armor, carried a sword, fought the bad guys, stormed their castles, was burned at the stake for her troubles, and smiled while burning...thus Sainthood. ???????????”
***I’d love to think that modern pre-teens didn’t need these role models the same way we did in the Dark Ages before the women’s movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but I’m afraid it’s not true. Hence the popularity of the A Mighty Girl website and the #LikeAGirl campaign.
****That assassination was the subject of another book I loved, Eric Jager’s Blood Royal. Read together, the two books illuminate not only the period, but each other. It’s thrilling when that happens.
The guts of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Happy Fourth of July
4th of July picnic in Rogers, Arkansas, ca 1904
Here in the United States we're heading into the Fourth of July weekend: one of those holidays where the point is easily lost in the trappings.
Take a moment in your celebrations to remember what we're celebrating:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Picnics and fireworks are nice. Civil rights are better.
Image courtesy of the Missouri State Archives
From the Archives: Easter Island: Not So Mysterious After All
One of the other places I hang out on the internet is Shelf Awareness for Readers--a very cool review publication that reaches the e-inboxes of avid readers twice a week.* I review new history books, with an occasional excursion into cookbooks or misc. reference works. Some of those reviews find their way here. Some of those books spark blog posts that are only vaguely related to the review. It's been four years and almost 100 reviews--time flies when you're reading.
In celebration, here's the post that came out of my first Shelf Awareness review:
Once upon a time, like many nerdy little girls, I wanted to be an archeologist. Today I get my hands grubby with old books and the occasional leaking ink pen instead of the sands of time, but my copy of C. W. Ceram's classic Gods, Graves and Scholars remains a prized possession and I still enjoy a good archeological read.
I was delighted to have the chance to read and review The Statues that Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo.
Anthropologist Terry Hunt and archaeologist Carl Lipo turn the accepted wisdom about the ancient culture of Easter Island on its head in this well-written story of scientific discovery.
From the time the first Europeans arrived on Easter Island in the eighteenth century, Westerners have been fascinated by the island's monumental stone sculptures and baffled by how an impoverished prehistoric culture could have built them. The standard explanation was that the island had once been as fertile as other inhabited islands in the Pacific. Over time, its population committed ecological suicide, cutting down thousands of giant palm trees to support the statue cult.
When Hunt and Lipo arrived on Easter Island in 2001, they expected to simply add a few details to the already well-developed account of its early history. In their fourth year of fieldwork, they found evidence of the giant palms that scholars believed covered the islands when Polynesian settlers first arrived. It was a major discovery. There was only one problem: the oldest layers were several hundred years later than the latest accepted date for colonization. If the island was deforested over decades instead of centuries, then everything archaeologists thought they knew about the early culture of Easter Island was in question.
Hunt and Lipo re-examined, and re-built, archaeology's fundamental assumptions about Easter Island, using discoveries from other Pacific island cultures, local oral traditions, previously discounted field research, satellite images from Google Earth, studies by evolutionary biologists, game theory, and accounts by early European observers. They make a compelling case against the traditional version of Easter Island's prehistory. Instead of "ecocide", they describe a culture of careful environmental stewardship. And along the way, they prove how a small number of men can make a giant monolith "walk".
*I read Shelf Awareness as well as review for it. My fellow reviewers are the source for many, many books on my own to-be-read list.
"AhuTongariki" by Ian Sewell - IanAndWendy.com Photo gallery from Easter Island. Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.
