Late in the afternoon of May 23, 1430, a Burgundian archer in the service of the English captured a hard-fighting soldier of the King of France and took his prisoner back to camp. Had he captured half the French army, his commanders would have been no happier. Stripped of armor, the soldier was seen to be a handsome, well-knit girl of 18 with short-cropped dark hair. For Jeannette d'Arc of Domrémy, who had given Charles VII his throne and whipped his English enemies with astonishing consistency, there now began one of the classic heresy trials of Christian history. That trial, held in Rouen (Feb. 21-May 31, 1431) under Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, is now a familiar story. Far less familiar is a second trial that, 19 years later, resurrected the ashes of the burnt heretic and transformed her into a heroine.
It was this second trial, in which Joan's former judges and their associates were themselves, in effect, the accused—though many of them were dead by then " —that made possible her sure but slow acceptance as a Roman Catholic saint (she was finally canonized in 1920). The rehabilitation trial is now again brought to light by Régine Pernoud, chief archivist of the Museum of French History (The Retrial of Joan of Arc; Harcourt, Brace; $4.75). The record, on the whole, backs popular opinion, which regards the judges who sent Joan to the stake as villains. It speaks of English bribery and pressure, Joan's imprisonment in a secular rather than an ecclesiastical prison, her lack of counsel, her inability to get an appeal through to Pope Eugene IV. The Rouen trial was full of inconsistencies and irregularities, e.g., after Joan made her famous "abjuration" renouncing her "errors," she was sentenced to life imprisonment, and what actually brought her to the stake was her return to men's clothes after she had promised to give them up. Though condemned as a "relapsed heretic," she was permitted to receive the last sacraments, and at the very end, the secular judges failed to pass formal judgment.
Yet the main interest of this study lies not in its evidence against Joan's judges, but in the evidence it presents on the character of a remarkable saint.
The Witnesses. The rehabilitation tribunal (formed partly on the instigation of Charles VII, who did not like to have it said that he had received his crown from a heretic) moved from place to place along the route that Joan herself had followed. Everywhere, it examined witnesses. Many of them were obviously as biased for her as her tormentors two decades before had been against her. Nevertheless, the record of their testimony brings together in a fascinating way the great and little figures who came in contact with Joan, and they tell about her in their own words, perhaps edited by court scribes, but unfiltered by historians or playwrights.
PERRIN DRAPPIER, beadle of Domremy: "Joan the Maid was a good girl, chaste, simple, and modest, all the years of her youth . . . When I did not ring for complin, Joan used to ask me why and scold me . . . She even promised me a present of wool if I would be regular in ringing..."