You're Dead to Me - Joan of Arc (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: June 5, 2021

Delusion or divine intervention? Learn about Joan of Arc’s super sewing skills, her badass credentials and the story of why it took nearly half a century for her to become a saint. If you think it�...�s tough being a woman now, find out what it was like in 1400s France. Joining Greg Jenner to learn about Joan are comedian Catherine Bohart and historian Dr Helen CastorScript: Greg Jenner Research: Emma Nagouse Producer: Dan Morelle A Muddy Knees Media production for BBC Radio 4.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the history podcast for everyone. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and I'm the chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories. And you may have heard my other Radio 4 show, Homeschool History, but that's mostly for the kids. In this show I'm always joined by an expert historian with a passion for the past and an A-grade comedian with a penchant for puns and today we are crossing the English Channel donning our suit of armour and going to war with
Starting point is 00:00:39 France's patron saint Joan of Arc and joining me, a Frenchman, is an Irish woman and an English woman. It feels like the setup to a joke, and hopefully it'll be a funny one. In History Corner, she's one of the BBC's finest history broadcasters. You'll often catch her on BBC Two, BBC Four and Radio Four. And she's also the acclaimed biographer of several medieval women, including Joan of Arc. Handy. It's the splendid Dr. Helen Castor. Hi, Helen. Thanks for coming. Hello. Thank you for having me. And in Comedy Corner, she's a classically trained actress and a rising star of stand-up.
Starting point is 00:01:08 You'll have seen her on The Mash Report, 8 Out of 10 Cats, BBC Funny Festival Live, and she was the co-host of the Radio 4 podcast You'll Do. It's the ace, Catherine Bohart. Hello, Catherine. Hello. Now, Catherine, you're a nice Irish girl. I'm assuming you were raised Catholic.
Starting point is 00:01:23 We shouldn't start with lies, but yes, I was raised Catholic. Of course I was, yes. Does that mean that Joan of Arc, you kind of have a bit of an awareness already? I feel like I have a lot of preconceptions about good old Joan, partly because I studied history, never her, but I studied medieval history at uni. And then I was, I shouldn't have said that because I'm going to make a fool of myself in a moment, being like, because I don't remember any of it. I wasn't a very good student.
Starting point is 00:01:48 And I, yeah, I was raised in a Catholic home. So obviously I have preconceptions. Also, she's kind of like, I think of her as a sort of feminist archetype. But then I know I have some negative preconceptions too. So I'm trying not to prejudge old Joan. She's also given her name to a leading North American brand of canned beans, if that helps at all, under the slogan Joan of Arc, the heroic bean! What?
Starting point is 00:02:13 That's so confusing because I love beans, but I'm a pacifist. Do I like the beans? I don't know. Okay, fascinating. So, what do you know? We begin, as ever, with the, so what do you know? We begin, as ever, with the so what do you know, which is where I summarise the kind of clichés and pop culture stereotypes that we have about our subjects. So, in pop culture, Joan of Arc is the peasant girl who had a vision from God, ran around in trousers, cut her head like Justin Bieber, fought as a warrior, liberated France,
Starting point is 00:02:41 then had the misfortune of getting burned at the stake for heresy. She's known as the Maid of Orléans, or in French, La Pucelle. The French love making plays and movies about her. The British like making jokes about her, and pop stars and rock bands like making songs about her. Shout out to Little Mix. And the surprising number of people think she was married to Noah. Different arc, lads. Come on, keep up. But is any of this true? Is all of this true? We are going to find out. So, Dr. Helen, we are jumping back to medieval times. When in medieval times? Probably 1412. Okay, so we're talking 600 years ago. And what's the family situation growing up?
Starting point is 00:03:14 She is a peasant girl. She's from a small village in the far east of France. She's not the poorest of the poor by any means. Her parents' house is pretty substantial. She couldn't read, couldn't write. She knew her Lord's Prayer and her creed, but she looked after animals in the field. She learned to sew and to spin. She was very good at sewing and spinning. At her trial, she's asked about her home life and her education, and she says, no one can beat me at sewing and spinning. Competitive spinning. Who brags about sewing at their trial?
Starting point is 00:03:44 Just like, I might have committed this crime, but regardless, I can really do a hem. What? That's crazy. It was a very long trial. I had to find all sorts of stuff to talk about. Yeah, okay, sure. You got to chat about something. Yeah. Wow. And presumably she's a big time Catholic. Technically, everyone's really into God at this point. Everyone in Western Europe is a Catholic, but among Catholics, she is going for most Catholic status. So what's going on in France at the time? Because we're talking 600 years ago, but France then is ripped apart by war, and it's the Hundred Years' War. This was a war between France and England, which had started way back in 1340,
Starting point is 00:04:21 when King Edward III of England had claimed that he was the rightful king of France. There were periods of very, very intense fighting interspersed with truces and stuff like that. But the essential issue hadn't gone away, which was that the king of England thought he should, in fact, be the rightful king of France. Now, we also have the slightly sad and strange story of a French king who thinks he's made of glass. We do. A mad king. And mad kings, as we know from some of our favourite TV watching, don't tend to produce happy, healthy political situations. That was certainly the case for Charles VI. He thought he was made of glass and if anyone touched him, he might shatter into a thousand pieces. It's a bit hard for government in a personal monarchy to work when your king's in
Starting point is 00:05:03 that sort of state. So unsurprisingly,prisingly perhaps factions develop among the French nobility one led by the Duke of Burgundy and another that's initially led by the Duke of Orléans until he's horribly murdered in the Paris street in 1407 and his faction ends up being called the Armagnac faction and it gets much worse after the Duke of Burgundy is himself horribly murdered by the son of the king in 1419. So there are political assassinations going on all over the place. It becomes a blood feud, basically. So they kill both of the heads of the factions, but the factions remain? Because the Duke of Burgundy has a son and because the son of the king has taken over as the leader of the other side.
Starting point is 00:05:45 Okay, I got you. It's a big mess. It's a really, really big mess. In the middle of which, Henry V of England, cry God for Harry, England and St. George decides to invade. So you have civil war and war with England going on at the same time. It's nasty. It's complicated stuff. So you've got the Armagnac on one side, the Burgundians on the other,
Starting point is 00:06:03 then the English. Until the Burgundians decide, because the duke has been so horribly murdered, they are going to link up with the English. They would rather have the King of England as the King of France than the son of the Mad King, who's the one who's killed their Duke. And then to add more complexity to it, Henry V puts himself to death. I mean, he dies of dysentery. Well, I mean, if you read the Shakespeare play, you imagine he dies heroically. It's pretty horrible. And then his replacement is a toddler. And then along comes Joan of Arc. And what does she want? Armagnacs, the Armagnac heir to the throne who his father's now died to, is the rightful king. God wants him to be king and has sent Joan to lead his army to defeat the English and drive them into the sea. So she's pro-Armagnac. Yep. And that guy is called Charles of Valois. How
Starting point is 00:06:55 old is she when she has her first vision? Back when she was 13, she says she was in her father's garden. She saw a light and heard a voice coming from god and the voice told her that god was with her and eventually after a few chats as you do get it through the weather break the ice yeah exactly talk about this and that's his favorite hip-hop act he tells her to go to school be a good girl then eventually and again the later story is that this is a message that comes through three saints in particular michael margaret and catherine They tell her that God wants her to lead an army to defeat the English and take her king to his coronation. So when a king who is theoretically in power starts to hear voices, everyone's like, he's crazy. When a 13 year old girl is like, a bunch of people in my dad's garden are super
Starting point is 00:07:42 keen that you be king. Everyone's like, that seems legit. No, they didn't all immediately go, oh my God, Joan's daughter. I was going to ask this. So like if a young woman of poor political stature and very little economic income says, I'm hearing messages from God, how does she convince anybody to even listen to her? Everyone believes in God and the devil. If a woman came forward with a message and if she seemed legit, then that was a possible way God might speak in the world. She takes a while to convince. So she tries to get to the Dauphin, to Charles himself, and she goes to the nearby town called Vaucouleur and she meets a soldier there
Starting point is 00:08:18 called Robert de Baudricourt and says, take me to the king. And he's like, no. Absolutely not. He's the captain of the town. And this is an Armagnac garrison. So he is loyal to the Dauphin, but he just sends her back to her family and tells her family to give her a few slaps, slap the nonsense out of her. I mean, she can't possibly be making sense of talking. Okay, now we're talking.
Starting point is 00:08:35 So there's a reasonable man. He's like, this kid needs some talking too. Yeah. All right, cool. I don't necessarily approve of them slapping her around, but I see what he's saying. Okay. But then she becomes like sort of almost a celebrity.
Starting point is 00:08:47 Like people start sort of going, oh, have you heard about Joan of Arc? She's magic. Well, people start hearing about her message because she won't shut up about it. She keeps trying to get back to Vaucoulard. She keeps trying to get someone to take her seriously so that she can get to the Dauphin, who, by the way, is 270 miles away cross-country. It's not like she lives next door to the palace or anything. But word does get out, and partly word gets out because the war's going so badly. I mean, the English and the Burgundians are not having a great time. This has essentially become a war of attrition by this point. Everyone's in a sort of horrible
Starting point is 00:09:17 stalemate. But the Armagnacs are in a pretty bad situation, particularly because their Dauphin, their king, Charles, really isn't a soldier. He's the kind of bloke who keeps ordering very swanky suits of armor for himself, trying them on and parading around in them, and they're not going to war. He sounds great. So the English are besieging Orléans, which is on the River Loire. And if the English managed to capture Orléans, they can push deep into Armagnac territory. So really, you're getting to the stage where they need a miracle. And if you're looking around for a miracle, then the idea of a teenage girl who says she'll lead your army for you, that sounds plausible on the miracle front. What else have we got?
Starting point is 00:10:01 I mean, sure. Okay. Yeah. They are desperate for a miracle. She's like, that's so handy. I just became one. She comes to the attention of the local duke. And the local duke, we know, is in contact with Charles's mother-in-law, who's a formidable brain. If you're looking for a political genius at the heart of this story, it's probably Yolande. She knows exactly what she's doing. And she sends for Joan. So Joan gets escorted across country,
Starting point is 00:10:29 those 270 difficult miles, including through hostile territory, by six men at arms. She's brought all the way to the court at Chinal. And this is the first time she cuts her hair and starts to wear trousers. That's it. Because she's got to make this difficult journey across country, much safer if you're dressed as a man. The townspeople of Vaucoulard give her an outfit of men's clothes and she cuts her hair into that so fashionable pudding bowl shape above the ears. It's very Beatles, isn't it? I don't hear zero shade on what I've just heard it described as basically the lesbian go-to look. I'm like, great.
Starting point is 00:11:03 Good for you, Jan. No, it's great. Do not look. I'm like, great, good for you, Jan. No, it's great. Do not apologise. I'm so excited. If it wasn't for the staunch Catholicism, I would assume that's why she did it. I'm more endeared towards her now that she's a badass.
Starting point is 00:11:12 There you go. All it takes is a strong haircut and I'll be much more invested in a woman. Carry on. So she turns up and she is now going to meet the king in waiting. He's called the Dauphin, which means the prince, but she thinks he's going to be the king.
Starting point is 00:11:27 He plays a sort of trick to check if she's legit. Can you tell us the story? Story goes that Joan is brought into the middle of the court at Chinon, the great palace where Charles has his court. And she is pointed at the man wearing glittering golden clothes on the throne at the head of the room. And she looks at him and says, no, that's not the Dauphin. And they say, yes, it is. Yeah, look, he's in golden clothes on the throne. That's the Dauphin. She says, no, it isn't. And she goes into the crowd and she picks out someone hiding behind someone else and says, this is the Dauphin and kneels before him.
Starting point is 00:12:03 And everyone goes, it's a miracle. It's a miracle she's come. Because he's been hiding in the crowd. He's trying to check whether she can really recognize the man she's been sent to save by God. So he's doing like pantomime hiding in a crowd. And she's like, it's obviously the dude over there. And everyone's like, it's a miracle. And pantomime is exactly the right word. And then they send her off with the best theologians they can muster for three weeks to see if the theologians can work out whether she has actually come from god or whether it's actually the devil that's talking to her oh jeopardy devil or god devil or god and they they can't decide it's like a comedy show they can't decide they can't decide like
Starting point is 00:12:39 could go either way what that is exactly what they say, well, we can't find any sin in her. And she seems very simple and very pious. And we can't find any obvious problem. On the other hand, we also can't tell you for definite that she's from God. So you might want to give her another test. And handily enough, a plausible test has kind of come up in discussion. Because she said, I'm going to take the king to his coronation the coronation has to happen at a particular cathedral which at the moment is in
Starting point is 00:13:09 enemy hands and to get there in the way is the town of orleans which is under siege and she says right give me some soldiers i'll lift the siege of orleans so the theologians say if you like your majesty you could just give her some soldiers and see what happens and basically oh my god they're so gracious they're like hey do you know you could just do you could just give her some soldiers and see what happens. And basically... Oh my God, they're so gracious. They're like, hey, do you know what you could do? You could just send her into battle and sure if she dies, she dies. And if she doesn't,
Starting point is 00:13:31 we can totally pretend it's because of God. That is exactly it. She's given a sort of fighting chance by being given armour and given a horse and given minimal amount of training to stay on it and given some troops to go with her and some provisions for the poor town that's been under siege for six months and so on and certainly the people in orleans absolutely believed in her they'd been told that this miraculous maid was coming to
Starting point is 00:13:54 that's what lapucelle means the name that she was giving herself the maid the people who need rescuing believe in her and it seems that the troops who went with her were prepared to march under her leadership so the french general defending the city is called jean de dunois he's been defending orleans for six months clinging on with these tired soldiers and the people who live there joan turns up he must be thinking oh great just what i need he's a child with a sort of small retinue of randoms but actually as far as we as we can tell, he's really pleased because he's been left there on his own to hold this place for months and months and months. Anything is a help.
Starting point is 00:14:33 To someone to chat to. And if there's a chance she's been sent by God. And the thing we have to remember at this point is Joan hasn't got this far by accident. Yes, she's had to shout and holler and attract the attention of somebody to get her to court. But she has got so much charisma, so much, I was going to say self-belief, but it's self-belief that comes from her belief that God has in fact spoken to her.
Starting point is 00:14:52 Yeah. That the effect she has on the poor battered town, the people are out in the streets trying to touch her as she rides on her white horse in her shining armour with her silken banner with a picture of Jesus on it. And it works. How? In six months they've been besieged. She turns up. Four days later, victory.
Starting point is 00:15:11 Four days. Not bad, is it? Why, what do they do? Well, Joan's tactic, I mean, various people have made arguments about how she was an amazing military commander and she had a great appreciation of the subtleties of warfare. As far as I can see, her tactic was attack now. of the subtleties of warfare.
Starting point is 00:15:22 As far as I can see, her tactic was attack now. And if you've been in this terrible, gruelling, grinding siege for six months to have someone come with some fresh troops, some fresh food,
Starting point is 00:15:35 and say, right, we're attacking in the name of God now, it actually feels great. It's extraordinary. They are swept away from Orléans, pushed back into retreat. The city's been rescued. Okay, are swept away from Orléans, pushed back into retreat. The city's been rescued. Okay. So after she saves Orléans, are the theologians like, fine, it was Jesus.
Starting point is 00:15:54 In fact, they're more like, you see, we knew all along. Of course they are. We had to be careful. But yet now you see that she has in fact been sent by God, because God, of course, is on our side. I mean, this is the difficulty when you're fighting a medieval war. God's there all the time. You know God's will is at work in the world. So if you get defeated, what on earth does that mean? It can't mean he's on the other side. It just means you've done something wrong for a bit. So they're going, finally, God has spoken. We're in the right. Victory is ours. This is the beginning of a glorious new world. And then she wins the Battle of Patay, which has nothing to do with delicious duck liver patay.
Starting point is 00:16:23 of a glorious new world. And then she wins the Battle of Patay, which has nothing to do with delicious duck liver pate. It's a small town in France. But she wins that, a bit of momentum onward. Does this now mean that Charles gets to be king? It does. And it also means that not only the theologians are saying we knew all along, but Charles is saying I knew all along. And he is now prepared to put the biggest army he can possibly recruit at her disposal, because her next plan, after freeing Orléans, driving the English completely out of the Loire Valley, she's going to take him to be crowned at Arras Cathedral. But Arras is in enemy hands, so they have to push a long way across country. And as they march ahead of this huge army now, Joan and her king, towns start opening their gates to them because she's one
Starting point is 00:17:06 at Orléans, God seems to be with her, everyone's getting a little bit antsy, even if, you know, they're not sure what's going on there. She takes him to Reims, she takes him to his coronation. If I was like going on celebrity gossip of today, if the king starts rocking around with a younger lady, but he has a wife at home, Were people like, is there a story here? Everyone on the other side was immediately, clearly, she could not be virtuous. How could she? She was wearing men's clothes. And doesn't it say in the Bible, in Deuteronomy, that wearing men's clothes is an abomination unto the Lord, if you're a woman, or vice versa, wearing women's clothes if you're a man. And to be honest, Joan's own side were very antsy about this as well. They had had to write theological treatises saying, yes, I know cross-dressing isn't really allowed, but the New Testament doesn't say that.
Starting point is 00:17:55 It's only the Old Testament, and besides which, she needs to for her mission, which is from God. So clearly it's fine. But especially because she's like, I'm going to need more soldiers. And he's like, sure, have them. And she's like, I'm going to need more soldiers. And he's like, sure, have them. And she's like, I'm going to get you to that crown. And he's like, okay, whatever you say, babe. It feels like it. And when he was crowned, she was standing right beside him holding her banner. So job done, really.
Starting point is 00:18:16 She wanted him to be king. He's king. She can go home back to the sheep. English is still there. Damn. Do you remember she promised to drive them into the sea? Oh, yeah. Joan doesn't think her job is done. Everyone else is beginning to think, you know what, this was great, this miracle thing,
Starting point is 00:18:28 but we've got some politics to get on with now. We might actually start negotiating with the Burgundians because if we can prize them away from the English, that's going to make the next stage a whole lot easier. And Joan's going, no, we must march on Paris, which is in the hands of the Burgundians. We must attack it and I will take it. And of course, it's a bit difficult to say no to her because she's been right so far. So they say, okay, we'll march on Paris. They're outside the walls of Paris, which has the greatest fortifications west of Constantinople,
Starting point is 00:18:55 guns all around the top of the walls. And they give her one day. Well, she saved Orléans in four. Surely she can save Paris in one. She's doing miracles, right? Come on. Yeah, it didn't work. What a four. Surely she can save Paris in one. She's doing miracles, right? Come on. Yeah, it didn't work. What a surprise.
Starting point is 00:19:07 And she gets injured. She got shot with a crossbow bolt through the thigh and was still protesting that the attack should continue as she was carried off the field. It's horrible. She still believes everyone else has sort of stopped believing and in order to justify stopping believing, they give her an even more impossible
Starting point is 00:19:26 task. So she gets to carry on fighting through the winter of 1429, 1430. But at these little sieges in little out-of-the-way places, she's really a sort of jobbing soldier by this point. And that's a real problem, because if the miracles have stopped happening, why have you got a woman in charge of your troops? So she finds herself at a siege in may 1430 a place called compiaine which is being attacked by the burgundians it's in armagnac hands and she does her normal thing she rides straight out of the gates to attack the enemy and this time it doesn't work she gets cut off surrounded and captured by the burgundians who they'll then sell her to the english they sell her. made a bit of a fool of them. She's claimed to come from God. She's defeated them at Orléans. She's got her king crowned. They have to prove...
Starting point is 00:20:25 They got beaten by a girl. They got beaten by a girl. So they've got to prove that she didn't do what she said she'd done all along. They're going to have to show that actually this was not God speaking through her. God was not on the other side. God was not an Armagnac. He was actually with them all along. And that's why we end up with an ecclesiastical trial for heresy. It's about whether God is speaking through this woman or not. So this trial is overseen by a bishop, he's called Pierre Cochon, who works for the English. So he brings 70 charges against her, and then they kind of drop those to 12 charges. So there are months of interrogations of Joan herself. She's the only witness. They bring her
Starting point is 00:21:02 into the castle at Rouen, that's where she's a prisoner, but she's brought into rooms full of learned theologians to defend herself against this charge of heresy. And as a result of those interrogations, they gather to start with 70 charges, but then they distill it down to the 12 that are strongest and most likely to pin her down, to condemn her. And they are interrogating her about her visions, about what she claims, about her messages from God, about what she's done. And she is extraordinarily brave, articulate, constant in her belief in what she's saying. So she's very able to withstand that kind of questioning. But where she falls down, though she doesn't know she's falling down, is in the questioning about her visions, because this is where she starts talking in detail, starts naming saints, starts describing their voices and their faces. And what she doesn't know, but her interrogators do, is that while angels and saints can appear on earth, they are essentially spiritual beings.
Starting point is 00:22:06 So the more she makes them real and physical and literal, which she's doing to try to demonstrate that her visions were real after all, the more she's condemning herself out of her own mouth. What a weird stance to take as like a believer to be like, whoa, that's too much detail. Everyone knows Catholicism is vague. You keep it vague and we'll believe you. Theologically precise. I mean, this is the kind of age when legendarily theologians are arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. So there are very specific theological positions about angels and they're more or less going, ha ha, she's got this bit wrong. Depends on the dance. I mean, if it's tap dancing, then you can get quite a few angels on. But if it's a tarantella, it's a very big dance.
Starting point is 00:22:47 Exactly, if you're river dancing. It's a very wide dance. She does recant. She does at one point say, OK, you got me. I made it up. I'm not a heretic. What? It's absolutely heart-rending.
Starting point is 00:22:58 They go all the way through the trial and they find her guilty, which they were always going to do. They deliver the verdict and the sentence in public, in the centre of Rouen. And the executioner is standing by with his cart, ready to take her to the stake. And it's awful to read this bit of the trial because Joan, it seems, absolutely believed that God was going to save her. That's what kept her going all the way through the trial. You'll see that I'm from God because God's going to save me. And at the point when the sentence is given and she's about to be taken away by the executioner, she breaks and she says, no, no, I take it back. I will submit. I'll submit. I'll submit. And she has to sign a piece of paper confessing to her heresy. And she's taken back to the castle,
Starting point is 00:23:38 put in women's clothes and all her hair is shaved off as a penitent. And she's told she'll be imprisoned for the rest of her life. And it's only a few days later that Bishop Cochon is called back to the castle because there's been trouble. And the trouble is? The trouble is she's back in men's clothes and she's back saying she's seen her visions. And so on May 30th, 1431, she does go to the stake and she is burned in public. And then her ashes are tossed into the river so that they can't be collected as sacred relics. No relics must be left.
Starting point is 00:24:07 So that's it. She's basically destroyed. But long story short, the French do win. 1453, English booted out. The Armagnac French win. Well, you know, the French that I care about. So the war ends, 116 years, the Hundred Years' War, and Joan gets a pardon? 1456?
Starting point is 00:24:25 She gets a nullification of the verdict. What good is that to her? Administrative putting right. So 25 years after her death, everyone is like, oh, it's terribly sad. And there's been an administrative error. Administrative error. She wasn't a heretic after all. 1920, she's finally canonised.
Starting point is 00:24:40 She's fine out of a canon. As is tradition. Loaded in. And it took 500 years to make her a saint because she was such a tricky proposition. She'd been killed by the Catholic Church. She was made a saint as a holy virgin who had lived a life of heroic virtue. Oh, that's beautifully ambiguous. Isn't it?
Starting point is 00:24:57 Well, I mean, that's the end of her life, but that's not the end of the story. The Nuance Window! No! Now we've reached the part of the episode. The Nuance Window! Now we've reached the part of the episode called The Nuance Window, where we allow our expert to go to town with the sophisticated hot take. So when you're ready, three, two, one, go. I thought I'd talk about plausibility because we tend to think we live in a sceptical age, whereas people in the Middle Ages would believe in almost anything. But in some ways, I think we're more likely to believe or believe in Joan than her contemporaries were. The whole idea of Joan was alarming to them. She was young, she was poor, she was a woman, she wasn't supposed
Starting point is 00:25:34 to have a voice. And the stakes for them were incredibly high. If God and the devil were real, it mattered which of them was speaking. Whereas we're more interested in her story, whether or not we believe in God. So we tend to smooth the story over into a single inspiring narrative and we completely ignore details that aren't terribly convincing for the story we want to tell so for example at her trial joan didn't only talk about saints michael catherine and margaret she also talked about an angel who she said had walked into the middle of the crowded course at Chinon to give her king a golden crown. Now, this bit doesn't usually make it into the story of Joan as it's told today, and it doesn't because it's not very plausible. Everyone saw an angel who walked in
Starting point is 00:26:16 and gave the king a crown, and no one other than Joan ever mentioned it. Really? So we just cut that bit out. But when Joan actually said it, it was a huge sticking point precisely because her judges didn't think it was plausible either. On the morning of her death, Joan admitted it wasn't literally true. It had been a metaphor. She had been the angel and the crown was her promise that she would take the king to his coronation. So these are the kind of difficulties we don't really see in Joan's story anymore, but they help to explain why it took half a millennium for her to become a saint. But there's one more detail in the transcript of her trial that's
Starting point is 00:26:50 usually passed over because it doesn't fit with the heroic certainty we want her to have. On the morning of her death, she was asked again if she'd really heard voices and seen visions, and she said yes. She'd heard voices when the church bells rang and her angels had come to her in a great multitude in the smallest dimension as the tiniest things. And that's a kind of sensory experience of sound and light, sort of peripheral vision that I can begin to imagine. So if we want to get to the real Joan of Arc, I think we need to step away from the saint and try to see the contradictory and sometimes, as we all are, implausible human being. Amazing. Thank you. I'm afraid that's all we have time for on today's episode.
Starting point is 00:27:30 So join me next time for another cheerful rummage in the annals of history with another pair of tip-top guests. But for now, let me say a huge thank you to Dr. Helen Castor in History Corner and in Comedy Corner, Catherine Bohart. I'm off to go and listen to the French National Anthem and eat chocolate croissants until I feel a bit sick until the next time au revoir mes amis au revoir
Starting point is 00:27:50 hey me again sorry just forgot to say that if you want a little bit more French history why not check out our You're Dead to Me episodes about the Chevalier de Saint-Georges the amazing musician
Starting point is 00:28:03 of the 18th century or Josephine Baker the amazing musician of the 18th century, or Josephine Baker, the amazing musician of the 20th century. And you can also check out the In Our Time episode on Joan of Arc's great victory in the siege of Orléans. And you can find all three of those on the BBC Sounds app. Just search for In Our Time or Your Dead to Me and scroll down to the right episode. Thanks very much. Bye.
Starting point is 00:28:28 Sneakers? Trainers. Whatever you want to call them, they are amongst the most iconic cultural objects of our time. But their evolution is a story rarely told until now. From BBC Radio 4, this is Sneakernomics. Across this podcast, we're going to be telling the crazy origin stories of the most well-known sports companies and their relentless quest to be the world's number one brand. Sneakernomics tells the story of fierce competition and rivalry, one that tore families and friendships apart and even divided towns. We'll follow in the footsteps of mavericks, hustlers and dreamers and hear their tales of boom and bust, fame and infamy, hope and heartbreak. Above all, this is the story of the people behind the shoes. From BBC Radio 4, this is Sneakernomics.
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