The Voices of Joan of Arc

A Garden in Domremy

In the summer of 1425, in the garden of her father’s house in the small Lorraine village of Domremy, a thirteen-year-old peasant girl named Jeanne first heard the voice. The detail is preserved in the trial transcripts of Rouen, where Jeanne, six years later and on trial for her life, was repeatedly questioned about the nature, identity, and authority of the voices that had directed her actions. Her testimony, given under interrogation by hostile clerical examiners, constitutes one of the most extensive first-person paranormal records to survive from the medieval period.

The voice came at noon, she said, in summer, in her father’s garden. It came from the direction of the church. It was accompanied by a great brightness. She was afraid the first time. The second time, she recognised it as a voice that wished her well. By her account, the voices spoke to her thereafter several times a week, sometimes daily, for the rest of her short life.

The Three Saints

Asked who spoke to her, Jeanne identified three voices. The first and most authoritative was the archangel Michael, captain of the heavenly host. He was accompanied, she said, by other angels, and on occasion she was permitted to see them physically: she could embrace them, she said, and they smelled sweet. Michael instructed her to live a good life, to attend church, and eventually to leave Domremy and ride to the support of the Dauphin Charles, the disinherited heir to the French throne.

The second voice was that of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, the early Christian martyr particularly venerated in the region. The third was Saint Margaret of Antioch, another early martyr, whose statue stood in the parish church of Domremy. These two female saints, Jeanne testified, appeared to her crowned with beautiful crowns and spoke to her in courteous and gentle voices. They embraced her. She knew them by their greeting and by the manner of their speech.

The Mission to the Dauphin

In May 1428, Jeanne presented herself at the nearby fortress of Vaucouleurs and demanded an escort to the Dauphin’s court. She was refused. She returned in January 1429 and was again refused, then accepted. Robert de Baudricourt, the captain of Vaucouleurs, finding the girl unable to be dissuaded, eventually provided the escort and a horse. Jeanne, dressed in male clothing for safety on the road, rode with six men through hostile territory across France in eleven days, arriving at Chinon on 23 February.

At Chinon, the Dauphin tested her by mingling with his courtiers and placing another nobleman on the throne. Jeanne, never having seen the Dauphin or knowing his appearance, walked through the assembled court, ignored the seated impostor, and addressed Charles directly with proper deference. She then, according to multiple later testimonies including that of Charles’s confessor, told the Dauphin in private something he had told no one else, identified in some accounts as a private prayer he had made the previous All Saints’ Day, regarding his own claim to the throne.

Whatever was communicated, Charles afterwards treated Jeanne with grave attention, submitted her to a three-week theological examination at Poitiers, and on receiving favourable judgement gave her command of an army to relieve the besieged city of Orleans.

The Lifting of the Siege

The English siege of Orleans, in place since October 1428, had been considered nearly unbreakable. Jeanne arrived at the city on 29 April 1429. Within nine days the siege was lifted. The English forces withdrew. The strategic balance of the Hundred Years’ War, which had been moving steadily against the French, reversed within weeks. Jeanne went on to win the battle of Patay on 18 June, leading directly to the coronation of Charles VII at Reims on 17 July 1429, with Jeanne herself standing beside the king holding her standard.

For more on the broader medieval category of mystic visions and on the specific phenomenon of auditory hallucination versus genuine paranormal voice-experience, see our related entries. The Joan of Arc case is unusual in the historical record for the degree of independent, falsifiable corroboration: predictions made and fulfilled, military campaigns directed and won, and recognition of unseen persons at sight.

The Trial at Rouen

Captured by Burgundian forces at Compiègne in May 1430 and sold to the English, Jeanne was brought to Rouen and placed on trial for heresy and witchcraft. The seventy charges against her centred on the voices. The court demanded that she submit her experiences to the judgement of the church. She refused, insisting that she had submitted them to God, who was higher than the church’s representatives at Rouen. Asked whether the voices spoke in French, she answered that Saint Margaret and Saint Catherine spoke better French than the prosecutor. Asked whether Saint Michael was naked when he appeared to her, she replied: “Do you think God has not the wherewithal to clothe him?”

The trial transcript, taken down in Latin by notaries and supplemented by a French minute taken by the trial recorder Guillaume Manchon, has survived nearly intact. It is one of the most extensively documented paranormal interrogations in the historical record. Jeanne’s answers under hostile examination are remarkable for their consistency, their wit, and their refusal to reduce her experiences either to scripted orthodoxy or to recanted falsehood.

The Burning and the Rehabilitation

On 30 May 1431, Jeanne was burned at the stake in the old market square of Rouen. She was nineteen. Her ashes were scattered into the Seine to prevent the gathering of relics. Twenty-five years later, at the request of her family and with the support of Charles VII, a rehabilitation trial was opened by papal authority. After lengthy investigation, including testimony from over a hundred and fifteen surviving witnesses including her childhood friends, military companions, and confessors, Jeanne was declared innocent of all charges in 1456. She was beatified in 1909 and canonised by Pope Benedict XV in 1920.

What the Voices Were

The literature attempting to explain Jeanne’s voices is vast. Medical hypotheses have included temporal lobe epilepsy, schizophrenia, tuberculosis, and a range of neurological conditions producing auditory hallucinations. Each proposed diagnosis confronts the same difficulty: the voices, by report, conveyed information that proved verifiable, directed actions that proved successful, and produced predictions that were fulfilled. A purely subjective account of the phenomenon must explain how a nineteen-year-old illiterate peasant identified the Dauphin in a crowded court she had never seen, lifted a siege that had defeated multiple seasoned commanders, and predicted with reported precision the location and circumstances of her own future wounds.

What the voices were remains, six centuries later, an open question. What they did, on the other hand, is a matter of historical record.

Sources

• Procès de condamnation de Jeanne d’Arc, ed. Pierre Tisset and Yvonne Lanhers, 3 vols. (Paris, 1960-1971).
• Procès en nullité de la condamnation de Jeanne d’Arc, ed. Pierre Duparc, 5 vols. (Paris, 1977-1989).
• Régine Pernoud and Marie-Véronique Clin, Joan of Arc: Her Story, trans. Jeremy duQuesnay Adams (St Martin’s, 1999).
• Larissa Juliet Taylor, The Virgin Warrior: The Life and Death of Joan of Arc (Yale, 2009).
• Daniel Hobbins, ed. and trans., The Trial of Joan of Arc (Harvard, 2005).