Description of the video:
[Music] do now the flames they followed joan of arc [Applause] as she came riding through the dark no moon to keep her armor bright
no man to get her through this very smoky night
she said i'm tired of the war
i want the kind of work i had before a wedding dress or something white to wear upon my
la la la la
la la la la la
well i'm glad to hear you talk this way you know i've watched you riding every day
and something in me yearns to win [Music]
and who are you she sternly spoke to the one beneath the smoke
why i'm fired replied and i love your solitude i love your pride
[Music]
me [Music] then fire make your body cold [Music] i'm gonna give you mine to [Music]
is
and deep into his fiery heart
he
[Music] he hung the ashes of her wedding dress [Music]
[Music]
alone
it was deep into his fiery heart
he took the dust of jonah [Music] and then she clearly understood if he was more than she must be i saw her wince i saw her cry i saw the glory in her eye
myself i long for love and light
but must have come so cruel and oh so bright
[Music]
[Music] oh
[Music]
good evening on behalf of the indiana university college of arts and sciences i would like to thank you for joining us tonight i'm vanessa khloe and i serve as the college's director of alumni relations as part of the college's special programming for celebrating alumni contributions 200 plus years of impact initiative our food for thought live streaming series serves as an opportunity for our alumni and friends to hear from faculty experts explore topics of interest and stay connected with our u and the college of arts and sciences during a time when we are unable to easily connect in person i'm delighted to to introduce tonight's featured speaker provost professor winifred fowler sullivan from the department of religious studies a prolific author professor sullivan's research examines the complex and cultural phenomena that both generates law and is regulated by law in addition to her work with the department of religious studies she is also an affiliated professor of law with the i.u maurer school of law and directs the center for religion in the human following her presentation professor sullivan will be joined by professor and religious studies chairperson constance fury as they discuss the principles behind their joan of art course professor fury is an award-winning teacher and a scholar of renaissance and reformation christianity with a particular interest in the emergence of new types of religious and intellectual communities and theoretical questions of relationality and intersubjectivity afterwards they will participate in an audience q a session you can submit your questions at any point during this evening's discussion simply click on the questions tab located in your webinar toolbar hover your mouse over your screen and your toolbar should appear now it is my pleasure to welcome professor winifred sullivan thank you vanessa and good evening to everyone um vanessa told me that there are more than 200 registrants for this event um i want to say very emphatically that is because of joan not because of me that is one more piece of evidence for her remarkable charisma so as vanessa mentioned my friend and colleague constance fury and i are co-teaching a course on joan of arc during this week's this year's three-week interim online pandemic session in january and we look forward to helping students to understand how joan is both a person of her time and place in early modern france and a person who reaches across history to speak to us today so i will tell you remind you of her story and talk a little bit about my interest in joan and then talk with constance about that but let me first show you some images some familiar uh and some perhaps less so so this first image here this is the only image we have of joan um from her time it's actually a doodle in the margin of a chronicle uh by someone who never saw her uh which will be what he has in common with everyone else who uh tries to imagine joan we have no idea what she looked like but let me show you some of the images uh here she is um a village church in northern england
in notre dame cathedral in paris
in riverside on riverside drive in new york city
here is a british suffragette dressed as joan and here marine le pen the leader of the national front in france uh in front of an image of joan
here we have the archangel michael giving joan her charge from classics comics and joan as the heroine of a recently invented video game
here she is as imagined by alexander mcqueen the british fashion designer
and finally this is a doll a refrigerator magnet of joan given to me by a student are many many more across the world joan of arc is everywhere in public parks in comic books in movies plays video games on the runway who was she why did she die was she killed by the church or the state was she killed because she refused the church's judgment that the voices she heard were from the devil or was she killed just because she legitimated charles's claim to the french throne over that of the english king henry vi and why should we care at a time when we are having difficulty ourselves disentangling religion and politics joan's story speaks powerfully of the predicament of the individual caught in between but also importantly of whether we any more than her judges can see otherwise worlds alternatives to the politics in front of us so let me remind you of her story almost 600 years ago in february of 1429 a young woman appeared in the court of charles of balwa one of the pretenders to the french throne it was toward the end of what would come to be called the hundred years war between france and england and france itself was in the middle of a protracted civil war what we call france today was then divided among at least five governments there were rival claimants to the french throne and rival claimants to the papacy when joan left her home in domer me in loren contested territory she probably knew the civil war in her village as a child more than 300 miles away from where charles's court was when she left to travel to the loire valley the english and their burgundian allies held the northern part of present-day france north of the loire river while the armagnacs the supporters of charles held most of the south that's the part in green so you can see here domrami which is joan's hometown here so she traveled across france to the loire valley to meet with charles then the pretender to the throne when she arrived in china at the court joan told the young prince that she had heard voices from god telling her that she should start wearing men's clothes obtain an army and lead an attempt to raise the english siege of the nearby town of orleans on the analog river charles apparently believed her story after the subsequent victory at orleang then charles and joan fought their way north through burgundian territory as you see through the purple uh light purple there uh to the ancient cathedra cathedral city of rams where just five months after jones arrival in court in the midst of a stalemate really a paralysis of the of the force french forces charles was consecrated king of france
after the consecration charles wanted to make peace with the burgundians and he began to pursue peace negotiations although the war continued
but joan wanted to go ahead and take paris and from the english and force the english out of france she was captured outside paris in may of the following year by burgundian soldiers who sold her to the english for ten thousand pounds verily a king's ransom she was a prize prisoner because of her threat to the claim of the english king she was taken to their french headquarters in rule where she was tried for heresy and for war crimes after a lengthy trial during which she was examined by more than 40 theologians mostly from the university of paris she was convicted and burned at the stake in july of 1431.
the rue trial importantly was not her first trial she was a much tried young woman before she left dom remy she had been called before a magistrate for breach of promise we don't know much about that trial except that she refused to marry the young man her family had chosen for her because she had made a religious vow to remain virgin as a young girl when she arrived at charles's court he had her examined both by women of the court to determine that she was in fact a virgin and by theologians to determine whether she indeed was sent by god they were all apparently satisfied and the record of that exam examination although it is lost to us is referred to in many sources that would be the second trial of joan the trial that condemned her to the fire was the third and not the last 25 years after her death when charles had finally secured france and the english had gone home to deal with their own problems a trial was held to review the legality of the trial of condemnation many of those who knew her as a child and those who fought with her testified and that court found the earlier trial to have been irregular and voided its judgment rather too late for joan of course but it comforted her family and friends finally in 1920 a trial was held at the vatican in rome to determine whether she should be canonized as a saint of the catholic church so we know joan very much through legal documents and legal process in all of these places we get glimpses of her as well of course as in poems and chronicles and letters written during her life but it is in the trial of condemnation of which we have a very full record that we think we hear and see her
asked by her judges to put on women's dress she said no she was more comfortable in men's clothes asked to swear an oath she replied that she they had not yet told her what she was charged with asked whether the saints who appeared to her have clothes she asks them whether they think god cannot afford clothes for them
we thrill to her defiance she is a way ahead of them always
and it was not just the oath she demanded her right to be guarded not by english soldiers but by nuns as a woman prisoner she demanded an appeal to the pope of which she had a right although it was never granted
she is really seems to step out from the pages of the trial but what motivated her what gave her the strength to speak back to these men more than 40 judges was she a crazy visionary enthrall to the prompting of imagined saints was she just a front for charles's propaganda machine as some have argued in the powerful images that have been made of her some of which i've shown you but i will show you some more now
she most often comes to us alone
alone on her father's farm when she first hears her voices alone leading the army alone before the coat court and of course alone at the stake these images are from a popular french children's book about her so i too am writing a book about joan
there are libraries full of such books
one of the things i want to argue is that we do her a disservice if we imagine her as a lone figure a lone heroic figure without a mind without a politics what if instead of seeing her as george bernard shaw did as an essentially modern woman we imagine her strength as collective as coming from a community what if we imagine her as the leader of another france not the france of char of charles and not the france of the church and not the france of henry what if we imagine her as a leader a leader one that gathered around her as she summoned her country to imagine themselves together beyond war beyond corruption one that saw her temporarily as la defrance when she arrived in a town people crowded around her we have many accounts of this the soldiers who fought with her respected and admired admired her and sought her advice
from whence came her authority with these people what was her political project her authority came from her mystical communion with her saints her intelligent understanding of the political situation and her integrity but it may also be understood to have come from an alternative religious and political history one as i say beyond the church and the state one that has been explored and invoked by the great italian historian carlo ginsberg in many books he has argued that there is evidence of a persistent and widespread peasant resistance to the institutional oppression of the church and the monarchy in early modern europe christine de pisan a writer of jones time who lived in paris wrote a poem about her just after the raising of the siege of berlion in it she recalled that merlin prophesied half a millennium earlier that a young woman would come from loren to save france this story is a part of what historian francoise meltzer calls the celtic tradition of french origins an alternative to both the right wing catholic royalists and the revolutionary secularists that tradition is evident also in the questions that jones judges asked her about the fairy tree that young girls danced around in her home village they were suggesting that she participated in pagan religious practices and she easily parried their questions seeing the trap saying that such things were childish but are they also evidence that joan could be seen to belong to an older and longer tradition than that of either the french state or the french church and that her appeal to uh then and now lies beyond both
this is not an uncomplicated argument pre-christian europe has been enlisted in service of much that is unsavory but revisiting these histories may help us to see joan as an interestingly complicated political figure not just as an action figure one who might help us us to a different political theology during the so-called arab spring of 2011 in the demonstrations in tahrir square in cairo a young woman held up a sign saying i am woman i am egypt when i saw that photo i thought of joan
i thought of another people imagining an alternative politics one struggling to be born
there is much more
to say about joan and many many more pictures and poems and plays and movies and operas and pop songs leonard cohen wrote the long ballad that you heard at the opening of our program
maybe we should just let her be but somehow we can't thank you for listening now we're going to the second part of our program here and turn to my colleague constance fury for her perspective as an early modern historian
thank you so much winnie uh that was really fascinating and i always love hearing you talk about joan i also want to thank vanessa for the occasion of being here and all of you for being here with us um as when he mentioned early on or maybe vanessa mentioned in the introduction when he and i are teaching a class in the intersession this wonderful one of the you know many uh small good things that have come out of this very horrible bad thing of the pandemic that the our changing calendar has meant this opportunity to do some experimental classes in this small three-week intercession and we're planning to do one a one credit class it was so exciting to have an opportunity for the two of us to think together in a classroom with students and we are grateful to have this early moment to do that here with you all as well um so i what we're going to do is spend maybe 10 minutes doing a little bit of back and forth just talking about joan and then opening it up for questions so you should certainly feel free to answer some questions now i won't be looking at them as we talk initially here but um after about 10 minutes i'll say we'll now open it for questions and i'll i'll do what i can to review the questions that are there and to um and to ask them several of them in the time that we have remaining so when you have a struck early on you said in your talk you said we know joan through legal documents and you are of course a lawyer as well as a scholar of religion you have a jd and a phd so we might expect that you know joan primarily through legal documents and that made me wonder how did you first know joan how did you first come to know joan well it's interesting you know um when i ask other people this question um people tend to say uh i've always known about joan um it's remarkable my own first um what i remember is that when i was in high school uh we did our senior play about john uh it's the lark and i also worked in a professional summer theater where we did george bernard shaw's uh play of joan of arc so i guess i first was introduced to her through the theater um and then after i met my husband i learned about the joan of the catholic church so he grew up in a francophone part of massachusetts where he went to a french school that was taught by the sisters of joan of arc so but but the first time i really seriously looked at the record of the trial was when i taught a course at in the law school at the university of buffalo to law students about her trial it's finding trying to find ways to introduce law students to law and religion outside of the american constitutional context because we tend to think about law and religion really through the first amendment so i was trying to expand our repertoire a bit and how what was that like teaching joe to law students and and did they was it of course i mean i i would imagine i have never been to law school but i would imagine it would strike them as very curious the idea that they'd be learning about something that isn't in sort of modern histories and modern courts isn't part of a modern legal system did did were they was it an optional course that they signed up and what did they make of it um well yes of course it was an optional course yes um and i but i was lucky to have um a law student who had a masters in medieval history so he was a fantastic ally for me in uh helping the students to uh you know get enough up to speed on france in the 15th century i think that law students american law students are simply amazed that
that courts in the 15th century um had due process that joan had rights that found that astounding they would regard first of all any trial that was a religious trial as highly suspect and couldn't possibly be about justice but particularly the inquisition that this was the inquisition and yet she talked about rights in a very modern way which is what appealed so much to george bernard shaw yeah and i think about how there's um how joan is you know because of you saying how is it that we come to know joan and most people can't remember how they came to know joan i i realize i don't know either but someone once gave me a a great old poster of catherine hepburn as jonah mark right catherine hepburn played joan of arc so i realized oh the theatrical model and that of course especially in the modern um context at least as i knew it for those kind of movies catherine hepburn and then through to the you know three or four more that came after that it's always the heroic woman right the feminist before her time the proto-feminist and and a great model for any woman any girl looking for a strong woman in the past um strong female models but then i had the opportunity um my husband actually played for the silent film um about a famous um silent film about john of arc where the really the what's so upsetting there is the way in which she's um are startling for those of us who aren't used to it the way she weeps all the time and then and then of course the horrible uh execution at the end and the burning of her so that juxtaposition really struck me the ways in which she's seen as so strong and yet also um so compelling as a site of of of terror and horror and the ways in which male authority triumphs over her and i wonder if that gender dynamic how you've had how you've worked with that gender dynamic in terms of how you teach joan how you thought about joan
you know there's um i've become more and more cautious about um
using joan for our purposes although um that that that's what you see in in so many places and maybe i'm doing that too um i think that um one of the hardest parts of joan's story for modern to understand is her devotion to her voices um her voices are so hard to explain in fact many of the students that i teach at iu about joan don't have a very clear idea that she actually about the voices they kind of uh you know sort of blur that part of her but i think it's a tremendously important aspect of her strength and her ability just kind of hold it together in front of the court because she has and she protects very fiercely her secret life with the voices and that gives her a kind of strength i think um i should also say in terms of the gender of course is the clothes
right exactly that she's cross-dressed she's the cross-dresser or or that you would eat right but not ever concealing not ever it's never meant to be a concealment she doesn't try to pass um there are as you know even better than i do there's many stories of of medieval women who who transvestite saints is a very it's a lot and that made me think about that question that older and longer tradition that you're talking about and one of the things i'm learning um from you and thinking about so when as someone who teaches medieval christianity often and early modern christianity i'm often i mean there is a long tradition of women visionary women mystic women i mean not all mystics were women but a lot of women we know about whose writings remain uh with us who became saints uh or para themed heretics were um became notable because they were mystics and in fact in my medieval christianity class i i teach that there are sort of three prominent forms of authority in christianity uh through the middle ages and one is intellectual authority and another and that's sort of claimed by theologians because of their and so therefore mostly men though not only men um uh because usually it has to do with learning and having access to universities once the universities emerge and or monasteries and then two is institutional authority and that's certainly in the uh stan in the um european catholic church was a male only institutional hierarchical authority but then third is spiritual authority and women had a lot of access to spiritual authority and i wonder whether you think thinking about joan as having spiritual authority i i guess it's a question both about the distinctiveness of joan and the tradition you want to link her to like is there a way that you see her as in the lineage of women claiming spiritual authority through their relationship to god or and or is there something distinctive about the kind of authority you see her claiming or is authority even your primary question when you think about joan
so um it's always so tempting to say that john stands alone you know um i i don't know how but it's important that this is a time of huge social uh unrest upheaval division in france i think it's really important to realize that and she was not the only visionary appearing in court um charles and both men and women itinerant visionaries mystics prophets france was kind of littered with them right in the 15th century everybody's trying to what what i think the way in which um such a little different than your women mystics i think um who uh through their uh religious experience or their connection with god or with uh claim and authority that is separate from the male realms of the university and the church and the court um i think one of the things that's so appealing about joan is that she does seem to sort of be a crossover figure um in the sense that i and i i really would like to see her almost as a political theologian as a as a thinker not just as a feeler the way you know women often are and that that she was a kind of political genius um that she knew that frank she had to get charles two rams and consecrated in rams because that's where clovis had been consecrated you know uh 800 years earlier or more um so uh so i think that one one way i think about this is that she kept her um spiritual experience or mystical experience if you like secret um almost occulted in a way to separate religion and politics so that it gave her that's not how i thought that sentence was going to end so she kept it sort of secret to separate religion and politics yes so i think you can see her in a way as gaining strength and uh and authority because you know her companions thought of her as called by god and having the authority of god but she refused to talk about the details of it okay that actually is a perfect segue to one of the questions i'm going to take from the q a and so i want to remind others you're welcome to ask questions now as well and i'm going to start us off because i think this is perfectly ties to what you were just saying which is a question about um how to think about joan's silence during the trial and the ways that she speaks during theatrical production so the voice she's given in these kind of more you know dramatic uh examples but also the dramatic um context but but the silence that we know was notable or that you maybe you could tell us a little bit more was notably part of her trial uh she speaks to the voices but doesn't feel the need to speak to the court and so thinking about what is she what is as you just said occluding i think you said how is silence part of that so for sure she uh she refused to speak a lot um so she not only sort of sassed her judges which everybody likes but she also refused to speak a lot and it's difficult to completely understand that but there have been various theories one her judges were and you know much more than i knew about this were trained scholastically and they they asked her questions which asked for a kind of you know binary bifurcated kind of scholastic kind of answer and you see her trying to find a way to sort of not succumb to their world view in a sense and so i think she uses you could see her sort of using the silence between the judges coercively it's not simply um a refusal it's a strategic refusal in which sometimes frustrates them but sometimes also pulls pulls the court toward her [Music] uh right say about that right and so for you that i mean this seems as though you're saying too and i'm of course interested in others asking more questions about this way of the way that you think with joan about the relationship between politics and religion or the possibility of dividing them but or distinguishing them or how we might distinguish them as we imagine a world otherwise as i think you said uh early on um but the way that you were just saying so that there's a sense that you're seeing this as a kind of the genius also of her ability to handle um the cards she was dealt basically in this court context to play with the cards she was dealt i guess but also that that is part of the things that she wouldn't speak about partly my name distinctions she was trying to draw is that a fair way to say what you're saying distinction she was trying to draw between the kind of the privacy or i know that's an anachronistic obviously but um what it is that she might be in the realm of her relationship to god and the voices and what it is that was being asked of her and what she was then called on to speak of in court yeah i think it is that um i mean one of the puzzles about joan is that although she was tried as a heretic she was a outwardly totally conventional pious catholic totally conventional she did not have any um heretical ideas she um she asked constantly to be allowed to go to mass she talked about a very pious upbringing she said her prayers so outwardly she was an entire i mean in her public life she would entirely conventional and pious woman um so um you might see that as as another way of sort of enabling her political life in other words what's what's bold is her political life not her religious life so her the the the religious life that's occulted that secret and that she kept keeps cigarette refuses to talk about she will not tell the judges what she and the voices talk about right yeah okay right um all right so i wanted there's a couple of questions about the politics and then a couple of questions about religion i'm trying to think of the right order to do these and maybe maybe the next one that would um could fit here is the one about joan's social background i think this goes to the ways in which you're claiming both how conventional she is in her religiosity uh but also thinking about her as a thinker uh thinking about her as connected to possibly a long tradition of as you invoked ginsburg as saying a kind of peasant religiosity so this person asked specifically about um she's mythologized as an innocent peasant girl but is this accurate is there other recent research into her origins or education her social media that might help us think about how to understand her social background yeah thank you for that question i think that's really important to clarify um so her father was an important farmer he participated in the administration of the local town so she was she was not poor and she was probably illiterate although i think that's also something we have to think carefully about she's obviously highly intelligent and how we understand the intelligence of women like her in an oral culture i think is something that um is important to she's seen for example um she wrote letters probably she dictated them but she wrote letters uh lots of letters um she wrote letters to the the leaders of the town she was about to um you know capture but she uh but she wrote letters lots and lots of letters um so uh so so yes i think uh calling her an ignorant peasant girl is a way to not listen to her really and to make her into an uh a com just an icon or a figurehead yeah right um okay another one one last question about the politics um what someone was asking about the as this question starts by saying france in the 15th century was in total political chaos and then there's more details here the english occupying large area is the land mass henry the fifth gun henry vi is king um so was she a person with local french popularity who charles tied his star to to justify his claim to the french throne uh and um the idea then how to think about how sort of parochial in some sense french politics was that how sort of small these distances are only a few kilometers separating places and then also the question goes on to ask about a part that i might have to speak to and i'm not so sure i'm um up for it but the what about the avignon papacy and the church split so do you want to any part of that chaos total political chaos uh dissent within the uh splits within the church that all of that
yes so um total political chaos um you know i i hope i have made clear i'm just you know i'm just an american lawyer i am not a historian of medieval france and i i would guess that my questioner knows more about this than i do um
i think so she was asked about the split in the papacy actually that was one of um and and one of the ways they tried to trip her up was to see if they could and she was always completely on to these kinds of questions they wanted her to take it aside in order for them to then use that in their argument against her um
uh as far as
you know the more i learn about the period one of the things i'm really working on right now to understand better is the period between the consecration of charles and her capture and it's incredibly complicated the number of negotiations individual towns changing sides between the burgundians and charles and um and the uh sort of alliances the sort of negotiations diplomatic little skirmishes all around uh between the loire valley and paris and there's of course english politics everybody can learn about that from shakespeare who didn't have a very high opinion of of joan um it's it's really complicated um it is in a sense very parochial i do think that maybe the quest one thing that the questioner might be getting at here is there is no france at this point you know uh marine le pen wants joan to stand for a xenophobic france today but there was no france then there's henry vi of england had an equal client dynastic claim to charles um to the french throne there is no reason why i mean
you know some people will believe that it's because of joan that that alone um but but things could have gone very difficult differently and and that sort of mess that the the questioner asked about could have ended up in very different national configurations although charles turned out to be a better king than most people give him credit for right so you do have some opinions on how the on the politics of the time um yes and i think that i mean just as a moment to think a bit about the ways in which uh the church the split within the church and the competing claims papal claims of authority uh both are a great reminder that there was no singular uninterrupted sort of sense of apostolic succession or at least it was often contested and certainly most dramatically at this time at some point uh the papacy wasn't even always in rome which is always which is itself kind of a shocking thing but i always think when i teach medieval christianity there's that moment where charlemagne is crowned by the pope and i ask people um so there's two parts to that scene right charlemagne kneels or at least as it's depicted uh and the pope puts the crown on his head and then the emperor charlemagne stands so who has more power right you know there's this moment where he has orchestrated such that then the papacy is the one standing over him with the ability to put the crown on his head and he then stands with that authority um and uh you know certainly standing alongside the papacy and that's one way to attract all the different uh the ways in which that particular kind of um competition for uh power played out but never just between two you know just between two stable entities papacy and king or papacy and emperor because that's sort of the part of the story so there's a lot of dynamic movement and room for people like joan to appear uh and become part of this um play of authority which can that's one of the reasons i'm interested in your thought thinking about how to how both she sequesters her religiosity but also how we might sequester or delineate or differentiate her religiosity from her politics and you then go on to say that she's a political theologian at one point it's i think that's a locution a lot of people won't have heard of um it depends you know that's something people use a lot now in religious studies in another context but maybe you can explain what you mean by political theologian but also how you think joan might help us think about that and that ties to a question that was asked um here about uh when uh imagining a world otherwise could you say more about joan as gesturing to a political theology beyond church and state and how how are you thinking about that in terms of political theology yeah i mean maybe one thing i would say is that uh just following on what you were saying that remembering that she's from dormer me right so she's from uh loren she's from the edge of of french territory at that point so there's um there's a way in which she can be imagined as participating in some political you know political communities far from paris and far from the sort of consolidation of royal power um in paris and with with the with the english crown um so so so uh in imagining you know her appeal and her ability to think politics alternatively um
political theology is is in some senses kind of a loaded term today but i i want to use this with a small p and a small t just to say that um
to gesture beyond a kind of hard secularism in which we pretend that political life has no religious aspects and that theories of the the ends of politics are entirely secular political theology is just for my from my point of view a way to say how do we think uh religion and politics together um and what ways are there to think them together and i and i want to suggest that um that joan is um doing a com possibly this is a bit speculative at this point i'm at the beginning of this project is um putting together um an alternative sense of community that comes out of this uh long peasant tradition that ginsburg talks about she occults her relationship with the saints so it's not to make that part of her claim to political authority or to claim that the political world ought to be organized around religious authority right um so it is a secular politics in a sense but it's one that's attached to religious ideas of uh the end of human community but a broader sense okay that's really interesting i want to um uh tie it to the question that was asked about and it's partial answer i think to this question what do you say to people who think that joan is a fanatic so someone started uh by saying you know that as a catholic child he had admired jones so much and as an atheist adult as the questioner identified himself um the he feels now that she seems like a fanatic and some you know and i wonder in ways i wonder if you think about the ways in which she might seem scary because of her uh the ferocity of her convictions but also her appeal to religion as a source of her conviction so in that sense it's not it can't be questioned you know the voices can't be in some sense questioned although that would be something we could talk about but anyway how do you think about that
um i guess i would say uh go read the trial transcript um and listen to joan herself um and um i'm not sure exactly what a fanatic is um yes she was convinced um and she derived some kind of authority from an internal experience that we would understand in different ways today but i think she kept herself quite separate from you know the um church authorities um
and yeah i i i'm not quite sure how to uh um
i i think i want to say that um this this notion of joan is a fanatic i think comes from her use by by marine le pen and others in other words i don't think that's joan i think that is the way in which she has appealed and this is a long and interesting story to the french right and this is a story that emerges in the 19th century um you know many centuries after joan was burned um and it's uh and the appeal that joan has for um a kind of monarchist and xenophobic uh uh french nationalism of a certain kind i think is what colors people's view of john um i mean i i find that if i talk to people who grew up in france or who are french and say i'm interested in joan of arc they kind of step back like oh you're one of them um as if i'm associated with this right-wing politics but then they will often go go on to say how much they loved joan as a child um as as this uh questioner did and um i guess i would say trust your child like self um that there was something but there was something lovable about joan um that uh that is worth still paying attention to in spite of marine le pen i don't know i think that the i mean this also goes to a question that was asked of what we thought we would hope to be able to do in an intercession course which is a very good question to ask given the complexity and and that you're writing a book and also we've gotten just a little glimpse of what it might might mean to be rethinking joan and in book form and then what can we accomplish but that's always where you go and it's where i i've follow you in that and think uh that you say we have to listen to joan we're going to read one book and i'm going to be the trials of joan of arc that her voice will be a voice that will do so much of the work that we're always interested in doing in religious studies which is to say that there are no clear oppositions for example even the idea of faith is not a simple idea that we all already know you know that so we can decide or the idea of heroism or the idea of devotion i think will turn out to be in her words what i've heard you describe about teaching other versions of this course and then but even in this conversation that there's the idea of the difference it's not that there's a fine line between a fanatic and a devotee but the effects of devotion are multifaceted even in their time and might still be understood to us as multifaceted in ways that then as you're describing could be ways of thinking the world otherwise which doesn't mean it's necessarily going to be liberatory or necessarily going to be oppressive and right wing in some way but that it might have unintended and unexpected effects and that's what joan seems to be one person who her complexity makes it possible to think about that i mean for one thing i mean you know considering our recent politics she resisted and very actively resisted efforts to sort of um make her into
a kind of miracle-working character she refused efforts to um people wanted to touch her and have her come and touch their kids and heal them and she she kept all that she refused to to play that role um okay so we are getting close to the end and i have there's so many good questions about how joan is represented i want to try and find a way to thread a few of them together um one uh and how she's represented also of course has to do with what her catholicism is or under is understood to be so one part of a question is could you or would you be interested in speaking to a relatively late canonization which may relate to a question about very how rare it is to see churches named after joan of arc um so that question of her place in catholicism but uh somebody did i have to say ask about um shakespeare's joan and henry vi and i know that might be something you'd be very especially interested in someone as a foreign theater person who follows these things closely um so representations of joan and shakespeare but also um whether you also might be interested in naming any thoughts you have about say mark twain's portrayal of john you can take any part of those the late canonization of course is very interesting because it it canonizing joan was really a puzzle for the church because she had been judged a heretic um and found to be a heretic and although the subsequent trial found the trial to be irregular it did not say anything about whether she was uh a heretic or not um and she was not a martyr for the faith um she doesn't fit into any of the categories that for canonization i mean she ends up basically being canonized for france i mean it it's about french nationalism her canonization um and there's no question about that but as far as churches being named for her um there's a church in indianapolis named for for her the churches all over america named for her because and just as that uh statue on riverside drive that i showed you um and there's one in in philip they're there there are statues of her all over the united states so um her canonization clearly uh sort of renewed attention for to her um mark twain uh mark twain said in the introduction to his last novel which was about joan that she was the only good person who had ever lived
um it's a remarkable he was completely besotted with joan some people connect this to the death of his daughter on some in a somewhat more uh
somewhat more maybe prurient vain regards i don't i'm not mark twain expert but then he had a fondness for young girls so his joan is a young girl pre-adolescent my joan is a grown woman [Music]
and shakespeare shakespeare oh well shakespeare's joan is is is a street rebel she's kind of a disreputable character um but i do want to say it's not just because shakespeare was english um uh yeah our colleague in the english department uh medievalist uh came to the class and told me told our class that she thinks one of the reasons that joan is missing from english chronicles of the period is that the english were ashamed of what they had done and there is an argument that in fact shame is the main reason we all respond to joan's story and it's um there's no other way but just to be in a sort of species shame that a young woman was burned to death um publicly for doing nothing more than being herself um it's uh it's a shameful episode and there's not in a sense there's nothing more to say about that it makes me think also about the um the silent film the famous uh film of joan um that someone did ask me here that i mentioned briefly that my husband had done an accompaniment um to that silent film at iu cinema and what did how did it change my feeling about joan and i think it maybe did for me what i think we hope that the reading the um trial will do for our students which is uh it closed the distance partly because my husband did it in a he used guitar you know he presumed an accuracy he presumed that he could not do a um you know he used an instrument and a style that was um from the 20s but in 1920s so not trying to sort of imagine and recreate some medieval music and so that is a way of speaking across time and ways in which thinking about joan and with joan uh can sort of transcend time and the distance but also the ways in which the film and then the exercise and discipline of trying to put music to it makes you linger over the the each scene and of course that film is is is exactly does that that it it slows down in a way that it's very very can be very frustrating or shocking actually even to all of us given our use the way we're used to seeing films the way things are supposed to move so i really appreciate the way that your attention to joan and all of her specificity without presuming something about joan or without already having us or predetermined which slot you know predetermined set of slots in which slot will she fit in makes possible for us that itself is an exercise in seeing otherwise um so i think that sort of maybe in testimony itself to joan or at least as you present her as someone who might be also imagining the world otherwise and actually listening to her is itself already a form of seeing things otherwise um so with that i think we will close off our evening and thank you for your wonderful work and i really look forward thank you all for for being here for your questions i'm sorry for those questions we didn't get to um or didn't get too fully uh but it really was wonderful to have a chance to talk to you winnie about your work and talk about joan as you said she's worthy of our attention so thank you everybody have a good evening
thank you again for joining us and participating in this evening's live stream i would like to thank professor sullivan and professor fury for their time and expertise we are grateful to you all finally i should acknowledge that events like this would not be possible without the support of donors who understand the value of a liberal arts education if you would like to support the faculty students and programs of the college of arts and sciences please consider making a contribution to the arts and sciences priority fund at the indiana university foundation until next time please take care and stay safe
thank you
you
