On Joan Of Arc, A Coda

Jeanne D'Arc

My essay A Perfect Virgin Saint was the seed for The Mock Angel. In it I ask if Joan Of Arc was gaslight gatekeep girlbossing it across France, in order to show how modern context can be imposed on our view of historical events and people. What I didn't ask are questions that sometimes come up, namely: was Joan of Arc Trans? Was she non-binary?

I didn't ask that as it distracted from the points I was trying to make. The answer my essay suggests is that Joan herself would not consider those questions that make sense. In other words, this says more about the person asking it, here and now in the 21st Century.

Which is good and fine. If you draw strength and inspiration from Joan as gender non-conforming, or from her faith, or her leadership, or her visions, then that is a valuable and useful thing. That's your Joan, and no one can take her away from you. Indeed that might be the most powerful way to think of her, my questions and concerns about history and framing irrelevant to you.

Still, I think if we want to know more, rather than asking how Joan of Arc would be framed in 21st century contexts, we might ask, what does Joan tell us about gender and gender non-conformity in 15th Century France? Why were there laws about gendered clothing? How were such laws being weaponised for political ends? These questions might help us understand what people in the 15th century thought and assumed.

One Last Note

I mentioned Joan of Arc's visions. Two saints of note she saw were Catherine of Alexandria, martyred in 305, and Margaret of Antioch in 304. 1100 years divided them from Joan's time, nearly twice as long as her from us today. Joan, of course, saw them in her context, as inspirations to a woman in a Christian society, to support a Christian monarch. Yet these women lived before the conversion of Constantine and the establishment of a Christian state, before the Council of Nicaea began the creation of a unified church. How would they have seen the questions that confronted Joan and others in the Hundred Years War?