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Middle Ages was that he was afraid her vivid presence would overwhelm and overbalance the book. He suggests that Joan’s expressing her experience as divinely sent voices was uncommon but not bizarre for the time, that to the contemporary framework of understanding it was no more odd than a twentieth-century person speaking of her unconscious or of outer space or relativity. He vehemently denies that her voices are pathological, and his work has not hesitated in pointing to the pathology of the age in which she lived. Her experience was unusual, he says, but it was not disturbed.
    We know that an anomaly only becomes a sickness when it has a disturbing effect on the purpose of the organism. And Joan’s voices may have had a very disturbing influence on her lower purpose of enjoying life and growing old, but it is not on such things that we would like to base our conclusion.
    One can hear the impatience in his usually quiet measured voice when he answers the charge of mental imbalance as the source of Joan’s voices:
    If every inspiration that comes to me with such commanding urgency that it is heard as a voice is to be condemnedout of hand by a learned qualification of a morbid symptom, a hallucination, who would not rather stand with Joan of Arc and Socrates than with the faculty of the Sorbonne on that of the sane. 9
    Huizinga’s defense of Joan’s voices is different from that of the Catholic apologists before and after Joan’s canonization, who used Joan’s voices as a proof of the justice of the Catholic cause—and the French one. Huizinga was a Dutch Moravian with no particular brief for either Catholicism or French nationalism.
    It is interesting to examine how Joan’s descriptions of her voices changed during the course of the trial. As the trial went on, pressed by her judges, she became more and more specific about the identity of the voices and their physical appearance. The historian Karen Sullivan believes that this greater specificity was, in fact, a product of the language of the questions that the judges asked, an absorption, as a result of her desperation and exhaustion, of her accusers’ terms and a rejection of her own nonclerical, vernacular ones.
    Sullivan notes that the judges were clerics formed by scholastic philosophy, the system of thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, famous for its method of finding truth through relentless dividing and questioning. His discussion of angels includes their movements, their knowledge, their hierarchy, whether they move through intermediate space, whether they know singular facts or only universal ones. She says that the chronicles describing Joan written by lay-peoplewho knew Joan when she was alive don’t refer to her voices as being embodied in the persons of St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret, but merely speak of them as the voice of “God.” In tracing the trial testimony, she finds that Joan refused to specify the nature of her voices for the first three days of the trial. It was only when she was asked “if it was the voice of an angel that spoke to her, or if it was the voice of a saint or God without intermediary, that she responded that it was the voice of St. Catherine and St. Margaret and their faces are crowned with beautiful crowns, very opulent and precious.” Even then, when asked about St. Michael’s giving her comfort, she said, “I do not name to you the voice of St. Michael but I speak of a great comfort.” 10
    A charitable interpretation of the judges’ insistence on Joan’s greater specificity is that it would be more in keeping with mystical tradition and would therefore give them a way of understanding it. A vague “it came from God” left them at sea, sailing uncharted waters. Joan confounded their attempts, however, by answering about her voices inconsistently. Sometimes she refused to answer the judges’ questions; sometimes she answered their