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questions about the voices’ identity by referring to her emotional response to the voices. In their summary of Joan’s answers to their questions, however, the judges only focused on the answers that were in the terms they wanted: specific mentions of Michael, Catherine, and Margaret. As the trial progressed—it is possible to say, as Joan got more worn down—she spoke increasingly of the archangel Michael and the saints, and by the eleventh day, she had abandoned her vague terms from the beginning of the trial entirely.
    Sullivan notes, however, that even if we understand that Joan’s providing the judges with names was a result of the unrelenting pressure of their questions, the choice of the identities was hers. The culture of the veneration of saints was flourishing to the point of excess in Joan’s time; the authorities of the Church were attempting to curb the endless proliferation of local saints, but their attempts were only beginning to be successful. This is to say that Joan had an enormous cast of characters to choose from if she were attaching specific names and faces to a voice that she initially experienced as an unspecified divine messenger.
    Joan’s choice of St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret could be described as another example of her genius for self-presentation and the creation of highly legible signs. On the other hand, the choices can be read as a natural response typical of any pious girl from the Middle Ages to the present. For the faithful who venerate them, the saints provide both models and protection, and they are invoked for specific reasons connected to the narratives of their lives. Thus, even in our day, believers pray to St. Anthony to help them find lost things, to St. Jude for impossible causes, to St. Lucy, whose eyes were gouged out, for diseases of the eye. In my school, we were told to pray to St. Joseph Cupertino when studying for our exams on the ground that he was a poor student who prayed to be asked only the questions he had studied. This miracle was granted, and he was able to become a priest.
    Female saints have an especially important function for young girls, since they provide examples of heroism outside the sphere of the domestic; the simplest girl has access to models who defied authority and made a place for themselves in the larger world. Joan herself has served this function for centuries of pious girls; she made sacred the longings for self-expression in the public world that in all other contexts would have been vilified.
    The three saints that Joan invoked are vivid examples of the active, rather than the contemplative, path to sanctity. St. Catherine was the patron saint of philosophers and students; it makes sense that Joan would invoke her when she was up against the learned clerics.
    Catherine died in 305. When the Roman emperor Maxentius ordered the execution of Christians, Catherine offered a learned discussion of the faith when she was brought before him. This inflamed him with desire, and he ordered her to marry him. When she refused him on the grounds of preserving her virginity as a bride of Christ only, he devised a machine with wheels to crush her, but the machine was miraculously disabled, leaving the frustrated executioners no choice but to behead her. Marina Warner says that Catherine “stood chiefly for independent thinking, courage, autonomy. She was the saint chosen by young unmarried women in France.” 11
    One clear link between Joan and St. Margaret was that Margaret was one of those female saints who entered a monastery in the disguise of a man. Like Catherine, she was also martyred for refusing to marry a pagan, and she, too, was decapitated. Margaret was usually pictured with a sword, as was St. Catherine. All three of Joan’s saints were armed, especially Michael, the protective angel of France. Mont-St.-Michel, in Normandy, was the last bastion of French loyalty. Michael was always represented