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in armor. So the three saints (one doubling as an angel) with whom Joan identified her voices were icons of resistance and might.
    Everyone who spoke of Joan mentioned her great religious fervor. And yet she set herself up as superior to the authority of the Church, which gave her access to everything she loved, the Church which was the mystical body of the Christ whom she believed she served. She was devoted to the Eucharist but refused to give up men’s clothing in order to receive it.
    This does not, however, mark her as irreligious or as a crypto-Protestant. She challenged the followers of the rebel Jan Hus in Bohemia and threatened them with a crusade under her leadership—an example of her almost limitless sense of mission.
    I, Joan the Maid, to tell you true, I would have visited you long ago with my avenging arm if the war with the English had not kept me here. But if I do not hear soon that you have mended your ways, that you have returned to the bosom of the Church, I shall perhaps leave the English and turn against you, to extirpate the dreadful superstition with my blade of iron and to snatch you from heresy or from life itself. 12
    How, then, do we understand Joan’s religious life? She was untutored theologically, yet was able to contend with the learning of the leaders of the University of Paris, to resist their charge of witchcraft and to maintain the integrity of her position on her voices. She was a loving daughter of the Church whose greatest moments of joy came from its prayer and its sacraments, yet she refused to allow herself this consolation if it meant denying what she knew to be her mission.
    It is no easier to understand Joan as a religious figure than as a political or military one. She bursts out of categories, crisscrosses our ideas about her, contradicts the images she has presented about herself. We must make an attempt to place her historically, geographically, sociologically. Doing so may help us understand why what happened was not impossible, but does not explain the extremely unlikely fact that it happened at all. The life of Joan is such a flagrant beating of the odds that no facts sufficiently explain the course of it. She was born during one of the most corrupt, demoralized periods of French history; she is considered a religious and military hero, but she had neither religious nor military training. Her family was undistinguished; it was, if anything, an obstacle she had to overcome. She existed in time and space; she was a product of history and culture and was formed by them. But the Joan who transcended all the norms of where and when she was born must, if we honor her properly, remain, in her essential shape, mysterious.

CHAPTER II
    APPROACHING THE THRONE

Joan’s King
    THE MESSENGERS who came to tell Joan the Word of God were heavenly creatures, but their message was specific and definitely of this world. She was charged by St. Catherine, St. Margaret, and St. Michael with the task of crowning the dauphin king of France. It was the French crown that shimmered always in front of her eyes, and her vision of the head that would wear it may have been blurred by the gold’s ancient luster.
    The man whom Joan would crown king of France was hardly the proper stuff of a young girl’s dreams. As a man, he wasn’t worth a hair on Joan’s cropped head; as a leader, he was weak, equivocal, and self-serving. Yet it was the idea of crowning Charles that inspired Joan to leave her village and to give her life. This devout girl was moved not by a religious goal, not the simple salvation of her soul, the spreading of the Gospel, the conversion of the heathen Turks, or the recovery of the Holy Land. She didn’t want to enter a convent or fast in a desert cave. She didn’t want to inspire the unbelieving or the faint of heart. She wanted to crown a king, and the personality of the man whom she wanted to crown was of little importance to her.
    Why would a girl