"Where Airy Voices Lead": Joan of Arc's Auditions in Historical Debate (2016)

The story of Joan of Arc encompasses only two years in life of a fifteenth-century adolescent girl from Lorraine, whose intervention in Hundred Years' War helped turn tide of victory away from England and toward France. Until English burned Joan of Arc at stake for heresy at age nineteen, Maid resolutely maintained that she had entered into France's military campaign at insistence of disembodied, divine voices. While events in Joan's story are historically important, it is spiritual climate in which these events took place that has made Joan of Arc's narrative resonate and captivate for six hundred years. Although content of Joan's story is accessible and documented, nature of her story is inaccessible and mysterious.Joan's auditions are inexplicable, cryptic part of her narrative that have relegated it to a field beyond possibility of historical consensus. At same time, it is very impossibility of historical conclusion that has opened Joan of Arc's narrative to extradisciplinary interpretations that have, in turn, enhanced and strengthened historical dialogue surrounding Joan's auditions. What is known is that Joan of Arc claimed to hear disembodied voices of Christian saints, countless believed that Joan heard voices of these saints, and course of historical events was altered as a result of Joan's acting on information that she claimed to have received from divine sources. It is this historically documented coalition of physical and metaphysical forces that has rendered Joan's story unwieldy and even uncomfortable for some historians.1Medieval historians discomfited by presence of Joan of Arc's voices have responded to their own unease by burying Joan's story or by brushing it aside. For example, Dutch historian, Johan Huizinga, claimed that people did not know how to deal with her, she was too real.2 Huizinga himself mentioned Joan only incidentally in his classic 1919 medieval history, The Waning of Middle Ages, because he believed that Joan's towering persona would dominate and completely distort context of book I had in mind.3 When Joan does appear, it is as a thorn in Huizinga's argument that the whole domain of ghost-seeing, signs, spectres and apparitions, so crowded in Middle Ages, lies mainly apart from veneration of saints.4 Although Joan's voices were professedly signs given to her by saints, Huizinga dismisses Joan's auditions as a historical anomaly immaterial to his larger thesis.Although some historians have been hesitant to contemplate academically Joan's voices, most Johannic scholars have candidly confronted them. According to Karen Sullivan, works of those who have attempted to explain Maid's auditions have fallen into three basic categories: Catholic, rationalist, or spiritualist.5 Catholic histories assert that Joan did indeed hear divine voices, rationalist works suggest that Joan suffered from mental or medical debilitation, and spiritualist studies maintain that Joan was sensitive to pervasive occult forces.6 Sullivan's trifold categorization holds fast until beginning of 21st century when Johannic scholars begin to incorporate new forms of psychological research into study of Joan's auditions.All who have studied nature of Joan of Arc's voices have considered first her own words. According to an excerpt from a 1431 trial transcript, before being questioned by theology professor, Jean Beaupere, Joan had said, If you were well informed about me, you should wish that I were out of your hands. I have done nothing save by revelation.7 Joan's contemporary, Jacques Gelu, Archbishop of Embrun, defended her divine mission in his 1429 treatise, De adventu Johanne. Initially, Gelu had been skeptical of Joan's legitimacy and had requested an official investigation into her background. The archbishop was hesitant to bestow title of prophetess on a shepherd's daughter who might have been susceptible to illusions because she was young and because she was a woman. …