No, “the Church” did not kill Joan of Arc, you credulous dullards

So you know how a lot of the time my blogs are inspired by stuff I saw on twitter that made me angry? Well, because of all the incipient fascism I just haven’t been on twitter very much any more, which has been extremely good for the blood pressure. I do, however, be scrolling over on Insta, which as a general rule of thumb is a nice thing cuz I mostly get served socialist memes and then some cat videos. A+ stuff. No notes.

However, because of the memes I like, occasionally I am served a miss and one such of those was this:

Bros. Come on.

So you know in the first place that I am always annoyed with the way that everyone needs to calm the fuck down about the Catholic Church. Secondly my loves, my darling creatures, my sweet little ducklings – that is absolutely not what happened to Joan of Arc (1412-1431).

Now let’s just back up a quick moment to talk about the conditions under which my excellent bitch Joan was apprehended. If you don’t know much about the Hundred Years War you might be like “oh word it was between England and France.” That is sort of true, but France then is not France now, and one of the major belligerents involved was actually the Duchy of Burgundy. The thing about Burgundy is that it was immensely wealthy and powerful, and it had thrown in alongside England, mostly to prove a very important point about how they were fancy and you couldn’t push them around. (Lesser points included: japes, goofing.)

Anyway, by this point the Dauphin had been crowned Charles VII, King of the French (1403-1461) in Rouen as was customary, and the French were doing pretty alright. However, certain key and very French places, including Paris, were not yet on the side of the French. And Paris was distinctly not in favour of Charles. More particularly, the University of Paris had sided squarely against him and in favour of the English claim. This is important, because as I have stressed before, if you were a member of the university you also had to become a clergy member. So, a bunch of guys who were in the clergy very much had their knickers in a twist about the ascendant French forces and the young woman who was acting as their mascot. This is true.

In the meantime, Charles, now the king in theory, had called a truce with the Burgundians. As a result, there wasn’t a whole lot for Joan to do around court. This did not suit her. And further the Burgundians had started to try to reclaim towns that had been given to them in treaties but which hadn’t fully submitted. One of those was the town of Compiègne, and Joan, at a loose end and fully in her Burgundian hating era, decided to set off with some volunteers to go fuck shit up there. Anyway, there was rather a lot of sieging, some inability to feed all of Joan’s troops of the surrounding countryside – things of this nature. Eventually during a sortie against the Burgundian camp Joan got herself caught. By the Burgundians.

Now the English and Burgundians were stoked about this because the French had lost their rallying point in a big way. More specifically, the English really wanted to get their hands on Joan, and they ended up paying a ransom to the Burgundians to do so. See, it would theoretically have been possible for Burgundy to ransom her back to France, as is standard practice when you are engaging in rich guy tag warfare. The English very specifically did not want that to happen. Anyway, the guy who helped out with the negotiations was Pierre Cauchon (1371-1442) the Bishop of Beauvais, supporter of England and Burgundy against France, and noted hater. The English then moved Joan to Rouen, their headquarters, because as you will all remember the English were really just a bunch of Normans anyway, so they absolutely still held whole towns in Normandy.

Anyway, it is at this point that Joan gets put on trial for heresy. You might grasp upon this fact and say “AHA! By the CHURCH!” but that would be incredibly ignorant and wrong. You know who put her on trial? Cauchon. That’s who. And he called up a bunch of people he knew would take his side – including like seventy guys from the University of Paris, who, of course ,also were on the side of the English and the Burgundians.[1] This was incredibly shady. Ordinarily, if you wanted to put someone on trial for heresy in the first place you needed to actually have the person in question held by the Church. Joan was being held by the hater patrol, aka the Duke of Bedford.[2] She was also being guarded by male soldiers, as opposed to women from the Church, which would have absolutely not gone down with the Church because of, you know, all of the implicit sexual assault involved.

More to the point, if you wanted to put someone on trial for heresy it’s actually kind of tricky, and the first stop is that you have to prove that they are infamous. Otherwise you are in actual factual contravention of canon law. Guess what Cauchon, his friends from the uni, and the English absolutely did not do.[3] They also just started to interrogate her without actually bringing charges until part of the way through, and said charges didn’t meet inquisitorial standards. For example, Joan didn’t have counsel; she was interrogated at too great a length; these MFers were maybe just straight up falsifying trial records?; you get the gist.[4] It was so incredibly sus that a couple of the clerics involved in the trial stepped back citing the fact that this was clearly a total stitch up, and also that Cauchon didn’t have any legal right to be overseeing this trial in the first place. (The guy who pointed that inconvenient fact out was straight up thrown in jail for his trouble.)[5]

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Despite all of this, eventually twelve articles of accusation of heresy were brought by Cauchon – not to the Church, but to the University of Paris. Again. The group of people who were already decidedly pro-England and pro-Burgundy. It was The University of Paris that approved said charges.[6] Were those guys members of the Church? Yes! Did “the Church” do this? NO. The Pope was absolutely not out there banging his hand down on a desk yelling “GET ME JOAN OF ARC GODDAMN IT, OR YOU’RE OFF THE FORCE!” This was a decision taken by people who were doing all of this behind the back of the Church on purpose.

Anyway Joan signed what we call an abjuration document, which is a sort of denouncement of her previous theoretical misdeeds. This was likely coerced. As a part of it she had to promise that she wouldn’t wear men’s clothes or take up arms against the English and Burgundians again.[7] The key here is that Joan more or less admitted that dressing like a dude and kicking peoples’ asses was heretical. If she now relapsed and took that up again a secular court could put her to death. Anyway, despite the abjuration, Joan was kept in a secular prison, in chains, had her head shaved, and started wearing women’s clothes again. She endured all kinds of rape threats and general taunting including having men’s clothes put in her cell and being forced to put them on.[8] She started to wear them again.

Cauchon’s evil ass then comes back and is like, “I see you are wearing dude’s clothing again.” Joan was like, “Yeah because you have me guarded by men, which is forbidden by the Church. Also you said I could go to Mass. Maybe if you turned me over to the Church I would start listening to you. Anyway, just FYI the angelic voices that speak to me say you are a little bitch, and I shouldn’t have signed the abjuration.” This was of course considered a “relapse” by Cauchon and she was then condemned to death.[9]

This is sketchy and extra-judicial enough in that this was not a sanctioned ecclesiastical court. Even sketchier was the fact that if she was apparently now a heretic she should have been turned over to the Baliff of Rouen, who was the secular authority of the locality. Instead, she was turned over to the English who burnt her at the stake.[10] IDK who you think the Church is, but if your answer is “whichever English guys happen to be in the area” then I am afraid you are just not correct. Anyway, she was burned and her ashes were thrown in the Sein, which is generally what happens when someone who is a religious leader is burnt for heresy. See my boy Jan Hus for more information.

This is awful.

It was so gross and awful that everyone at the time knew it and there was not one, but TWO fucking inquests about it. The first was led by the theologian Guillaume Bouillé in 1450, and it found that Joan’s trial was arbitrary, that she had been a political prisoner, and there was no basis to demand her death.[11] Two years later there was another inquest, this time led by a cardinal Guillaume d’Estouteville (c. 1412-1483) and the literal Inquisitor of France Jean Bréhal. They worked the case for two years, ultimately interviewing multiple witnesses and submitting a summary of the findings to the papacy, as well as Church lawyers across Italy, and in the Holy Roman Empire, just for balance. The Church was like “this does indeed, look extremely sketch monster” and Pope Callixtus III (1378-1458) who ordered a rehabilitation trial.[12]

The trial began in 1455. 115 witnesses were called, and the inquisitor Bréhal in his summary made the point that not only was Joan not a heretic, but further, he stated, “Wherefore, how that bishop [Cauchon] and others who supported him in this matter [the sketchy trial] could properly excuse themselves from manifest malice against the Roman church, or even from heresy, I do not see.”[13] You know, because they weren’t the fucking Church but wanted to clown around like they were. As a result, the Articles of Accusation against Joan were torn up in court and a cross was erected on the site of her execution.

So, here’s the thing, the minute the actual Church – which is a distinct legal entity whose reference has meaning – gets involved with the Joan of Arc case everyone agrees that she was not, in fact a heretic. When you have cardinals, inquisitors, and the fucking POPE involved they are all immediately like, “nah dude.” And of course, the Church can repudiate her killing because – and this is crucial – they didn’t fucking kill her. Some renegade haters within the Church were the ones who did that, and if they had been reporting to anyone other than the English and Burgundian courts they would have been stopped from doing that.

If you in the year of our lord twenty-fucking-twenty-three go around saying that “the Church killed Joan of Arc” not only are you just flat our wrong, but you are a victim of English and Burgundian propaganda, and that’s just pathetic. Now if you want to go out there and agree with the English just to try to point score on “the Church” that’s your prerogative, I guess. However, I will never let you live that down.

Anyway I hate you all for making me defend the Church. Pull yourselves together.

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[1] Hobbins Daniel (ed.), The Trial of Joan of Arc, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), pp. 1–32.
[2] Frances Gies, Joan of Arc: The Legend and the Reality, (New York: Harper & Row, 1981) p. 154. You can read the whole thing online here – for free!
[3] Henry Ansgar Kelly, “The right to remain silent: Before and after Joan of Arc”, Speculum 68 (4), 1983, 1018, 1022; Craig Taylor (ed.) Joan of Arc: La Pucelle (Selected Sources Translated and Annotated). (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 24-25.
[4] Karen Sullivan, (1999). The Interrogation of Joan of Arc. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp 88-89. Again – you can read it here! What a time to be alive!; Hobbins, The Trial of Joan of Arc, p. 5.
[5] Kelly, “The right to remain silent”, 1018, 1022.
[6] Gies, Joan of Arc, pp. 208-209.
[7] Ibid., p. 212.
[8]  Valerie R Hotchkiss, Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Medieval Europe, (New York and London: Garland, 2000), p. 66. I love this book. You should read it.
[9] Vern L. Bullough, “Transvestites in the Middle Ages”, American Journal of Sociology, 79 (6), 1974: 1389; Sullivan, The Interrogation of Joan of Arc, pp. 132-133; Hobbins, The Trial of Joan of Arc, pp. 24-25.
[10] Gies, Joan of Arc, p. 223.
[11] Ibid., p. 230.
[12] Ibid, p. 124.
[13] “Unde, quatinus ille episcopus et alii in hoc ei faventes se a malicia manifesta contra ecclesiam romanam, aut etiam ab heresi, se debite excusare possent, non video.”Jean Bréhal. “Livre Quatrième: Texte de la Recollectio”, Recollectio. Jean Bréhal, Grand Inquisiteur de France, et la Réhabilitation of Jeanne D’Arc, eds. Marie-Joseph Belon and François Balme, (Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1893), pp. 105-105.

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For more on weird myths about the medieval Church, see:
JFC calm down about the medieval Church
On cats

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© Eleanor Janega, 2024