Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism
Berkeley , University of California Press , 1981, paperback, 2000.
Marina Warner has produced major books – Alone of all her Sex on the Virgin Mary
and From the Beast to the Blonde on
fairy-tales for example -- but Joan of Arc, which really announced her
as both a major scholar and also an intellectual analyst, remains a powerful
work, notable among the rather disappointing wealth of Joan books both for its
full and solid scholarship and its calm and searching power to develop
arguments. Joan studies in general is a major location for personal obsession
and scholarly myopia.
By subtitling her study `The Image of Female Heroism’ Warner
takes on directly the main challenge posed by Joan – or Jehane, as she called
herself: the name Joan is one of the many brutalities she has suffered at
English hands. She was both fully feminine – affectively religious, deeply
gregarious, excellent at attracting support, very loyal to her friends and
supporters, strongly against brutality – but also a serious participant in
warfare as soldier but, especially, as she saw herself and was seen by
contemporaries, as a knight and war-leader.
Warner explores a serious sequence of female warriors,
Amazons and militant Christians notable among them, and in a late chapter
`Personification of Virtue’ works through a range of conceptual ways of
understanding Jehane, a good deal more subtle than the many reductions she has
suffered (such as being a symbol for the Le Pen far right in recent French
elections).
If Régine Pernoud’s book is the best-illustrated modern
treatment of the Jehane materials, Warner’s is by far the most learned and
intelligent.
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