# The Twelve Articles
*Joan of Arc and the Church That Judged Her Three Times* — Legendary Biographies No. 287

- **Subject:** Joan of Arc
- **Written by:** Edward Forrester
- **Shelf:** Power & Politics / History
- **Published:** 2026
- **Extent:** 230 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink
- **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-567-1)
- **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Theo Brackett (ISBN 979-8-90623-676-0)

Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/287-the-twelve-articles.html

## About this book

Everyone knows the church burned Joan of Arc for heresy and later made her a saint. The church also cleared her, and did it first. In 1429 a commission of theologians at Poitiers examined her for three weeks and found for her; the register is lost, and only its favourable conclusion survives. Two years later a court of qualified clerics at Rouen, working from the same canon law by the same procedure, convicted her. The doctrine had not moved in the interval. What had moved was who held Normandy and whose legitimacy stood to gain from the finding.

Sixty-eight days separate the last interrogation from the morning she was brought out to Saint-Ouen. Almost none of that interval was spent finding anything out. It was spent writing. Seventy articles were drawn up by the promoter, Jean d'Estivet, compressed into twelve propositions and sent to the University of Paris, which returned the condemnation the court needed. Guillaume Manchon, the notary who took the French minute in the room, testified twenty-five years later that the twelve did not represent what she had answered.

Eleven chapters reconstruct fifteen months of public life out of fragments, every inference marked as one, down to the sortie at Compiègne, after which she was sold to the English for 10,000 francs while Charles VII made no ransom offer, no protest and no explanation. Six chapters are the trial, told from the transcript, because the only place her own voice survives at any length is the record kept by the men who were killing her.

Four more go to the verdicts. The annulment of 1456, for fraud, calumny, iniquity and contradiction, was also convenient for a king whose anointing rested on a woman burned as a heretic. Nobody was disciplined. She was canonised as a virgin and not as a martyr, a classification that avoids naming a persecutor, and the persecutors were a bishop, a vice-inquisitor and a faculty of doctors of theology. Condemned, cleared, canonised: it never said which was wrong.

## Contents

1. The Old Marketplace
2. Domrémy
3. The Kingdom That Was Not One
4. The Voices
5. Vaucouleurs
6. Chinon
7. Poitiers
8. Orléans
9. Patay
10. Reims
11. Paris
12. Compiègne
13. The Court at Rouen
14. The Interrogations
15. The Twelve Articles
16. Saint-Ouen
17. Relapse
18. Thirty May
19. The Second Verdict
20. The Woman Who Came Back
21. The Making of a Saint
22. Everybody's Joan

## Questions

**Who is The Twelve Articles about?**

Joan of Arc. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Twelve Articles — and the name goes on the line underneath.

**Is this an authorised biography?**

No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.

**Can I read some of it before buying?**

Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,181 words of the book.

**How long is it?**

About 71,000 words, 22 chapters, 230 pages in the paperback.

## The writer

Edward Forrester is a Princeton-trained historian whose work for The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement has focused on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — the long arc by which the modern political world was made.