The Twelve Articles

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.