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Joan of Arc: A History By Helen Castor Faber & Faber, £9.99
“In gaining a saint, we have lost a human being,” the Cambridge historian Helen Castor writes in this riveting history. If Castor’s mission is to restore that human being she has achieved it admirably. From 1425, and the rout of the French at Agincourt, we are led through a country convulsed by civil war before we encounter the 16-year-old Joan at the court of the dauphin Charles. We see her as contemporaries would have: a charismatic village girl, bizarrely dressed (in men’s clothes), with a forceful message from God. Her astonishing progress in lifting a six-month siege on Orleans in four days is followed in visceral detail, as are her subsequent capture, trial and burning as a heretic. As her end nears, Joan’s humanity becomes agonising to witness. A vulnerable young girl fighting off the groping hands of captors who see her not as “the maid” but as the “whore of the Armagnacs”. The teenage warrior impresses, but nothing has more power and pathos than “what happened, in the end, when the miracles stopped”.
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