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3 books match the query '1412-1431'
For Fear of the Fire
Joan of Arc and the Limits of SubjectivityFrançoise Meltzer
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Engaging a number of theorists, and alternating between Joan's historical and cultural context, Meltzer also explores the ways in which postmodern thinkers question subjectivity. She argues that the way masculine subjects imagine Joan betrays their fear of death and necessitates the role of women as cultural others: enigmatic, mysterious, dark, and impossible. As such, Joan serves as a useful model of the limits and risks of subjectivity. For Meltzer, she is both the first modern and the last medieval figure. From the ecclesial jury that burned her, to the theorists of today who deny their attraction to the supernatural, the philosophical assumptions that inform Joan's story, as Meltzer ultimately shows, have changed very little.
Interrogation Of Joan Of Arc
Karen Sullivan
University of Minnesota Press, 1999
A radical reassessment of the trial of Joan of Arc that gives a new sense of Joan in her time.
The transcripts of Joan of Arc’s trial for heresy at Rouen in 1431 and the minutes of her interrogation have long been recognized as our best source of information about the Maid of Orleans. Historians generally view these legal texts as a precise account of Joan’s words and, by extension, her beliefs. Focusing on the minutes recorded by clerics, however, Karen Sullivan challenges the accuracy of the transcript. In The Interrogation of Joan of Arc, she re-reads the record not as a perfect reflection of a historical personality’s words, but as a literary text resulting from the collaboration between Joan and her interrogators.
Sullivan provides an illuminating and innovative account of Joan’s trial and interrogation, placing them in historical, social, and religious context. In the fifteenth century, interrogation was a method of truth-gathering identified not with people like Joan, who was uneducated, but with clerics, like those who tried her. When these clerics questioned Joan, they did so as scholastics educated at the University of Paris, as judges and assistants to judges, and as pastors trained in hearing confessions.The Interrogation of Joan of Arc traces Joan’s conflicts with her interrogators not to differing political allegiances, but to fundamental differences between clerical and lay cultures. Sullivan demonstrates that the figure depicted in the transcripts as Joan of Arc is a complex, multifaceted persona that results largely from these cultural differences. Discerning and innovative, this study suggests a powerful new interpretive model and redefines our sense of Joan and her time.
JOAN
Jake Rose
University of Chicago Press, 2026
Longlisted for the 2026 National Book Award for Poetry. A narrative sequence of lyric poems reimagining Joan of Arc as a framework for queer identity, transformation, and poetic voice.
Collapsing biography and autobiography, the poetry of Jake Rose’s debut explores queer identity, grief, and desire through the historical framework of Joan of Arc’s life. Moving through rural landscapes of the speaker’s youth, contradictions of faith, consequences of desire, and fragmentations of trauma, JOAN is structured as an excavation of the speaker’s most intimate moments, combining poetry with historical quotations, visual collage, and a sequence of film stills. Through vivid lyric moments, the poems construct a speaker and world both intimate and charged—“I have to touch my farthest feeling,” “the sapphire dusk draping its lace arias”—with clarity and vibrant intensity. Refusing resolution, these poems dwell in rupture, reinvention, and fluid forms of gender that come to life outside of inherited boundaries. This collection speaks from the margins, searching for a body the self might inhabit and asking what it means to transform through language, gender, and desire.
JOAN is the winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize.