Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured [Paperback]

Kathryn Harrison gives us a Joan of Arc for our time—a shining exemplar of unshakable faith, extraordinary courage, and self-confidence on the battlefield, in the royal court, during a brutally rigged inquisition and imprisonment, and in the face of her death. In this new take on Joan’s story, Harrison deftly weaves historical fact, myth, folklore, scripture, artistic representations, and centuries of scholarly and critical interpretation into a fascinating narrative, revitalizing our sense of Joan as one of the greatest heroines in all of human history.

“Passionate. . . . Harrison superbly teases out the politics and paradoxes of the Maid of Orleans’ wildly improbable saga.” —Elle

“It remains, after nearly 600 years, a story to break your heart . . . . It is Joan’s rambunctious humanity as much as her divinity that makes her powerful, both for modern audiences and historians.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Stunning. . . . A layered portrait not only of Joan’s life, but of her times. . . . [Harrison] awes us with her incisive intelligence, her fierce curiosity, her literary prowess.”
   —The Boston Globe
 
“Working from trial records and modern literature, the Bible and Bresson, Harrison marshals all the forces. The result is sumptuous, as rich and radiant as Joan’s (apocryphal) golden cloak.”
  —Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Cleopatra

“It is impossible for Harrison to write an uninteresting book. She is too skilled a prose writer, too good a storyteller, too alert to passions and the human heart to produce a work that ever flags. But read Joan of Arc for what it tells you about the world in which the subject lived and the half-millennium of culture that has continued to mythologize her. In this striking volume, it is cllS.