Actual Rating: 3.5/5 stars
Review: This was — overall — a fun read. However, while reading it, I did feel like the research of Joan of Arc wasn’t used to its fullest potential. With a figure like Joan of Arc, where most of the contemporary writing was from her prosecutors from her trial, we get their views and opinions of her. However, I feel like the sources could have been interpreted in a few more ways (“reading between the lines”) and could have been used better, especially given that this book was published in 2014.. Other that, this was a good read. ( )

Fascinating

Joan of Arc
Kathryn Harrison
Doubleday, $28.95, hardcover

If Lisbeth Salander or Katniss Everdeen is your idea of the perfect female fighting hero, then you'll love this new biography of the Maid of Orléans from Kathryn Harrison, who recently spoke at Colorado College. In Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured, Harrison offers a new version of a familiar narrative: At 12, Joan begins hearing voices; at 17, she ends the English siege of Orléans; at 19, she's burned at the stake for heresy. Harrison reviews previous biographies and famous retellings, but also offers up her own interpretation of the story of Joan by focusing on her sexuality — not surprising, really, if one is familiar with Harrison's oeuvre, but very well done given the way spirituality gets incorporated into the discussion. This is not so much a biography as an interpretation of a life, and with an interesting life in the hands of a gifted author, it's well worth the time. — Kel Munger

Reviewed in the Colorado Springs Independent: http://www.csindy.com/coloradosprings/joan-of-arc-in-real-life-ebola/Content?oid... ( )

Kathryn Harrison’s Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured is the best biography I’ve read in quite some time—probably the best one I’ve read in years.

I’m one of those non-Catholic girls who grew up reading lives of the saints and fantasizing about converting (at least while I was still in junior high). My first encounter with Saint Joan took place in the gift shop at Holy Hill, a large Catholic church near my mother’s childhood home that was a destination for Catholics and non-Catholics alike because of the views its tower gave of the surrounding countryside. I picked up a comic-book version of Joan’s life, read it in the car on the way home, and was hooked.

Harrison’s book is very much unlike that first version I read, which was pure hagiography. I may be wrong, but I suspect Harrison has been interested in Joan for quite some time. She’s thought about Joan, looked at her from this angle and that, pondered the way she’s been received by different generations.

In fact, Harrison’s book is something like four books in one (or perhaps the best pages of four different biographies excised and stitch together within a new cover. There’s the straightforward biography; the discussion of the way Joan’s life has been interpreted in the arts (theatre, film, painting); the consideration of Joan in the notions of gender prevalent in her own time; and a very interesting comparison of Joan with Christ. Early on she tells readers:

The life of Joan of Arc is as impossible as that of only one other, who also heard God speak: Jesus of Nazareth, prince of paradox as much as peace, a god who suffered and died a mortal… a messenger of forgiveness and love who came bearing a sword, inspiring millennia of judgement and violence…. More than any other Catholic martyr, Joan of Arc’s career aligns with Christ’s.

Harrison goes on to list some of these similarities in the opening of her book—a birth prophesied, an ability to command the natural elements and foresee the future, a body transfigured—and returns to these regularly throughout the book. (I’m hoping the above quote gives you a taste of her compelling prose style as well as one of her primary tropes.)

Harrison ends the first chapter with a penetrating observation: “It seems Joan of Arc will never be laid to rest. Is this because the stories we understand are the stories we forget?” Not only is Joan remembered, every generation wrestles to understand its own version of Joan. Shaw presents her as a religious reformer (despite her devotion to the religious practices of her own time). Brecht told her story twice; she becomes a hero of the working class in his Saint Joan of the Stockyards. In discussing these works, Harrison illustrates how tempting it is to hold up the mirror of Joan’s life and to see one’s own time.

In her own time, Joan was a heretic simply because she donned men’s clothes: a fact that was overlooked during her early victories, but made much of when leaders of church and government found it useful to have her toppled from her pedestal. Although witch burnings had occurred before her execution by fire, Harrison see Joan’s death as a turning point in European history: “Her trial, its verdict, and the publication of her example united for the three centuries’ worth of zealous, often hysterical, witch hunts amounting to the theatrically cruel execution of as many as a hundred thousand women.”

Harrison is a perceptive, eclectic thinker, and being able to savor four hundred pages of her research and reflections on Joan of Arc is an exceptional treat. Although the year’s not quite yet over, I feel confident that Harrison’s Joan of Arc will be the best biography we see this year. ( )

If this just told the story of Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who heard the voices of dead saints, led an army to support an uncertain king, was burned at the stake as a man-dressing sorceress, and later became canonized as a saint, that would be enough to make Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured a truly interesting book, but there is more to this biography than a detailed recitation of facts about her life. Along with relevant historical background author Kathryn Harrison also includes how each stage of Joan’s crusade to serve God and save France has been portrayed in popular myth, theatrical plays, cinematic film, and various works of visual art. Because of this expanded scope the book presents a larger picture of political history, and the history of culture, religion, common attitudes, and underlying beliefs than Joan’s tale alone would tell.

The writing is a smooth weaving of history, biography, legend, and reflection, and along the way Harrison corrects some common misperceptions about Joan, for instance she wasn’t quite the simple peasant many people then thought and still think she was. Harrison deftly compares Joan’s speeches, actions, and short life with those of Jesus, both to show how well versed in the Bible Joan herself must have been and to help explain why her story resonated so much with the highly religious people of her time. It’s an astounding story, well told, both inspiring and tragic. ( )