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The story of Joan of Arc encompasses only two years in the life of a fifteenth-century adolescent girl from Lorraine, whose intervention in the Hundred Years' War helped turn the tide of victory away from England and toward France. Until the English burned Joan of Arc at the stake for heresy at age nineteen, the Maid resolutely maintained that she had entered into France's military campaign at the insistence of disembodied, divine voices. While the events in Joan's story are historically important, it is the spiritual climate in which these events took place that has made Joan of Arc's narrative resonate and captivate for six hundred years. Although the content of Joan's story is accessible and documented, the nature of her story is inaccessible and mysterious.
Joan's auditions are the inexplicable, cryptic part of her narrative that have relegated it to a field beyond the possibility of historical consensus. At the same time, it is the very impossibility of historical conclusion that has opened Joan of Arc's narrative to extradisciplinary interpretations that have, in turn, enhanced and strengthened the historical dialogue surrounding Joan's auditions. What is known is that Joan of Arc claimed to hear the disembodied voices of Christian saints, countless people believed that Joan heard the voices of these saints, and the course of historical events was altered as a result of Joan's acting on the information that she claimed to have received from divine sources. It is this historically documented coalition of physical and metaphysical forces that has rendered Joan's story unwieldy and even uncomfortable for some historians.1
Medieval historians discomfited by the presence of Joan of Arc's voices have responded to their own unease by burying Joan's story or by brushing it aside. For example, Dutch historian, Johan Huizinga, claimed that "people did not know how to deal with her, she was too real."2 Huizinga himself mentioned Joan only incidentally in his classic 1919 medieval history, The Waning of the Middle Ages, because he believed that Joan's towering persona would dominate and "completely distort the context of the book I had in mind."3 When Joan does appear, it is as a thorn in Huizinga's argument that "the whole domain of ghost-seeing, signs, spectres and apparitions, so crowded in the Middle...