![]() Within Joan’s lifetime Christine de Pizan penned an elegiac poem to her. But her celebrity accelerated in the mid-Nineteenth Century, thanks partly to a now-forgotten historian and a famous American author, Mark Twain. Her recent canonisation may seem surprising for she seems to have been among us forever, and in some ways she has been popular and venerated for almost 600 years. ![]() Her corrupt, politicised conviction, at the hands of foreign invaders, was overturned a quarter-century later by Pope Callixtus III, but she was beatified only in 1909 and canonised just within living memory in 1920. Her basic story is legend: how during little more than a year of hearing her holy “voices,” the scarcely-educated farm-girl led her nation and her faith to repeated victories on the battlefield and how only a year after that, at age 19, she was burnt alive. Saint Joan of Arc (1412-1431), the Maid of Orleans, virgin and martyr, patron saint of soldiers and one of the patron saints of France… ![]() But they always missed the face-the divine soul, the pure character, the supreme woman, the wonderful girl.” “I studied that girl, Joan of Arc, for twelve years,” Mark Twain said, “and it never seemed to me that the artists and the writers gave us a true picture of her. ![]()
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