Of no other trial of the fifteenth century have we a report approaching this in detail and accuracy.
The official records of the Great Trial of 1431 and of the Process of Rehabilitation of a quarter of a century later are still preserved in the National Archives of France, and they furnish with remarkable fulness the facts of her life.
The record gives the questions put to her and her replies to them. They are remarkably direct and full, not infrequently touched with the native shrewdness of the French peasant, occasionally resentful of repetition or of the incredulity of her hearers.
There emerges from the record the story of a sensitive child, raised in simple piety, for whom the saints were as real as the people she saw around her, and who saw St. Catherine, St. Michael and other saints just as they were represented by their images in the parish church.
The trial at Rouen could end in but one way.
She was in the hands of those who could not afford not to destroy her. A moment of weakness on Jeanne's part gave them the opportunity. wearied, frightened by threats of torture and tempted by hopes of release, abandoned, as she thought, by her "voices," she broke down, declared herself an imposter, confessed that her voices had been feigned and threw herself on the mercy of the court.
Sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, returned to a cell and subjected to neglect and insult, she regained her courage, withdrew her confession and sought peace in the reassertion of her guiding voices and the reality of her mission. This was her end. She was summoned again before her judges, declared a relapsed heretic and a sorceress, and on the 3Oth of May 1431, she was burned at the stake in the market place in Rouen.
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The 1903 English translation was updated into modern English usage by Mathias Gabel of Trebur Germany and Carlyn Iuzzolino.
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Overview
