Joan of Arc, revered as a patron saint of France and formidable military leader of the Middle Ages, rose to prominence during the Hundred Years’ War as a powerful symbol of divine favor for the French. Guided by a counsel of heavenly voices on her mission to restore King Charles VII’s rightful title as king of France and expel the English from French land, Joan’s growing popularity and reputation as the “savior of France” (L. Taylor 98) became instrumental in shifting the course of the war to the French advantage (L. Taylor 88). At the crux of Joan’s rising potency as a spiritual symbol, however, lay a hidden slew of political advisors who, in collaboration with the French dauphin, constructed Joan’s public-facing identity as a prophesied savior by emphasizing her gendered traits of womanly sanctity and exaggerating her miraculous deeds (L. Taylor 42). Yet Joan’s carefully gendered image stood in stark contrast to her actual actions as a military leader, which were decisive, ambitious, and often violent, revealing a tension between her constructed gender identity and her lived reality. While Joan’s public portrayal as a divinely-sanctioned savior served the political needs of the French monarchy during her rise, the same qualities that emboldened this image were later weaponized against her when her autonomy and defiance of gendered hierarchy threatened the systems of power that had once celebrated her. Ultimately, Joan’s malleable gendered identity made her simultaneously indispensable and disposable to the political and religious forces of her time. 

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Joan of Arc’s rise was rooted in the deliberate construction of her identity as the “Pucelle”—a pure, virginal vessel sent by God to save France and legitimize Charles VII’s rule (C. Taylor 47). The validity of Joan’s virginity was essential to her ability to enter and command authority in male-dominated spaces—an ability she required if she was to accomplish her divine quest. Craig Taylor explains that in Joan’s time, “female virginity could raise a woman to the status of a man, freed from the weaknesses of the flesh and its associated irrationality,” thereby allowing Joan to take on the transgressive gender roles that she needed to raise the siege of Orléans and turn the tide of the war (C. Taylor 49). Moreover, Joan’s chastity allowed her to embody the lore of known saintly women like St. Catherine and St. Margaret, permitting her a unique authority to transcend her gender and access traditionally male spaces without being perceived as morally corrupt or threatening to the social order (L. Taylor 25). Despite reports that the French dauphin privately ridiculed and cast Joan aside as a demon-possessed liar after their first meeting (L. Taylor 43), Charles VII, in his desperation to unite his ever-splintering kingdom (Warner 33), recognized Joan’s potential as a potent “figure of virtue” for the French cause due to her virginal status (Warner 43). With a saint-like virgin legitimizing his aspirations for the throne and guiding his troops to divinely-orchestrated victories, Charles VII could claim divine support against his English enemies and rival French factions. Knowing Joan’s potential, the French court “began to spread new or elaborated prophecies,” many of which rested on the fact of Joan’s elevated female virginity, to make her a legendary figure who could militarize troops (L. Taylor 47-48). Her constructed image as a virgin savior thus became both a political weapon and a moral shield, uniting a fractured kingdom under a common banner of virtue and divine support. 

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While Joan’s constructed identity as a virginal savior granted her unprecedented authority for her time, her actions during her military pursuits complicate her idealized gender image. Reports of Joan’s violent disposition while with her troops stand at sharp odds with the way she presented herself in testimony during her condemnation trial, suggesting that she may have been aware of the gap between her expected behaviors as the prophesied savior of France and her lived experience, and that she tried to actively distance herself from her violent deeds. When asked whether she preferred her banner or her sword in battle, Joan responded that “she was much fonder, indeed forty times fonder, of the banner than of the sword” and always preferred carrying the banner into battle “to avoid killing anyone” (Hobbins 69) despite multiple reports that Joan was a skilled soldier and took an active role in the destruction of her enemy’s troops (Hobbins 31). Historian Larissa Taylor explains that “[h]owever sanitized and chivalrous the depictions or recollections [of Joan’s military role] were, the fact remains that bloodshed and violence were almost everyday parts of Joan’s life during this period,” and that Joan frequently “demanded action in the face of hesitancy and inactivity,” (L. Taylor 90) thereby cementing herself as an impassioned military leader quite at odds with the docile, womanly sanctity she ought to have embodied as a holy vessel for God’s will. 

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Indeed, it is difficult to square many of Joan’s other reported behaviors with the manufactured image of holiness that French allies hoped she would personify. Marina Warner claims that “Joan often rejected the role of living saint, refusing to perform in the manner expected,” (Warner 91-92) while Taylor reports that Joan had a few “nasty encounter[s] with camp followers” that had led her to be reprimanded by Charles VII, who instructed her to use less violent force against those whom she disagreed with (L. Taylor 102). These disruptions to Joan’s manufactured image did not escape the notice of the French court; as her political utility waned, their confidence in her divine promises likewise began to crumble (Warner 75), leaving her exposed to the mercy of her English captors who reframed the gendered traits that had once made her indispensable to the French court as justification for her trial and subsequent execution. 

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During Joan’s condemnation trial, her purity, access to heavenly voices, and leadership—once celebrated as signs of divine favor—were systemically reframed as evidence of heresy by her enemies. Joan’s cross-dressing, regarded by her French allies to be in line with a tradition of saintly women exempt from gendered judgment due to a necessity exemption, was cited as “the clearest proof that she was in breach of divine law” (C. Taylor 53) by her English-aligning captors. What once symbolized Joan’s dedication to her divine mission and practical role as a military leader was recast as a sign of moral corruption and became a frequently cited justification of Joan having “wholly forsaken the the decency and reserve of her sex” (Hobbins 123) in the seventy articles of the Libellus d’Estivet that doomed her fate (Hobbins 123-155). Similarly, Joan’s voices—which were once proof of her closeness to God—were reframed as demonic illusions designed to deceive her and lead others spiritually astray. Warner explains that throughout Joan’s trial at Rouen, her enemies were “obsessed with determining the extent of Joan’s sensual experience of her voices” (Warner 121) in an attempt to entrap her into making a claim that would position her as participating in “activities and attitudes ascribed to witches” (Warner 97). Even Joan’s virginity—the most fundamental core of her elevated image in the French imagination—was “twisted into the terrible sin of presumption” by her inquisitors (Warner 105). For every positive justification of Joan’s spiritual authority that inspired the French court’s construction of her gendered identity, her English-aligned captors provided a counter-narrative that transformed those same traits into evidence of transgression. The very purity that once elevated her became arrogance, her divine voices became demonic, and her practical decisions as a military leader were recast as unnatural defiance of God’s law. By systematically dismantling the pillars of Joan’s identity, her accusers weaponized her gendered role against her, turning her from a vessel of divine favor into an icon of moral and spiritual corruption. 

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Joan of Arc’s rise as an integral figure to the changing course of the Hundreds’ Year War and subsequent fall as a heretical witch whose demonic voices deceived the highest courts of the French monarchy exemplify how systems of power in the Middle Ages manipulate gendered identities to serve their shifting needs. Joan’s gendered identity as a saintly virgin guided by a direct mission from God, which helped the French dauphin secure his position on the throne and expel many English troops from French land, was swiftly and mercilessly deconstructed when her political utility no longer produced measurable results for the French cause. Joan’s tragic fate, facilitated by the careless or blatantly malicious attitudes that many systems of power adopted toward her, stands as a stark reminder of the pervasive violence inflicted upon women—even those who had proved themselves to be as mentally, verbally, and physically capable as the men around them—in the patriarchal systems of the Middle Ages.