The Virgin Mary and the “Voices” of Joan of Arc

Abstract

When I told a colleague of mine that I was studying Joan of Arc and the Virgin Mary, he replied, “I’ll be curious to leam what you discover. It’s hard to imagine that virago [Joan] and the humble Handmaid [Mary] together.” Many scholars who have taken a more considerate view of Joan’s spirituality seem to share my colleague s spontaneous reaction. Although, as Renée Grisel wrote long ago, “Joan participated from her infancy in the cult of the Virgin,” for some unknown reason scholarly studies of Joan and modern renditions of her legend often pass in silence over this aspect of her devotional life.1 Indeed, judging by the account given by some Jehannine historians, the example of Joan of Arc confirms the assertion of Caroline Walker Bynum: “Mary is not really as important as one might expect in [medieval] women’s spirituality,” which focuses instead on the humanity of Christ.2

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.