Joan of Arc feminist icon?

The French heroine is an uncomfortable fit as an icon of female solidarity or democratic rights, argues the author of a new historical studyChristine de Pizan was a remarkable woman. Despite the odds stacked against her by her gender, this daughter of a Venetian physician at the French royal court became one of the most distinguished writers of the later middle ages. In 1418, after a long career during which she had defended the cause of women against literary misogyny in a scholarly debate known as the querelle des femmes, she retreated into religious seclusion, horrified by the civil war and English invasion that, between them, were tearing her beloved France apart. But in the summer of 1429, by then in her 60s, she emerged one last time from a decade of literary silence to celebrate in effervescent verse the achievements of a yet more extraordinary woman: Joan of Arc.

That February, a peasant girl from a village named Domrémy had arrived at the court of the Dauphin Charles, leader of the Armagnac French, the anti-English faction in France's brutal civil war. The girl was bizarrely dressed in men's clothes, with her hair cut short and she brought a startling message: she was sent by God to drive the English out of France. Her utter conviction and the desperate straits in which the Armagnacs found themselves persuaded the Dauphin's theological advisers that she should be put to the test, and, in May, dressed in shining armour, she led his troops to astonishing victory at the besieged town of Orléans.

Continue reading... Reported by guardian.co.uk 12 hours ago.