In her meticulous and wide-ranging study, Nora M. Heimann follows the metamorphosis of Joan of Arc's posthumous representation during the years in which her image ascended from relative obscurity as a minor provincial figure in the middle ages through her treatment as a figure of political satire in the eighteenth century to her ultimate emergence as an image of piety and sanctity in the mid-nineteenth century. Offering the first scholarly art historical and cultural analysis of the origins of the modern Joan of Arc cult, she takes on the challenge of charting, as no previous critic has, why and how the Maid of Orl‘s has been all things to such a diverse public through the ages, particularly during the rapid shifts in political regimes that came in the wake of the French Revolution. Joan of Arc's image has shown a protean capacity to embody a vast and often contradictory range of qualities, from martial ascendancy to vulnerable piety, from maidenly purity to transgressive androgyny, from the power of the people to the divine right of kings. Heimann makes a persuasive case for this enduringly resonant woman as the only figure in French culture to be warmly embraced simultaneously by republicans, monarchists, feminists, and neo-fascists alike. In its recounting of the iconographic fortunes of this remarkable woman during her transformation from an image of satire to one of sanctity, Joan of Arc in French Art and Culture (1700-1855) offers an illustrated, interdisciplinary depiction of the relationship between art and politics that will appeal not only to art historians but also to those working in literature, women's studies, cultural studies, intellectual history, and religious history.

The fame of Joan of Arc began in her lifetime and, though it has dipped a little now and then, she has never vanished from view. Her image acts as a seismograph for the shifts and settlings of personal and political ideals: Joan of Arc is the heroine every movement has wanted as their figurehead. In France, anti-semitic, xenophobic, extreme right parties have claimed her since the Action Francaise in the 19th century. By contrast, Socialists, feminists, and liberal Catholics rallied to her as the champion of the dispossessed and the wrongly accused. Joan of Arc has also played a crucial role in changing visions of female heroism. She has proved an inexhaustible source of inspiration for writers, playwrights, film-makers, performers, and composers. In a single, brief life, several of the essential mythopoiec characteristics that throughout history have defined the charismatic leader and saint are powerfully and intensely condensed. Even while Joan of Arc was still alive, but far more so after her death, the heroic part of her story sparked narratives of all kinds, in pictures, ballads, plays, and also satires. This was only heightened in 1841-9 by the publication of the Inquisition trial which had examined Joan for witchcraft and heresy. The transcript of the interrogations gives us the voice of this young woman across the centuries with almost unbearable immediacy; her spirit leaps from the page, uncompromising in its frankness, good sense, courage, and often breathtaking in its simple effectiveness. Joan of Arc into one of the most fully and vividly present personalities in history, about whom a great more is known, in her own words and at first hand, than is, for example, about Shakespeare. However, this has not stopped the flow of fictions and fantasies about her. Marina Warner analyses the symbolism of the Maid in her own time and in her rich afterlife in popular culture. The cultural expressions are part of an ongoing historical struggle to own the symbol - you could say, the brand. In a new preface to her study, Marina Warner takes stock of the continuing contention, in politics and culture, for this powerful symbol of virtue. Joan of Arc's multiple resurrections and transformations show how vigorous the need for figures like her remains, and how crucial it is to meet that need with thoughtfulness. She argues that abandoning the search to identify heroes and define them, out of a kind of high-minded distaste for propaganda, lets dangerous political factions manipulate them to their own ends. When Marine Le Pen calls on Joan of Arc's name, she needs to be confronted about her bad faith and her abuse of history.

This book examines the figure of Joan of Arc as depicted in stage works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially those based on or related to Schiller’s 1801 romantic tragedy, Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans). The author elucidates Schiller’s appropriation of themes from Euripides’s Iphigenia plays, chiefly the quality of “sublime sanctity,” which transforms Joan’s image from a victim of fate to a warrior-prophet who changes history through sheer force of will. Finding the best-known works of his time about her – Voltaire’s La pucelle d’Orléans and Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part I – utterly dissatisfying, Schiller set out to replace them. Die Jungfrau von Orleans was a smashing success and inspired various subsequent treatments, including Verdi’s opera Giovanna d’Arco and a translation by the father of Russian Romanticism, Vasily Zhukovsky, on which Tchaikovsky based his opera Orleanskaya deva (The Maid of Orleans). In turn, the book’s final chapter examines Shaw’s Saint Joan and finds that the Irish playwright’s vociferous complaints about Schiller’s “romantic flapdoodle” belie a surprising affinity for Schiller’s approach.

In this book, Gail Orgelfinger examines the ways in which English historians and illustrators depicted Joan of Arc over a period of four hundred years, from her capture in 1429 to the early nineteenth century. The variety of epithets attached to Joan of Arc—from “witch” and “Medean virago” to “missioned Maid” and “shepherd’s child”—attests to England’s complicated relationship with the saint. While portrayals of Joan in English popular culture evolved over the centuries, they do not follow a straightforward trajectory from vituperation to adulation. Focusing primarily on descriptions of Joan’s captivity, trial, and execution, this study shows how the exigencies of politics and the demands of genre shaped English retellings of her military successes, gender transgressions, and execution at the hands of her English enemies. Orgelfinger’s research illuminates how and why English writers and artists used the memory of Joan of Arc to grapple with issues such as England’s relationship with France, emerging protofeminism in the early modern era, and the sense of national guilt over her execution. A systematic analysis of Joan’s English historiography in its political and social contexts, this volume sheds light on four centuries of English thought on Joan of Arc. It will be welcomed by specialist and general readers alike, especially those interested in women’s studies.

DIV This book tells the history of the French Renaissance through the lives of its most prominent queens and mistresses, beginning with Agnès Sorel, the first officially recognized royal mistress in 1444; including Anne of Brittany, Catherine de Medici, Anne Pisseleu, Diane de Poitiers, and Marguerite de Valois, among others; and concluding with Gabrielle d’Estrées, Henry IV’s powerful mistress during the 1590s. Wellman shows that women in both roles—queen and mistress—enjoyed great influence over French politics and culture, not to mention over the powerful men with whom they were involved. The book also addresses the enduring mythology surrounding these women, relating captivating tales that uncover much about Renaissance modes of argument, symbols, and values, as well as our own modern preoccupations. /div

Eighteenth-century Europe witnessed monumental upheavals in both the Catholic and Protestant faiths and the repercussions rippled down to the churches’ religious art forms. Nigel Aston now chronicles here the intertwining of cultural and institutional turmoil during this pivotal century. The sustained popularity of religious art in the face of competition from increasingly prevalent secular artworks lies at the heart of this study. Religious art staked out new spaces of display in state institutions, palaces, and private collections, the book shows, as well as taking advantage of patronage from monarchs such as Louis XIV and George III, who funded religious art in an effort to enhance their monarchial prestige. Aston also explores the motivations and exhibition practices of private collectors and analyzes changing Catholic and Protestant attitudes toward art. The book also examines purchases made by corporate patrons such as charity hospitals and religious confraternities and considers what this reveals about the changing religiosity of the era as well. An in-depth historical study, Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Europe will be essential for art history and religious studies scholars alike.

The year of 1832 marked a turning point in France as the country struggled to find its way in the wake of the French Revolution. Following the Revolution of 1830, Legitimists, supporters of the recently ousted Bourbon dynasty’s claim to the throne, continued to plot against King Louis-Philippe and his “July Monarchy.” In early 1832, after failing to launch a coup in Southern France, Legitimists plotted an unsuccessful uprising in the Vendée, a region in Western France that had supported the royalist cause during the French Revolution. The Duchesse de Berry led the rebellion in the hopes of placing her son, the Bourbon heir, on the French throne. The revolt marked the last attempt by the Bourbons to retake the throne by force and helped solidify the end of the Bourbon dynasty. During the cholera outbreak, which also spread throughout France in 1832, lower income areas suffered higher losses to the disease, for they were more likely to have contaminated water supplies. The lower classes spread rumors that the outbreak was an elitist plot to subdue the masses and the epidemic exacerbated class tensions. Meanwhile, conditions in France continued to be characterized by violence during the early 1830s as Louis-Philippe attempted to establish his regime’s authority. The most significant of these uprisings was the republican-dominated June Revolution of 1832. Victor Hugo and other contemporaries perceived the barricades of June as natural extensions of the cholera epidemic, or the “political continuation of a biological crisis.” The sad fate of the uprising, however, prompted republicans to regroup and develop new strategies for success. As a whole, then, 1832 helped solidify the end of the Bourbon monarchy and class identities, and was a crucial moment in the (re)organization and growing solidification of French republicanism that paved the way for the Revolution of 1848. This edited collection examines these three pivotal events in French history in 1832—a royal Legitimist uprising led by the Duchesse de Berry, the cholera epidemic, and the June Revolution (featured in the climax of Hugo’s novel, Les Misérables)—within the context of the legacy of the French Revolution. While the events of 1832 are significant, they have been relatively ignored because scholars have been distracted by the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848. This collection is the first piece of scholarship to examine these three events in an interconnected pattern to better examine France as it transitioned from a monarchy to a republic. As a result, this collection will be of value to both historians and academics studying diverse subfields within French and European studies.