Joan's Two Bodies

Winnifred Fallers SullivanJoan's Two Bodies:A Study in PoiiticaiAnthropoiogy

WE WERE ASKED IN THE FIRST PANEL OF THE CONFERENCE THATgave birth to these essays to think about the role of religion in relationto the state's ideas about what constitutes a "normal" body. What, wewere asked, does religion have to do vdth "body and state"? It was notclear whether religion figured at the beginning because it is connectedwath origins, that is, vdth the premodern state, or whether it was at thebeginning because it is foundational to our understanding of the bodyand the state.

Religion and politics is a lively and contentious topic. The conjoin-ing of the religious and the political has produced a rich—sometimeschaotic—conversation. One interesting strand of that conversationconcerns religion and democracy.^ I vdll discuss here not how reli-gion might be protected—or, alternatively, how it might be managedor exploited—by a secular democratic government, but, rather, howreligion figures in the alchemy of the ordinary member of the bodypolitic. How might one understand the religio-political anthropology ofthe many who seek to find their footing in a moment of social change?How do we understand the religious ways of being of people whoserelationship to religious and political authorities and institutions is

I wish to thank Gil Anidjar, Didier Fassin, Cédle Laborde, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd,Jonathan Sheehan, Barry Sullivan, Rachel Weil, and Robert Yelle, for comments on thispaper as it developed.

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attenuated or enlarged by the times? How might we seek to understandbody and state after the critique of secularism and separationism—afterthe réintégration of religion into our account of the human—withoutsuccumbing to the totalizing assumptions of most political theologiesof the right and the left?

Many interesting efforts to describe the religious lives of ordinarypeople are under way today. Historians such as Carlo Ginzburg, NatalieDavis, and Robert Orsi mine the historical record for traces of the reli-gious minds and bodies of those who often left no viTitten trace of theirown. Anthropologists such as Webb Keane and Charles Hirschkindshow us Christians and Muslims wrestling with the language to whichthey are both committed and committed to making live. CourtneyBender and Christopher White introduce us to eclectic spiritualists whopassionately engage the possibilities of spiritual/scientific technologiesof various kinds. Legal anthropologists such as David Engel and HusseinAgrama show us vernacular philosophers of law and religion reinvent-ing their traditions to serve the plural and unstable religious and legalworlds in which they live. In all of these cases we see religious personsacting democratically beyond the formal structures of theological elitesand the secular liberal state.

Talal Asad asks at the end of a recent essay on religion andpolitics:

How does democratic sensibility as an ethos (whether "reli-gious" or "secular") accord with democracy as the politicalsystem of a state? The former, after all, involves the desire formutual care, distress at the infiiction of pain and indignity,concern for the truth more than for immutable subjectiverights, the ability to listen and not merely to tell, and thewillingness to evaluate behavior without being judgmen-tal toward others; it tends toward greater inclusivity. Thelatter is jealous of its sovereignty, defines and protectsthe subjective rights of its citizens (including their rightto "religious freedom"), infuses them with nationalist

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fervor, and invokes bureaucratic rationality in governingthem justly; it is fundamentally exclusive. My point is not toargue that the two are necessarily incompatible. I simply askwhether the latter undermines the former—and if it does,then to what extent. I suggest, finally, that the modernidea of religious belief (protected as an individual right) is afunction of the secular state but not of democratic sensibil-ity (Asad 2011).

It is the last sentence that suggests a path.Paradoxically, perhaps, I will consider the problem of religion

and politics today—of the body and the state—and of honoring demo-cratic sensibility by returning to a much talked about and much vmt-ten about body—Joan of Arc—and state—early modern France, not anotably democratic time or place in world history. The story of Joan'sheroic intervention into fifteenth-century French politics can, I think,help us to understand the religio-politics of the body today.

There is a vast hterature about Joan. People began to argue abouther in print almost as soon as she appeared on the public scene inthe early fifteenth century. Within weeks of the raising of the siegeof Orléans, Christine de Pisan, the great Italian poet, had composed apoem to her and the chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean Gerson,had vorritten a tract defending her. Many others weighed in. New filmsappear wdth predictable regularity—and she is everywhere to be foundon the Internet. Joan is adored today by the French right for her mili-tant rescue of France for the French. She is venerated as a saint in theCatholic Church. She is also celebrated by millions who have no inter-est in France or the church for her spirited resistance to the crushingmisogynist power that was mobilized against her. It is almost impossi-ble to speak of her with respect without lapsing into adoration. What isit about her? Who was she? How should we understand her continuedlife almost 600 years after she was burned at the stake?

My title, "Joan's Two Bodies," refers, of course, to ErnstKantorovdcz's well-known masterpiece. The King's Two Bodies, which

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traces the history of the principle that medieval English kings werelegally imagined to have two bodies: the body natural, which wasmortal like everyone else, and the body political, which was immor-tal, canying with it the rights and responsibilities of the crovm beyonddeath. Kantorowicz brilliantly weaves together legal and political andtheological texts across centuries and across Europe to conjure beforeus a dense and highly textured legal fiction that enabled both ordinaryeconomic transactions and the continuities of dynastic succession.Moreover, in Kantorowicz's reading, this fiction can be traced directlyto theological refiection on Christ's two natures, human and divine. Itis that theological idea, Kantorowicz claimed, that both generated thelegal fiction and continues to sustain its power. Law and theology areshown to be inseparably dependent on a shared anthropology of thebody.

Others have extended this twin sovereign both backward andforward in time. Thus, Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer reminds us thatthe doubling of the king's body has earlier origins, in Roman law andreligious practice, and that the convenient fiction that the body of theking does not die not only enables legal transactions, it also enables(perhaps inevitably on Agamben's reading) the myths of the state—ofabsolute monarchy—and of despotism. In Agamben's account, it isthe very necessify of the state's continuation that authorizes its totalcontrol (Agamben 1998:101). The state, in contemporary lingo, like themultinational bank, is too big to fail; and the exception has become therule.

To build such a stmcture on Kantorowicz, to bind him to a total-izing political theology, seems to me to lose sight of the important andsubtle variations among the many individuals and texts that he putsbefore us—and, notwithstanding the power of his elegant prose—thetentative and indeterminate qualify of his conclusions. While sharinglegal texts and borrowing customs across the continent, the doctrine ofthe twin nature of the king is importantly different in different timesand places—and there are gaps in its theory and practice. We see in TheKing's Two Bodies a veritable host of witnesses, real and imagined—and a

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Suggestion that what is enabled by the fiction it describes is not despo-tism but constitutionalism.^

While it is tempting to see Joan as a victim of the budding abso-lute state in cahoots with an absolute church, a victim of the politi-cal theology of the king's two bodies, I will suggest that imaginingthe multiple bodies of Joan of Arc is more faithful to the legal fictionKantorowicz shows us and can help us to think a different politics. Thepersistence of the legal fiction of the two bodies might be seen in amore mundane, more democratic way, speaking simply to the problemof how any continuity is to be achieved beyond the lives of the actorswho initiate a project, whether of the economic or of the social kind,and to the fruitful possibility of separating the person from the office.It is a transcendence that is both enabled by law and resistant to it. Andit is not just for kings.

THE TRIALS OF JOAN OF ARCWe are taught by historians today to understand that the fifteenthcentury stands not at the end of the Middle Ages, at a time of waning anddecline and decadence, but at a time, like all times—like what we some-times call late modernity—of beginnings and of endings. And a time oflaw and of lawsuits. New scholarship on the trial that condemned Joanrejects the traditional portrayal of the trial as simply a kangaroo court.On the contrary, contemporary scholars contend that Pierre Cauchon,the bishop of Beauvais, an ambitious and careful man, bent over back-ward to get the process right, to dot all the i's and cross all the t's, tomake an exhaustive and thorough showing that what then passed fordue process had been followed. Joan was doomed, these historians say,not because her judges were corrupt but because she persisted in claim-ing that she had privileged information that God favored the Frenchover the English. Indeed, Daniel Hobbins, medieval historian at OhioState University, who has recently retranslated the trial documents intoEnglish, argues that Cauchon tried unsuccessfully to save Joan frombeing put to death (Hobbins 2005: 18-19). Far from being members ofan evil cabal, he and the others spent months persuading the English to


let them give Joan a trial rather than just going for summary execution.The problem with Joan's trial is not that it was not modern or that itwas not law, as we know it. We cannot get off that easily.

Joan was captured outside Compiègne, during a campaign to takeParis in late May 1430, by Burgundian troops allied with the English.After lengthy negotiations, she was sold to the English for 10,000pounds. The English held her as a prisoner throughout her trial forheresy. She was burned at the stake in Rouen a year later as a relapsedheretic. The trial itself lasted almost five months. One hundred andtwenty-one legal experts were involved, most from the University ofParis. Extensive pretrial investigations included a trip to Domrémy,Joan's hometown in Lorraine, 350 kilometers away, as well as to thevarious tovms that had been liberated in the battles that paved the wayfrom Orléans to Rheims. The trial and its outcome were reported allover Europe—as had been her initial success at Orléans.

Why so much trouble for an illiterate nineteen-year-old peasantgirl from Lorraine who said she heard voices?

In March 1429, a little more than a year before the trial, havingpersuaded Robert de Beaudricourt, a royal captain stationed nearDomrémy, to provide her with soldiers to accompany her, Joan hadtraveled from Vaucouleurs to Chinon in the Loire Valley to talk toCharles, known as the Dauphin, then one of the claimants to the Frenchthrone. She wanted him to arm her and allow her to lead an attemptto raise the English siege of the nearby town of Orléans. France andEngland were approaching the end of what would come to be called theHundred Years War, and France itself was in the middle of a protractedcivil war. What we call France today was then divided among at leastfive governments. There were rival claimants to the French throneand rival claimants to the papacy. It was not clear that there would bean independent France at the end of the war. Henry V had decisivelydefeated the French at the battle of Agincourt in 1415, and in 1420,by the Treaty of Troyes, Charles VI of France had recognized Henry Vas king of England and France. Both kings died soon thereafter. WhenJoan left her home in Lorraine to travel to the Loire Valley, the infant

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Henry VI of England was represented in France by his regent, the Dukeof Bedford, the English and their Burgundian allies held the northernpart of present day France, and the Armagnacs supporting the Dauphinheld most of the south.

Joan grew up in a part of France that had been fought over andthrough. She grew up in the midst of a civil war. As she tells the storyin the trial of condemnation,^ at the age of about 13 she began to hearvoices telling her to go to the king and to fight the English. She was, shetold her judges, to command an army and to wear men's clothes—todrive the English out of France.

Joan was a real and immediate threat—and a real and immedi-ate promise. The account of her trial published by the church afterher burning begins with a careful detailing of her notoriety, a neces-sary legal step in a heresy trial. Chroniclers of the time reported thatsoldiers on both sides were terrified of her. She was a threat to theEnglish because her voices and her mihtary career legitimated CharlesVII's claim as king. She was a promise to the Armagnac faction for thesame reason. It was she, as the story goes, who shook Charles out ofhis despondency, raised the siege, and fought their way to Reims sohe could be consecrated there in the cathedral wdth the holy oil thatlegend told had been miraculously provided for the consecrationof Clovis, king of the Franks almost a thousand years earlier. WhileCharles had a good dynastic claim through his father, Charles VI, byright of primogeniture, a right his father had no power to disclaim, itwas Joan who understood the mystical importance of the sacramentalsealing of Charles' claim. It was Joan who connected him to the mythichistory of France. Merlin—no less—foretold her coming.

After Reims, the romance was over. Joan wanted to forge aheadand complete the campaign. Charles, having achieved the crown,did not. Joan went on alone, with her army—and was defeated andcaptured.

One of the enduring mysteries about Joan was how she persuadedCharles to trust her initially. She said at the trial that she had given hima sign but she was reluctant to explain further. At one point she said


that an angel had brought a crown dovwi over the king's head, a visionthat everyone present saw. The crown fioats mysteriously through thetrial, first in Chinon and later in Reims. It is unclear which crown ismeant. The actual crov«i was kept in a treasury in Reims and was notavailable for the hurried coronation. But there was a good deal of thickfiction around the crown as an embodiment of the mystical body poli-tic of France (Kantorowicz 1957: 336-383).

In the period between the death of Charles VI in 1422 and thefinal expulsion of the English from France in 1453,^ the French thronewas claimed by both Charles VII and Henry VI. Although after 1435,with the recognition of Charles as king by the duke of Burgundy, andCharles' successful retaking of territory, Charles became de facto king.But in 1422 Le roi est mort! Vive le roi! had been heard in Paris, London,and in Méhun-sur-Yèvre, where the Dauphin was staying. Who wasking?

How does the doctrine of the king's two bodies work in thisperiod? Where were the body natural and the body political of Francefrom 1422 to 1453? It was a crowded field. Those who officially soughtto vdeld the authority of France included the infant Henry VI, the dukeof Bedford as regent, Philip Duke of Burgundy, the Dauphin—and Joan?As Kantorovdcz makes clear, the legal fiction of the two bodies did notdevelop in the same way in France as it had in England. In France thetheory of kingship was more unified, more mystical, and more tied tothe liturgical. Jean de Terre Rouge, a French jurist of the time, arguedfor Charles' claim to the throne on the ground that his father, CharlesVI, had no constitutional power to disturb the succession or to alienatethe dignity of the crown (Kantorov^cz 1957: 218-219). So alarmed wereHenry VI's advisers by the coronation at Reims that they arranged tohave him consecrated king in an elaborate ceremony in Paris in SainteChapelle in December 1431. There was no shortage of efforts to connectmortal bodies to immortal ones.

While certainly Joan lacked the royal blood, and, because of Saliclaw,̂ the sexual attributes, to be king of France, I suggest that there isa sense in which, constitutionally and mystically speaking, during this

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time of ambiguify, between Orléans and Reims, the motive power ofboth the body natural and the French body politic were carried by her.She embodied the French state, both the mortal and the immortal. Itwas she who wore the mystical crown and prevented the dignify ofFrance from being alienated. For a short time she had two bodies in theconstitutional sense. The many ambiguities of her identify and authen-ticify, together with the difficulfy her contemporaries had in readingher, allowed the fiction to work—while it did. That is the strength offictions.

Her clothes are one clue to this doubling. In some ways the mostnotable theme of the trial was her clothes. Her judges were positivelyobsessed with her clothes. It is not an exaggeration to say that she wascondemned because of her refusal to wear women's clothes. She wasdisturbing to the natural order of things. But her clothes were also herpower. And there was considerable biblical and medieval precedentto support the wearing of men's clothes in certain circumstances, asGerson had noted in his defense of her (Wamer 1981:139-158).

Karen Sullivan (1999), in her analysis of the trial, suggests thatit is difficult to resolve the contradictions in Joan's OWTI testimonyand in the attitudes around her with respect to her clothes becausethe conventionally available choices to explain what she did, then andnow, were either that she willfully transgressed social norms or thatshe did what she was told.* Sullivan's close reading suggests that wetake her at her word, not resolving her into either the androgynousrebel of the twenfy-first century or the pious servant of God. We mightimagine Joan rather taking up the role of soldier and captain for a whilewithout repudiating the norms of her sociefy. On the contrary, she washelping to make her sociefy work, improvising within the availableroles, mj^hs, and political dogmas. And there is evidence that she triedto resign the role when she was finished, seeking to return to privatelife—and to women's clothes.

What exactly did she wear during her public career? Do youimagine her in the medieval equivalent of jeans and a t-shirt? As anearly modem tomboy? A fifteenth-century Lisbeth Salander? All of the


evidence would suggest that she dressed in rich court clothes, velvetand cloth of gold, vdth the slashed sleeves of a dandy. She ovmed manyhorses, multiple suits of armor and swords. She dressed richly in themanner of a war captain. She functioned as a lord in the old feudalmanner. Her estate at her death was in the thousands of pounds. Herfather and her brothers had been ennobled by the king. Why shouldthis bother us? For a brief time—or for all time if you are of a certainFrench politics—her body transcended its finitude, believably carryingthe authority of the state. And the clothes were essential to that author-ity and to the task before her. She had difficulty explaining that to herjudges. When her work was finished, she would return to women'sclothes.

How did her judges imagine her? At the end of the trial, frus-trated with their failure as interrogators and as pastors to persuadeher to confess and commit herself to their protection, theyspoke:

Let her be pronounced and declared... a sorceress, diviner,false prophetess, conjurer of evil spirits, superstitious,entangled in and practicing the magic arts, evil-thinkingin the catholic faith, schismatic, doubting and misled . . .sacrilegious, idolatrous, apostate from the faith, evil-speaking and maleficent, blaspheming God and his saints,scandalous, seditious, a disturber of peace and an obstacleto it, inciting wars, cruelly thirsting for human blood andencouraging its shedding, wholly forsaking the decencyand reserve of her sex, utterly without modesty and shame-lessly having taken the disgraceful clothing and state ofarmed men; a transgressor of divine and natural laws andecclesiastical discipline, seductress of princes and peoples;permitting and allowing herself to be worshipped andadored injury and contempt of God, giving her hands andgarments to be kissed, usurping divine honor and adora-tion, a heretic . . . (Hobbins 2005:124).

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Really? Can this possibly be the same Joan we hear in the trial?Practical, modest, and down to earth? Sometimes funny? And these atti-tudes comes through in their cleaned up account. She is not simple. Sheis well informed about the law, procedural and substantive. She resiststaking an oath, saying she had not been told of the charges againsther and would only testify to what was relevant to the charges. Sheclaims the right to be held by the church rather than the state and tobe guarded by women. And she asserts a right of appeal to the pope.Asked whether she would attempt an escape if she saw the chance, sheanswers, "God helps those who help themselves."

Joan understands that they are accusing her of participating inmagic, and carefully counters any claim to magical powers, whether itis rumors that she raised people from the dead or of a capacity to findlost items. She is conventionally pious—affirming orthodox Christianbeliefs and continually seeking access to the sacraments—and she isvery strong in the face of the court. Defending the counsel of her voices,she explains that they had never told her to do anything wrong, thatthey told her to be a faithful Christian. Asked whether the archangelMichael appeared to her naked, she answered "Do you think God can'tfind him clothes?"

She does not overstate her case. She was under intense pressureand was questioned for hours and days. She was being tried as a warcriminal and a heretic. We hear her negotiating these different juris-dictions.

Like any trial, the difficulty is partly one of translation—of trans-muting life into law.5 Karen Sullivan, in her treatment of Joan's inter-rogation, emphasizes the scholastic training of her judges, and theircontinual effort to reduce Joan's ideas and acts to the dialectic withwhich they were familiar. Through the trial we see their use of thelanguage of the law with its template of scholastic categories both abouther beliefs and about her body, attempting to box her in through theirquestioning—trying to force her to choose. She must always answerso as to put herself on the side of the church, not magic, on the side ofwoman, not man, on the side of peace, not war.


Finally, having held out for more than four months againsttheir questioning, their harassment, and the confinement, she agreedto reject her voices, abjure her claim to be sent by God, and assumewomen's clothes. She was then immediately sentenced to perpetualimprisonment "with the bread of sorrow and the water of affiiction,that you may weep there for your faults." And then, the next day, shechanged her mind. She put her soldier's clothes back on and reclaimedher voices and her authority, famously saying that she had denied themonly "for fear of the fiâmes."^"

Upon her resuming men's clothes and repudiating her abjura-tion, her judges sentenced her again:

Seated in judgment, we do make known and pronounce inwriting by this our sentence that you are a corrupt member,and that to prevent you from infecting other members, youshould be driven from the unity of the church, divided fromits body, and handed over to the secular power; we cast youout, separate, and deliver you, praying the secular powerto be lenient in its judgment toward you vdth respect tothe death and mutilation of the body . . . we declare that,as a limb of Satan cut off from the church, infected withthe leprosy of heresy, you are to be abandoned to secularjustice, lest you infect other limbs of Christ, and we alsoabandon you (Hobbins 2005: 201-202).

She was transferred to the secular jurisdiction—to the English—andburned at the stake on May 30, 1431. In an entry dated that samemonth, the Bourgeois of Paris, the anonymous author of the ParisianJournal, described her death:

She was at once unanimously condemned to death and wastied to a stake on the platform (which was built of plas-ter) and the fire lit under her. She was soon dead and allher clothes were burned. Then the fire was raked back and

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her naked body shovra to all the people and all the secretsthat could or should belong to a woman, to take away anydoubts from people's minds. When they had stared longenough at her dead body bound to the stake, the execu-tioner got a big fire going again round her poor carcass,which was soon burned up, both fiesh and bone reduced toashes (Weiskopf 1999:113-14).

It is difficult to speak of this obscenity. Her clothes were burnedoff of her. She was stripped of her authority, of her membership in thebody politic. Then her body natural was destroyed.

CONCLUSIONIt is not only kings who have two bodies. It is not despotism that isenabled by the legal fiction of the two bodies—but life. As Kantorovdczhints throughout The King's Two Bodies, the problem of continuity inhuman matters, the problem of maintaining at once the many twinnedaspects of human mortality and immortality, is present in many places.We know it best today in the fiction of the corporation.

We are told today that the political is the theological. By Schmitt.By Giorgio Agamben. By Wendy Brown. We are told that all politicalpower is absolutist—tending toward the theocratic. That democracy isbut a thinly disguised autocracy by way of the authorizing of execu-tive power—of the power to declare the exception. All political life isa version of life in the camps. Social sciences only make biopoliticspossible.

On this theory, one might read Joan as the homo sacer—the onewho can be killed but cannot be sacrificed. She becomes the excep-tion—whether the sovereign is the church or the state. Is that true?

Certainly one can find the resources to bund such a story about Joan.Both Charles and her judges exclude her from the polis, Charles by with-drawing his royal patronage and the church by declaring her excommuni-cate—^but it would not, in my view, be Joan's story. Both state and churchstaged second trials to nullify their actions in the first trial.


The endlessly fascinating thing about Joan is that you cannotsolve the riddle if that is the way you see the world. She both assumedthe role of a captain of war, fighting for Charles' claim by blood anddivine right to the throne, and she performed the role of a personof impressive integrify striving to maintain herself before the narra-tives of her judges—the narratives of impersonal justice that enableviolence. She was both the victim of the state and she was the state. Youcannot make her disappear by casting her as homo sacer.

You cannot build a heroic politics—of the left or the right—onJoan if you actually pay attention to what she did and what happened toher. You cannot line her up on one side or the other. You cannot resolveher two bodies into one. If you cast her as a Catholic nationalist youare stuck with her stubborn refusal to obey either the Icing or the bish-ops—and with her unnatural rejection of proper women's behavior. Ifyou cast her as a resistance fighter you are stuck with all of her bloodynationalist rhetoric and pious talk.

You also cannot resolve who killed Joan by saying it is about thepremodern failure to separate religion and politics. The choice wasbetween the legitimacy of Henry and Charles, and about the contin-ued existence of the French body politic, of the honor of the Frenchcrown, not between church and state. Religion is not the problem. Theproblem was government. In a sense what is remarkable about Joanis that she brilliantly inhabited the politics of her time. She did whathad to be done. She stepped into a role defined by the political andreligious idioms of her time. And then? Her job was over. Then her fatewas sealed. She could not return to private life. Joan was the necessaryperson—the dens ex machina.

One does not have to have a stake in the fight over the Frenchstate to be moved by the pathos of Joan's plight. She is ever5mian. Jean-Marie Le Pen cannot have her. She entered into the politics of her day.She made sense of it in the terms that were available. And she gave herbody, as kings do. There is not a pohtics that could have saved her—sacred or secular. There is no comfort for us. We are not more superiorin intelligence, or loiowledge, or faith. Only one person could be Icing

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of France and that would not be resolved until years after her death. Butpolitics would endure, thanks in part to her.

We might see Joan's body reincarnate in the bodies in TahrirSquare when we hear the young revolutionaries speak of being Egypt."Like Joan, they are carrying their country's future. With all of the riskthat will entail.

NOTES1. Jeffrey Stout, in his Democracy and Tradition (2004), evokes some of the

same sensibility I seek to evoke in this essay.2. We have a more complete historical record about Joan's brief life

than anyone else who lived in the fifteenth century, but most agreethat the source that provides the best access to the historical Joan isthe record that was made of the trial of condemnation. The Latin textmay be found in Pierre Campion, Procès de condamnation dejeanne d'Arc(1920). A new English translation with an excellent introduction andnotes has just been published by Daniel Hobbins, The Trial of Joan ofArc (Harvard 2005). I am not a medieval historian so am immenselyindebted to those who have researched the record and placed herlife in the context of fifteenth-century religion, law, and politics.The following account of Joan's life is based on my reading over thelast decade or so of both the trial record and a portion of the largesecondary literature. There is much we will never know. I beg yourindulgence with my own modernist ways while hoping that you willthink my riffs on what I have learned contribute in a small way to theconversation.

3. I was particularly helped in situafing Kantorowicz by Victoria Kahn'sessay in a volume celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of The King's TwoBodies in Representations.

4. Joan was the subject of five ecclesiastical trials in her Ufetime: a breachof promise suit as a teenager, an examination of her authenticity byCharles in Poitiers before he accepted her, the trial of condemnation,a trial of nullification 25 years later, and the trial establishing hercandidacy for canonization in the twentieth century.


5. Joan was not the only woman hearing voices in fifteenth-centuryFrance. Others had preceded her. See van Engen (2008) for a descrip-tion of women mystics of the fifteenth century.

6. The dual monarchy formally came to an end with the final victory ofthe French at the Battle of Castillon on July 17,1453, thus ending theHundred Years War.

7. Medieval French Salic law of succession, derived from the pre-Romanlaw of the Franks codified by Clovis in the fifth century, provided thatonly men could succeed to the throne.

8. While Deuteronomy and Aquinas said that it was wrong for womento assume men's clothes, there were also models of virtuous womenwho assumed men's clothes for protection or to accomplish certainmilitary or political tasks for which the wearing of men's clothesmade practical sense.

9. Among many thoughtful considerations of this process of transla-tion, see Bruno Latour, The Making of Law (2010) and Robert Bums, ATheory of the Trial (1999).

10. There is much debate about what exactly happened in the last days ofthe trial and subsequent visits that were made to her cell.

11. Or, perhaps, in the bodies of the suicide bombers, as Asad (2007) hasargued.

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a Secular or a Religious State?" After Secular Law. Eds. WinnifredFallers Sullivan, Robert A. Yelle, and Mateo Taussig-Rubbo. PaloAlto: Stanford University Press, 2011:181-199.

Allmand, Christopher. The Hundred Years War: England and France at Warc. 1300-1450. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001 (1988).

Asad, Talal. On Suicide Bombing. New York: Columbia University Press,2007.."Thinking About Religious Belief and Politics." Cambridge

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1999.Davis, Natalie Zeman. The Return of Martin Guerre. Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1983.de Vries, Hent, and Lavwence E. Sullivan. Political Theologies: Public Religions

in a Post-Secular World. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006.Elliott, Dyan. "John Gerson, the Discernment of Spirits, and Joan of Arc"

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