Bad Girls Throughout History: 100 Remarkable Women Who Changed the World - Ann Shen (2016)
Joan of Arc
Born during the middle of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, Joan of Arc (1412-1431) was an illiterate peasant girl from a small French village. England was winning the war at the time, occupying most of France through an alliance with Burgundy. At thirteen, Joan experienced visions of saints in her father’s garden. The saints told her to help the French drive out the English and instate the rightful French heir, Charles VII, to the throne in the coronation town of Reims, which was currently under English siege. Three years passed before Joan finally persuaded a relative to take her to the nearest military commander, Robert de Baudricourt, to petition for a visit to the royal French court. It took several months of persistence and convincing two soldiers of her visions—she predicted a military reversal in an area far from where they were, days before messengers delivered a report of the action—before Baudricourt took her to Charles VII.
By then, the French military was in such poor shape that Charles VII was willing to give a sixteen-year-old girl the reins to ride with the military, taking her predictions as direct messages from God. With her guidance, the commanders finally turned the tide when they won back the city of Orléans. She joined the French military, dressed in men’s clothes to prevent harassment (men’s dress at the time had twenty fastenings that attached everything from top to boots), and they steadily took back their country, including Reims, where Charles VII was finally crowned. Joan and her family were ennobled as a reward for her courage. However, a year later Joan was captured by the English during battle and tried for heresy and cross-dressing. She was convicted by a biased jury and burned at the stake at the age of nineteen. The Hundred Years’ War continued for twenty- two years after her death, but the French prevailed after the turning point her military tactics created. Posthumously, Joan was retried and found innocent after the war ended. She became a heroic symbol of France and was canonized in 1920.
