Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured
Written by Kathryn Harrison
Narrated by Cassandra Campbell
4/5
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About this audiobook
The profoundly inspiring and fully documented saga of Joan of Arc, the young peasant girl whose "voices" moved her to rally the French nation and a reluctant king against British invaders in 1428, has fascinated artistic figures as diverse as William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Voltaire, George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, Carl Dreyer, and Robert Bresson. Was she a divinely inspired saint? A schizophrenic? A demonically possessed heretic, as her persecutors and captors tried to prove?
Every era must retell and reimagine the Maid of Orleans's extraordinary story in its own way, and in Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured, the superb novelist and memoirist Kathryn Harrison gives us a Joan for our time-a shining exemplar of unshakable faith, extraordinary courage, and self-confidence during a brutally rigged ecclesiastical inquisition and in the face of her death by burning. Deftly weaving historical fact, myth, folklore, artistic representations, and centuries of scholarly and critical interpretation into a compelling narrative, she restores Joan of Arc to her rightful position as one of the greatest heroines in all of human history.
Kathryn Harrison
Kathryn Harrison is the author of the novels ‘The Binding Chair’, ‘Exposure’, ‘A Thousand Orange Trees’ and ‘Envy’, as well as two volumes of memoirs, ‘The Kiss’ and ‘Seeking Rapture’, all available from Fourth Estate. She lives in New York with her husband, the novelist Colin Harrison, and their children.
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Reviews for Joan of Arc
19 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Poorly written, with too many references to contemporary literature of Joan of Arc and lack of explanation to actual facts. Vey much slanted by a 21st century feminist and atheists point of view that is very contradictory when telling the story of Joan of Arc.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5If this just told the story of Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who heard the voices of dead saints, led an army to support an uncertain king, was burned at the stake as a man-dressing sorceress, and later became canonized as a saint, that would be enough to make Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured a truly interesting book, but there is more to this biography than a detailed recitation of facts about her life. Along with relevant historical background author Kathryn Harrison also includes how each stage of Joan’s crusade to serve God and save France has been portrayed in popular myth, theatrical plays, cinematic film, and various works of visual art. Because of this expanded scope the book presents a larger picture of political history, and the history of culture, religion, common attitudes, and underlying beliefs than Joan’s tale alone would tell. The writing is a smooth weaving of history, biography, legend, and reflection, and along the way Harrison corrects some common misperceptions about Joan, for instance she wasn’t quite the simple peasant many people then thought and still think she was. Harrison deftly compares Joan’s speeches, actions, and short life with those of Jesus, both to show how well versed in the Bible Joan herself must have been and to help explain why her story resonated so much with the highly religious people of her time. It’s an astounding story, well told, both inspiring and tragic.
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