Jeanne D'Arc: Her Life And Death

At fourteen, a peasant girl in Domrémy heard voices that would reshape the fate of France. Margaret O. Oliphant weaves the legend of Joan of Arc into a nuanced portrait of faith, madness, and political manipulation in medieval France. When the disinherited Charles VII commissioned this illiterate teenager to lift the siege of Orleans, he gambled everything on her claimed visions from saints and angels. In just nine days, she did the impossible. But victory could not save her from the ecclesiastical court that tried and condemned her for heresy. Oliphant traces Joan's meteoric rise and brutal execution with clear sympathy, interrogating how a nation could so quickly abandon the woman who saved it. This is both biography and meditation on the cost of believing something the world refuses to believe with you. For readers drawn to complicated saints, impossible courage, and the tragedy of being burned by those you fought to crown.