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1924
A play written in the early 20th century. It dramatizes the rise of Joan of Arc, her battlefield leadership and coronation campaign, and her prosecution by church and state, probing the collision between visionary conscience and institutional authority. The opening of the work is a substantial preface that reinterprets Joan as a sane, shrewd, and practical visionary whose “voices” reflect an intense imaginative faculty rather than madness. It argues that she was destroyed less for witchcraft than for her presumptuous independence and the threat she posed to entrenched powers, while noting that her trial was legally careful by medieval standards yet morally horrific in outcome. The preface critiques earlier portrayals (from Shakespeare and Schiller to Voltaire, Mark Twain, and Anatole France), rejects melodramatic villainy, and reframes the conflict as tragedy born of normal people acting under powerful institutions. It surveys tensions between nationalism and a universal Church, genius and discipline, and medieval and modern forms of intolerance. Finally, it explains the play’s dramatic method—historical compression, emphasis on the medieval atmosphere, and the choice to portray figures like Cauchon, Lemaître, and Warwick as serious exponents of their systems rather than stock antagonists.
![Night Watches [complete]](https://d3b2n8gj62qnwr.cloudfront.net/COVERS/gutenberg_covers75k/ebook-12161.png)
