In November 1455 a most extraordinary ecclesiastical court convened in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris at the behest of the French Inquisition. At issue was whether French King Charles VII had committed heresy and used witchcraft in achieving victory over the English in the Hundred Years War. The crux of the matter turned on events a generation past, thought by some miraculous and by others diabolical. The defendant herself, Joan of Arc, was not present, having those long years past been accused, tried, and brutally punished. Her testimony and that of witnesses, though, had been entered into the court record and survive today. In that first trial, in 1431, she had referred to herself, in the medieval French of her day, as Joan the Maid. She was already famous as Joan of Arc.
In his youth Jean d’Orleans, Lord of Valbonais, Count of Dunois and Longueville, had known the Maid well. “I think that Joan was sent by God, and that her behavior in war was a fact divine rather than human,” he testified 21/2decades later. “Many reasons make me think so.”
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