Cross-dressing, Gender Identity, and Sexuality of Joan of Arc - Background

Background

Kelly DeVries notes that, "No person of the Middle Ages, male or female, has been the subject of more study than Joan of Arc. She has been portrayed as saint, heretic, religious zealot, seer, demented teenager, proto-feminist, aristocratic wanna-be, savior of France, person who turned the tide of the Hundred Years War and even Marxist liberator." Due to such widely differing interpretations of her life and its meaning, many interpretations of the implications of her adoption of a male dress and lifestyle have been debated.

As Susan Crane notes, "Joan of Arc wore men's clothes almost continually from her first attempts to reach the Dauphin, later crowned Charles VII, until her execution twenty-eight months later. In court, on campaigns, in church, and in the street she cross-dressed, and she refused to stop doing so during the long months of her trial for heresy. Joan's contemporary supporters and adversaries comment extensively on her clothing, and the records of her trial provide commentary of her own, making her by far the best-documented transvestite of the later Middle Ages"

After her capture while protecting the French retreat at Margny, Joan was sold to the English, imprisoned, and subsequently tried for heresy. Despite the attempts of the judges to get her to repent for her donning of male attire, Joan repeatedly defends the wearing of them as a "small matter" that was "the commandment of God and his angels." As Pernoud and Clin note, "Other questions about her mode of dress provoked only repetitions of these answers: She had done nothing that was not by the commandment of God. Probably not even Cauchon could then have guessed the importance that her mode of dress would come to assume." As Beverly Boyd observed, "The issue was, of course, voices .. but the emblem of the heresy was her wearing of men's clothing."

Joan signed a cedula, possibly without understanding, indicating that she would no longer wear men's clothing, only to "relapse" later, giving the court justification to have her executed ("Only those who had relapsed -- that is, those who having once adjured their errors returned to them -- could be condemned to death by a tribunal of the Inquisition and delivered for death.") On May 30, 1431, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake.