Joan of Arc probably never heard anyone call her Jeanne d'Arc
The name the world knows her by is first recorded in 1455, twenty-four years after she was burned. In her lifetime she signed herself Jehanne and called herself the Maiden, and scribes spelled her surname Darc, Tarc or Day. The illiterate teenager still helped turn the Hundred Years' War.
Joan grew up around 1412 in Domrémy, a village in the Meuse valley of northeastern France. Her father, Jacques d'Arc, farmed roughly 20 hectares and earned extra money collecting taxes and leading the village watch; her mother was Isabelle Romée. She could not read or write as a child and dictated her letters, though she may later have learned to sign. France was then fractured. Charles VI suffered bouts of mental illness, Burgundy had arranged the murder of the Duke of Orléans in 1407, and the resulting civil war set Armagnacs against Burgundians, with the dauphin, the future Charles VII, on the Armagnac side.
In 1428 she asked to be brought to Charles, later testifying that the archangel Michael and Saints Margaret and Catherine had told her to save France from the English. At about seventeen she rode with a relief army to Orléans, arriving in April 1429 with her banner. Nine days later the English lifted the siege. She pressed for pursuit through the Loire Campaign, which ended in victory at Patay and cleared the road to Reims, where Charles was crowned with Joan beside him.
Luck then turned. Failed sieges of Paris in September 1429 and La Charité in November cost her the court's confidence. Leading volunteers to relieve Compiègne, she was captured by the Burgundians on 23 May 1430 and handed to the English that November. Bishop Pierre Cauchon tried her for heresy, citing her male dress and visions he called demonic, and she was burned on 30 May 1431, aged about nineteen.
Her reputation climbed afterwards. A church court in 1456 annulled the verdict as riddled with deceit and procedural errors. After the Revolution she became a national emblem, Pope Benedict XV canonised her in 1920, and two years later she was declared a patron saint of France.
Source: Joan of Arc
