SOURCE: Brown, Cynthia J. “Allegorical Design and Image-Making in Fifteenth-Century France: Alain Chartier's Joan of Arc.” French Studies 53, no. 4 (October 1999): 385-404.

[In the following essay, Brown examines Chartier's allegorical depiction of Joan of Arc in the Latin prose letter De Puella epistola, and explores how this work draws upon the allegorical elements of some of Chartier's other writings.]

In the summer of 1429, Alain Chartier penned a letter in which he detailed Joan of Arc's divinely inspired mission in France up to that date. Chartier's Epistola de puella shared many of the features of the more well-known Ditié de Jehanne d'Arc, written by his contemporary Christine de Pizan, in part because both works postdate Charles VII's coronation on 17 July 1429 and precede Joan's ill-fated march on Paris in September 1429.¹ However, whereas Christine directed her vernacular poem of 488 verses to a general public, referring to the more wide-reaching work by the informal diminutive ditié, Chartier addressed his Latin prose epistola of some one hundred lines to a single dedicatee, an un-named prince who is now thought to have been the duke of Milan.² Yet this more formal mode did not restrain Chartier's enthusiasm any more than Christine's. Exhibiting great admiration and amazement in his account, Chartier discusses Joan's peasant background; the voices she heard at twelve years of age urging her to save the French kingdom; the success of her examination in Poitiers; Joan's interview with the Dauphin in Chinon (about which he could reveal nothing new); and her role in lifting the siege of Orleans and paving the way for the king's coronation in Reims. Marvelling, for example, at how the English did not even attempt to harm Joan in Orleans, Chartier exclaims: ‘hostes enim, velut ex inimicis amici, ex viris mulieres facti aut cuncti ligati manibus forent’ (p. 327, l. 12) [It was as if (our) enemies had become our friends, as if (these) men had been changed into women, as if their hands had been chained].

Unlike Christine de Pizan, who named Joan of Arc in the title of her poem, Chartier, like Jean Gerson in his De quaddam puella, never directly identified her in his text. He obviously did not need to do so. Chartier's repeated reference to Joan as the Maid, or Puella, the equivalent of Christine's Pucelle, sufficed, since she had become, at least for a number of French supporters, the incarnation of youth, femaleness, and, most importantly, virginity, that ideal human state according to Church teachings. As Deborah Fraioli has suggested, this relationship was legitimized not only by existing prophecies that an armed virgin would save the French kingdom, but also by the implicit association between Joan's and the Virgin Mary's powers of redemption and restoration.³ Moreover, at a time when political writers commonly allegorized the French kingdom as the body politic,⁴ Joan's actions brought hope that this seriously dismembered and violated body could be made whole again.⁵ In other words, she symbolized the potentially restored kingdom, the integrity that France could once again achieve after a prolonged period of debilitation. Reconstructed in the public consciousness as far more than a young inspired maiden with saintly powers of restoration, however, Joan was also figured as the embodiment of the virtue and courage that had long been absent in French political and military leaders. Chartier's own discussion of her qualities confirms this:

nemo mortalium est qui si ipsam cogitet non admiretur, dictis stupeat, factis eciam, virtute et magnitudine rerum gestarum, que tam multa et tam mirabilia brevi tempore egerit; sed quid mirum? Quid enim eorum est que habere duces oportet in bellis quod Puella non habeat? An prudenciam militarem? habet mirabilem. An fortem animum? habet excelsum superatque omnes. An diligenciam? vincit ceteros. An justiciam? an virtutem? an felicitatem? et his preter ceteros est ornata.

(p. 328, ll. 17-18)

[There is no one in the world who, pondering her words and deeds, is not filled with admiration and astonishment at the many extraordinary marvels that have occurred in such a short time. But should we be so astonished? What is the one martial quality that we wish to find in a war leader that the Maid does not possess? Military skill? Hers is marvelous! Courage? Hers is great and superior to that of everyone else. Quickness and readiness? Hers surpasses that of all others. Her sense of justice? Virtue? Goodness? No one else was ever so well endowed.]

The association of Joan with these qualities—courage and prowess, justice, and virtue—doubtless enabled would-be French supporters to negotiate more easily the enormous credibility gap between her past narrative as an inexperienced peasant girl and the victories the French military was winning under her presumed guidance. I would argue that it was the late medieval tendency to allegorize moments of crisis in order to understand and overcome them that set the stage for the very construction of Joan's image. For the public's assimilation of the Maid with a reconstituted France through a manipulation of the concepts of virginity, virtue, and courage implicitly aligned her with the many personified abstractions that peopled contemporary vernacular narratives.⁶ Raison, Droicture, and Justice, for example, figured centrally in Christine de Pizan's Cité des Dames, while Chartier gave voice to twelve virtues, including Noblesce, Foy, Honneur, and Droitture, in his Bréviaire des Nobles.

A young girl raised to super-human levels by an association with certain morally driven concepts that her own actions, or at least second-hand versions of them, continued to perpetuate, Joan essentially took centre stage in a kind of morality play in 1429. Indeed her confrontation with the evil English forces would have easily been interpreted by the learned as well as the illiterate fifteenth-century public as a true psychomachia, that is, as a dramatic interaction of personified vices and virtues often featured in medieval writings, theatre, church sermons, manuscript illuminations and on cathedral façades.⁷

Joan's miraculous appearance on the French scene in 1429 can be viewed, then, as an allegorical narrative of enormous dramatic dimension and impact.⁸ To appreciate more completely the collective construction and ready perpetuation of Joan's image,⁹ of which few contemporary visual examples remain today, we need only turn to the literary and artistic imagery of her time. Deriving inspiration from the enormous success of the Roman de la Rose, early fifteenth-century vernacular writers commonly designed their narratives as allegorical stagings. Alain Chartier himself contributed to this tradition with a number of important writings, including his 1422 Quadrilogue invectif and his Livre de l'Espérance, a work left incomplete upon his untimely death in 1430.¹⁰

Chartier's two allegorical works shed light on the construction of Joan of Arc's image in a number of authoritative ways. Not only was Chartier one of the most successful court writers of the day, but as Charles VII's notary, secretary and ambassador,¹¹ he served the very king Joan saved. In point of fact, Chartier wrote the Epistola de puella promoting Joan's activities at a time when those involved in the conscious or unconscious construction of her image demonstrated increasing scrutiny and scepticism about her authority. The Quadrilogue invectif and Livre de l'Espérance conveniently frame the period of Joan's adventure as well. The first depicts the political crisis in France prior to her appearance on the scene, during that period of civil disruption and chaos that followed the precipitated flight of the Dauphin (along with Chartier) from Paris to Bourges in 1418 and made the Dauphin a virtual outlaw in his own country. The Livre de l'Espérance portrays the psychological conflicts besetting the author—narrator during the months leading up to the lifting of the siege of Orleans in May 1429 as well as his consolation by two of the three theological virtues.¹² The manner in which Chartier shaped his allegories in these writings and artists' renditions of them mirror in reverse the process by which the French public fashioned Joan's image. In different yet complementary ways, each work reconfigured contemporary issues, thereby offering us indirectly an illustration of the cultural stage onto which Joan of Arc most unexpectedly stepped in the spring of 1429.¹³

Composed between 12 April and 13 August 1422, during a period when the English had recently won a new round of military victories, Alain Chartier's Quadrilogue invectif dramatizes the French political crisis through an allegorical staging of the personifications of three socio-political entities, the French estates: the Nobility, Clergy, and People. Following the late medieval literary convention in which the dream state provided an authorizing framework for the discussion of significant political and moralistic questions, the pseudo-autobiographical narrator, or acteur, whose anguish is described as a ‘debat entre espoir et desesperance’,¹⁴ falls asleep and has a vision in which France appears before him. Reconfiguring the body politic into the allegorized female form of the French kingdom,¹⁵ Chartier has his narrator describe the arrival of France, whose noble extraction is belied by her dolorous comportment and dishevelled appearance, in the wasteland of his dream world. As Le Chevalier, Le Clergé, and Le Peuple, her three sons, approach, France berates them for their ingratitude, selfishness, and lack of action on behalf of the common good, exhorting them to come to the support of their mother. Two of her children, Le Peuple and Le Chevalier, speak out several times in self-defensive and vituperative tones, while Le Clergé, remaining somewhat above the fray, preaches about the necessity of reversing the present state of corruption. France's final words call for each of her children to acknowledge his own faults instead of blaming the others. In the end, the awakened acteur consciously takes up his pen, instead of his sword, to urge his audience to defend France.¹⁶

How allegory works here is pertinent to our discussion of Joan's own particular image. Chartier's staging of France and her three children is more or less conventional: Le Peuple and Le Clergé participate in this drama in predictable fashion as personifications of two of the French estates. The third son, however, does not function in exactly the same manner. Designated not as La Chevalerie or La Noblesse, as one might expect, but rather as Le Chevalier, he is not the personified abstraction of an entire class like his counterparts. Does an explanation for this anomaly lie in the fact that, with the sex of allegorical figures traditionally determined by the gender of the French word used to depict them, the abstract words for knighthood were feminine? Was Chartier influenced by the Salic law and consciously striving to maintain all three of France's children as males in contradistinction to their female mother? Was it inconceivable for the author to portray the one character representing the French military as a female warrior at this time?¹⁷ Or did he feel that figuring the military as a female abstraction would constitute an unfair attack on women, who had had very little to do with the nobles' supposedly unheroic fighting? There is no way of confirming if and, if so, why Chartier might have avoided creating a female personification to represent knighthood here; but his divergence from that expected allegorical designation is rather remarkable, given the presence of similar personifications in other works.¹⁸

In the end, France stands apart from and above her three sons, not only because Chartier portrays her as a victimized parent, justified plaintiff and accuser designed to gain the sympathy and eventual political support of her audience, but also because he allegorizes her character in the most elaborate terms. For example, the magnificent royal palace at France's side, once sumptuously adorned and solidly erected, has, according to the text, devolved into a structure in dire need of repair. France, in point of fact, is exhausted from having held up for so long the main section of the cracked palace wall (p. 9). With fleurs-de-lis and dolphins (dauphins) adorning the sleeve of that supporting arm, the underlying allegorical significance of these details is all too obvious: the infrastructure and foundation of the French body politic, broken from within, cannot continue to maintain its integrity.

The meaning of France's carefully described mantel is likewise politically engendered. Chartier has fashioned this extraordinary cloak, woven out of three different designs, to depict the three French estates. In the upper horizontal band, fleurs-de-lis and the banners and symbols of the former kings and princes of the House of France once decorated a section bejewelled with precious gems. Letters and characters representing various areas of knowledge appeared in the mantel's middle section. Fertile land filled with a variety of animals, plants, and fruits adorned the lower band of the mantel. But this once precious vestment of great artistry and beauty has been so violently torn and soiled that it is no longer possible to decipher its meaning (pp. 7-8). By directing the reader's attention to the visual depiction of socio-political tensions, France's mantel serves to emblematize Chartier's entire narrative strategy.

Like many other late medieval literary allegories, the dramatic and visual potential of Chartier's imagined scenario invites artistic representation. Indeed, a number of the forty extant manuscripts of the work include miniatures, confirming that Chartier's allegorical design in the Quadrilogue invectif was intimately associated with image-making by miniaturists.¹⁹

The first image of one of the most elaborately ornamented manuscripts of the Quadrilogue invectif, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale fr. 126, an anthology dating from the first half of the fifteenth century (Droz, x), evokes in a compelling manner the socio-political tensions that strain the dialogue among Chartier's protagonists (fol. 191). The reader discovers a dynamic rapport here not only between text and image, but also among the various levels of decoration. For artists have strategically shaped the manuscript folio into what might be called a codiocological drama, with the miniature, decorated margins, rubric, initial letters, and script all collaborating in a theatrical recreation of their own. The elaborately ornamented letter A that begins Chartier's beautifully transcribed text, for example, provides a dramatic transition from the stunning visual rendition of the Quadrilogue invectif in the upper register to the verbal account of the work below. The large scale of the opening initial dazzles the reader's eye, especially in contrast with the smaller scripted letters that follow, and it boldly announces the initial words of the work: A la treshaulte et excellente majesté des princes, à la treshonnouree magnificence des nobles, circonspection des clers et bonne industrie du peuple françois, Alain Charretier, humble secretaire du roy … (p. 1).²⁰ The author has unexpectedly recast the conventional opening dedication to a noble patron into a general address directed as well to all three levels of French society, each of which is personified in Chartier's text and portrayed in the miniature above it. The beautifully decorated margins set this leaf apart from the other folios of this work by calling attention to their own resplendent display of colourful floral patterns and the highly stylized staging of participants and spectators they enclose in the miniature. The border of the illustration, reinforced by the elaborate architectural settings within the miniature, outlines on the manuscript leaf itself a privileged space in much the same way that the scaffolding of a theatre demarcated the stage for the public's viewing. Like the décor simultané of medieval plays, with simultaneously juxtaposed scenes on the stage, three different mini-dramas fill three contiguous spaces of one and the same image. This composite form of illustration was, of course, a common feature of medieval books.

Action in the opening miniature of MS BN fr. 126, however, does not necessarily follow the left-to-right pattern of a reader. While locating the principal focus of the four-part invective itself in the central privileged space of the illustration, the artist has placed two preparatory scenes of the Quadrilogue invectif at left and right respectively. The prologue and initial phase of the dream sequence, in which author and narrator are essentially compressed into one figure who has fallen asleep in his study, appear at the left. Here the miniaturist has collapsed two conventional medieval images into one segment of the tripartite illustration: that of the author writing in his study, developed from early medieval iconography of the Evangelists, and the scene of the sleeping author-narrator, which derives from the Romance of the Rose tradition. The depiction of the first stage of the author-narrator's vision, the discovery of France and her children, is situated at the right. Although France does not appear here as dishevelled as the text itself indicates, nor is her mantel ripped, we can see that she supports the broken wall of the House of France and that her mantel bears many of those details carefully described by Chartier's narrator.²¹ Again in keeping with textual protocol, Le Peuple lies on the ground in torn clothes as the armoured Chevalier bullies him, and Le Clergé stands apart looking on. The accusations hurled by each of the four protagonists are dramatically staged in the central portion of this image, where, corroborating the text, tears flow from the eyes of the distanced France as she speaks with her sons, a discussion indicated by their hand gestures. This scene serves as a general composite version of the heated exchange among the three classes, which appears in other manuscripts in a series of miniatures.²²

Joan of Arc herself would come to represent a composite version of these four separate allegorical representations. On one hand, as an incarnation of a new nationalistic spirit (Poirion), her female gender allied her with Chartier's figure of France and her patriotic call to arms, especially given the association made between Joan and a reconstituted French body politic. In fact, alluding to, if not exactly adopting, the same allegorical terms, Chartier himself later invoked these very associations in his Latin letter about Joan when he stated: ‘Hec est illa que non tam aliunde terrarum profecta quam e celo demissa videtur ut ruentem Galliam cervice et humeris sustineret …’ (p. 329, l. 20) [It is as if she came not from our world, but rather that she was sent forth from heaven to support with head and arms our ailing and decaying France]. At the same time, the public also identified Joan with the male figures in important ways: her peasant roots allied her with Le Peuple, her divinely inspired mission with Le Clergé, her military deeds with Le Chevalier. Whereas the elaborate details Chartier associated with France and her sons in the Quadrilogue invectif served to humanize and concretize his socio-political abstractions, however, Joan's contemporaries fashioned her image in a reverse manner. Its nearly complete lack of specific detail facilitated the public's substitution of Joan's real-life status as an inexperienced, illiterate, spiritually driven peasant girl with a more vague, yet familiar, image of a female abstraction. Through the construction of this image, people participated in, if only unconsciously, what had long constituted literary allegorical design: making the abstract concrete and the concrete abstract.

Chartier's staging of France's political crisis underwent a significant transformation in the Livre de l'Espérance, which postdates the Quadrilogue invectif by at least six years.²³ The allegorical modifications the author made to the later work, which coincides more closely with the period of Joan's own entry into the political arena, introduce us to yet another level of contemporary image-making.

Thought to have been begun in 1428, when the situation in France had reached an unexpectedly more desperate stage, the Livre de l'Espérance was left unfinished upon Chartier's death in March 1430. In this writing, the author presents his readers a considerably longer, more complicated, and more psychologically-based allegorical narrative; it develops the Quadrilogue invectif narrator's ‘debat entre espoir et desesperance’, rather than the more externally political allegorical configuration of the earlier work.²⁴ In reshaping the greatly deteriorated French political crisis into an internalized mental landscape, the author, essentially placing his own emotions and spiritual convictions on stage, resorted to more abstract entities. Their embodiment of human passions and theological virtues is further removed from the more concrete, politically-based world of Chartier's earlier work, their attributes, words, and behaviour are more detailed and symbolically charged, and their metaphoric interactions more extensively elaborated. And yet Chartier, doubtless in an attempt to inspire his readers, exploited the allegorical veil of the Livre de l'Espérance in a more emboldened manner by having his personified figures directly address, criticize, and exhort the French rulers and their subjects.²⁵ In a reversal of the gender roles of the Quadrilogue invectif, it is the male figures in the Livre de l'Espérance, Entendement and the acteur, who are enfeebled, ailing characters, while female personifications are responsible both for their illness (Melencolie, Defiance, Indignation, Desesperance) and their eventual recovery (Foy, Esperance, Charité). Could Chartier consciously—or unconsciously—have reformulated in allegorical terms the prophesy that the kingdom of France would be ruined by one woman but saved by another.²⁶

A variety of fifteenth-century manuscript images provides insight into this more psychologically based allegory. The opening scene, in which Melencolie covers the languishing body of the sad author-narrator with her mantel while placing him on la couche d'angoisse et de maladie (p. 3), where he remains for days without eating or speaking, is visually translated in a tripartite miniature from MS BN fr. 126 (fol. 218),²⁷ the counterpart to the Quadrilogue invectif miniature from the same manuscript, discussed above. The acteur is literally moved from his classical pose in the chair of the writing poet at the left to his ‘bed of anguish and sickness’ at the right. Setting the appropriate stage for the acteur's phantasmagoric dream that follows, this bedroom scenario alerts us to the fact that we are witnessing a verbal and visual rendition of what any twentieth-century reader would recognize as a severe case of depression. The narrator specifically describes how his head is opened up and the best part of his mind, namely his fantasy or imagination, is removed by Melencolie, giving rise not to the traditional literary dream but to a nightmarish vision (p. 5). Long before modern psychiatry and psychology provided us with the concepts and vocabulary to discuss the workings of the mind and related emotional trauma, the Middle Ages had its own very concrete and visual manner of understanding and representing mental anguish, as Huizinga suggested decades ago.

Two miniatures from MS BN fr. 24441 depict in great detail the dramatic arrival on the scene of the three human passions responsible for the narrator's state of mind: Defiance, Indignation, Desesperance (fols 34 and 41). The visual depiction of Indignation closely follows the text as she is seen holding in one hand a bloody whip of vengeance, and in the other open tablets, from which she launches into a violent satire against the court by reading of the injuries caused her. Defiance, the embodiment of insecurity and suspicion as she repeatedly steals furtive glances around her, is likewise portrayed according to her textual description: with beggar's bags slung over her shoulder and a lead casket and keys clenched in her hands, she despairs about the general anguish of the people who have neither refuge nor possibility of escape. The image of Desesperance as a pale woman with sunken eyes, dishevelled hair, torn clothes and bearing a rope around her neck, a shroud over her arm, and a knife in her fist, completes the accurate visual rendition of Chartier's text. It is she who suggests suicide to the ailing narrator as the only antidote possible to the predictable misery of his future.²⁸ Together these three psychological states—Defiance, Indignation and Desesperance—whose artistic likenesses appear in MS BN fr. 126's composite scene uniting all the allegorical figures of the work, at the right,²⁹ hark back to the allegorized France of Chartier's Quadrilogue invectif, for each represents a critical dimension of the earlier character. And yet the author's decision to put his depressed persona on stage through these personifications, rather than having him serve as the political embodiment of those emotions, results in an even more compelling dramatic narrative that calls to mind Christine de Pizan's weeping in a closed abbey at the beginning of her Ditié de Jehanne d'Arc.

A kind of alter-ego or personification of the author-narrator's deep desire to find an explanation to the incomprehensible situation around him, Entendement appears in the three segments of the theatrical décor simultané of MS BN fr. 126: always by the acteur's side, he follows as Melencolie transports the acteur to bed, and then falls into a deep lethargy, as the narrator is bedevilled by psychic monsters (pp. 3-4).³⁰ Once awakened by Nature (p. 22), however, Entendement seeks to protect the acteur from Melencolie and her cohorts by exhorting him to ignore these monsters. Chartier's acteur describes this psychological turning point in terms that clearly inspired artistic imitation—and possibly Charles d'Orléans as well:

Entendement se retrait vers la partie de ma memoire, et ouvrit a grant effors pour donner plus grant clarté ung petit guichet dont les varroux estoient compressés du rooil de oubliance. Par la entrerent incontinent troys dames. … Entendement qui defferma le guichet de ma memoire lez mescongneust a l'entrer, car encores avoit il ses yeulx esblohis, comme prisonnier qui d'une trouble chartre vient soudainement a la lueur du solleil. Par l'entree de ces dames fut la place esclarcie de lumiere.

(p. 23)

In the illustration of MS BN fr. 126, for example, Entendement opens the ‘guichet de [l]a memoire’ of the acteur in the upper register of the second section of the tripartite miniature. In one of the images in manuscript 24441 (fol. 41), the divine light announcing the imminent arrival of Foy, Esperance, and Charité emerges through the door at the left as Entendement awakens to scare off the narrator's nightmarish emotions through his strong denunciation of them. Two subsequent images in the same manuscript present the arrival of their ideological opposites and replacements, the theological virtues (fols 44 and 71).

Foy wears a golden crown of twelve jewels representing the articles of faith, from which emanates a vivid gold light in a number of miniatures; she holds under her arm the Pentateuch, while reading from the open book of God. Esperance carries a golden anchor in one hand and opens from time to time a container of consoling, sweet-smelling balm, an action that, in chasing off the monsters, positively alters the acteur's state of mind. Each, one after the other, engages in a lengthy dialogue with Entendement, who is riddled with doubt about the future. Foy teaches him about Justice Divine and Providence, insisting that the only way to rectify the desperate situation is to place complete confidence in God. Entendement thereupon renews his acceptance of the precepts of Foy, whose sister Esperance then confirms that prayers, sacrifice and respect for religion are what guarantee the safeguard of kingdoms. These two theological virtues, along with Charité, are likewise clearly depicted in MS BN fr. 126's composite scene at the right’.³¹

Chartier's personifications of Foy and Esperance and their many visual renditions in extant fifteenth-century manuscripts are reminiscent of Joan of Arc's image, which was constructed—and deconstructed—around the time that Chartier was working on his Livre de l'Espérance. In the text, in fact, Esperance all but prophesizes Joan's adventure by suggesting that foreign invaders would experience a reversal of fortune (p. 139).³² Indeed, when depicted in virtuous terms, Joan was none other than the incarnation of Chartier's Esperance.³³ The word spes and its derivatives appear several times in Chartier's Epistola de puella as he describes how the dauphin reacted to his interview with Joan—it was as if he had been rapidly infused with renewed hope (‘illud tamen manifestissimum est regem velut spe renovatum non mediocri fuisse alacritate perfusum’ [p. 327, l. 10])—and acknowledges that Joan has lifted spirits toward the hope of better times (‘animum ad meliora sperandum erexit’ [p. 329, l. 20]).

In returning to Alain Chartier's Latin letter of July 1429, in which he discusses the magnarum rerum atque illustrium (p. 326, l. 2) [great and illustrious events] surrounding Joan of Arc's coming, we discover that the author, although depicting his heroine in the non-allegorical terms appropriate for this more or less official letter, repeatedly invokes many dramatic aspects of the two works we have just examined. He quotes in direct discourse Joan's voices, thereby authorizing words he himself had never heard (p. 326, l. 5). He imagines the drama of her Poitiers interrogation as a spectacle: ‘Spectaculum profecto pulcherrimum: [mulier] cum viris, indocta cum doctis, sola cum multis, infima de summis disputat!’ (p. 327, l. 9) [Indeed a most admirable spectacle: a woman among men, unlearned among the learned, alone among many, she of lowly rank discusses the most lofty matters!]. Even though Chartier writes his letter to a foreign noble, like his own allegorical figures, he assumes a second-person stance when addressing Joan herself in laudatory and in personified terms. Joan of Arc is like the divine light emanating from the theological virtues in the text and miniatures of the Livre de l'Espérance: ‘O virginem singularem, omni gloria, omni laude dignam, dignam divinis honoribus, tu regni decus, tu Gallie lumen, tu lux, tu gloria non Gallorum tantum, sed Christianorum omnium!’ (p. 329, l. 21) [O distinguished Virgin, worthy of all glory, of all praise, worthy of all divine honour, you are the honour of our Kingdom, the bright light of the lily, you are the light, you are the glory, not only of the French, but of all Christians]. Most dramatic perhaps is the fact that, while Chartier seems to have hesitated in portraying knighthood in the Quadrilogue invectif as a female allegorical figure, he repeatedly and vividly promotes the image of Joan as the female warrior in his less publicly oriented Epistola de puella. In one passage he states: ‘Etenim conflictura cum hoste ipsa exercitum ducit, ipsa castra locat, ipsa prelium, ipsa aciem instruit et fortiter opera militis utitur et, que pridem opera ducis, exequitur. Dato enim signo hastam raptim capit, captam concutit, vibrat in hostes, et, tacto calcaribus equo, magno impetu in agmen irrumpit’ (pp. 328-39, l. 19) [If we need to engage in battle with the enemy, she leads the army, sets up camp, forms the battle ranks, behaves like a knight, like an experienced war leader. And when the signal is given, she seizes her lance, brandishes it, hurls it against the enemy, spurs her horse on, and with great fury wreaks havoc on enemy ranks]. Overcome by admiration for her military actions, Chartier, like his counterpart Christine de Pizan,³⁴ accords Joan a rank high above all past military heroes: ‘Non Hectore reminiscat et gaudeat Troja, exultet Grecia Alexandro, Hannibal Affrica, Italia Cesare et romanis ducibus omnibus glorietur! Gallia, et si ex pristinis multos habeat, attamen una puella contenta audebit se gloriari et laude bellica ceteris nacionibus se comparate, verum quoque, si expediet, se anteponere’ (p. 329, l. 22) [Troy need no longer rejoice at Hector's memory; Greece need not exalt Alexander any more, (or) Africa its Hannibal; Italy need not glorify Caesar and the other Roman generals any longer! France, even if she has many heroes from the past, will be satisfied with the Maid: she will be glorified and her military glory compared favourably with all other nations; and in truth, let it be clear that she ranks above all of them]. On one hand, Chartier offers his reader a very literal account of Joan's actions, perhaps as a conscious part of the royal strategy of avoiding reference to the mythical and prophetic dimensions of Joan of Arc's image at this point in time.³⁵ On the other hand, Chartier's repeatedly voiced amazement, his hyperbolic glorification of Joan, and his very dramatic staging of her story maintain the allegorical dimension of her image that echoes that of his own fictional characters. In the end, Joan—or the image that her public constructed of her—transcended tradition itself by powerfully uniting the literal and the allegorical.

And yet, by September 1429, the allegorization of Joan through her association with positive abstractions was undermined by her capture and subsequent condemnation as a heretic. Joan had become a victim of the once favourable forces of public image-making for, ultimately, at least in the king's entourage, her very same actions were interpreted as a challenge to, rather than a confirmation of, the very status quo she had played such a critical role in re-establishing. As long as Joan's behaviour had more or less coincided with what was expected from her idealized, yet artificially imposed role, the pattern of royal and public support continued. Once the difference between her literal actions and those idealized expectations became too great, she was essentially ‘de-allegorized’ by those in power and reduced to a witch or heretic. This very deconstruction recalls the manner in which troubadour and trouvère poets ostensibly idealized the lady in their twelfth- and thirteenth-century lyrics, yet, when faced with her unresponsiveness, ended up debasing her as a woman.³⁶

Curiously, just as Christine de Pizan's Ditié de Jehanne d'Arc constituted her last known literary product, Chartier's Epistola de puella proved to be the last work he wrote as well. The defeat of the Maid had an eerie way of forever silencing contemporary French authors—not to mention French authorities. And yet, Joan's burning in Rouen ultimately achieved what the English, in making certain she would be judged by the French, had so feared it might: her martyrdom. Joan's rehabilitation twenty-five years after her death ensured that the myth and legend that surrounded her during her life, and which was expressed in the form of pseudo-literary allegorical constructs, would endure.³⁷

Although we have no way of directly accessing that most medieval of spectacles, Joan of Arc's restoration of France in the fifteenth century, we can indirectly invoke that dramatic moment by reading carefully between the lines of texts such as Alain Chartier's and of the manuscript illuminations accompanying them. Indeed medieval illustrated books represent in many ways the counterpart of the films that figure so centrally in our twentieth-century portrayals of Joan of Arc.³⁸ Both are the visual cultural products of a community of makers, for just as medieval works were created by multiple bookmakers, including authors, compilers, rubricators, illuminators, miniaturists, and scribes, so too the cinematic community is constituted by many makers—producers, directors, actors, screenplay writers and technicians. Both are cultural products that can be repeatedly re-viewed. It is the ultimate tribute to Joan of Arc, to the incomprehensible drama she precipitated in the fifteenth century, and to her image makers, who include Alain Chartier himself and, indirectly, the illustrators of his works, that she has come to represent, in twentieth-century cinema, one of the most compelling and creatively re-interpreted roles.

Notes

1. See Le Ditié de Jehanne d'Arc, ed. by Angus J. Kennedy and Kenneth Varty (Oxford, Society for Medieval Languages and Literature Monographs, 1977). See also Jean-Claude Muhlethaler, ‘Le Poète et le prophète: littérature et politique au XV^e siècle’, Le Moyen Français, 13 (1982), 37-57, who compares the narrators in Chartier's Quadrilogue invectif and Christine's Lamentacion des Maux and Ditié de Jehanne d'Arc.

2. Pascale Bourgain-Hemeryck, Les Œuvres latines d'Alain Chartier (Paris, CNRS, 1977), pp. 52-53. For an edition of the Latin text of Chartier's letter, see pp. 326-29, from which all quotations are taken. For a French translation of the letter, see Pierre Champion, Histoire poétique du quinzième siècle (Paris, Champion, 1966), 1, 150-54. English translations are my own.

3. See ‘The Literary Image of Joan of Arc: Prior Influences’, Speculum, 56 (1981), 818, 824-25.

4. See, for example, Christine de Pizan's Livre du Corps de Policie of c. 1407 (critical edition by Robert H. Lucas (Geneva, Droz, 1967)). Acknowledging her debt to Plutarch (probably via John of Salisbury), Christine describes the Body Politic as a living entity with the prince at its head, knights and nobles serving as its hands and arms, and the people as its stomach, legs and feet (pp. 2-3).

5. Marina Warner states in Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (New York, Vintage, 1981), p. 32: ‘Juxtaposed to the vivisected and dismembered body of the kingdom, her virginity provided an urgent symbol of integrity. By synecdoche, Joan's intact sexuality stood for the whole of her and, in the ambitions of her supporters, for the whole of France’.

6. Daniel Poirion, in ‘Jeanne d'Arc’, in Littérature française: Le Moyen Age II (Paris, Arthaud, 1971), p. 119, speaks in similar, but more general terms when he refers to Joan as a momentary ‘living allegory’ of nascent nationalism.

7. See Adolf Katzenellenbogen, Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Medieval Art (University of Toronto Press, 1989).

8. In fact, within thirty years of her death, the Mystère du Siège d'Orléans (by Jacques Millet?), the first known dramatic work written on the subject of Joan, was composed and staged. Taking a slightly different angle, Philippe Contamine describes Joan in De Jeanne d'Arc aux guerres d'Italie: Figures, images et problèmes du XV^e siècle (Orleans, Paradigme, 1994), 74 ff., in terms of a ‘myth in action’. See also Robert Deschaux, ‘Jeanne d'Arc à l'heure de la poésie: Trois visages de la Pucelle au XV^e siècle’, in L'Hostellerie de Pensée: Études sur l'art littéraire au Moyen Age offertes à Daniel Poirion par ses anciens élèves, ed. by Michel Zink, Danielle Bohler et al. (Paris, Presses de l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1995), p. 142, who speaks of the birth of a legend, if not a myth, with the arrival of Joan of Arc on the scene.

9. See Fraioli, pp. 819-20 and pp. 822-29, who discusses the ‘collective propagandistic effort’ on the part of the Duphin's entourage and others in the construction of Joan of Arc; Poirion, p. 118; and Contamine, p. 75, who speaks of the power of ‘images-forces’ that both Joan and the Bourges government helped to shape.

10. For details about Chartier's death on 20 March 1430, see C. J. H. Walravens, Alain Chartier (Amsterdam, Meulenhoff-Didier, 1971), pp. 40-48.

11. For details about Chartier's diplomatic missions, see J. C. Laidlaw, The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier (Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 5-15.

12. For details about the date of the work, see Walravens, pp. 82-83, who places the terminus ad quem some time before the victory in Orléans in May 1429.

13. The Quadrilogue invectif and Livre de l'Espérance commonly appeared together in contemporary manuscript collections as well. See Champion, Histoire poétique du quinzième siècle, p. 135, note 2, and Laidlaw's listing of the sixteen manuscripts containing both works in The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier (pp. 44-46).

14. See E. Droz's edition of Le Quadrilogue invectif (Paris, Champion, 1950), p. 7, from which this and all other references are taken.

15. The clergy did not necessarily form part of the so-called Body Politic (see note 5).

16. For a discussion of the fifteenth-century poet as political writer, see Joël Blanchard, ‘Vox poetica, vox politica’, Etudes littéraires sur le XV^e siècle (Milan, Unniversità Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 1985), pp. 39-51.

17. France attacks her children as ‘feminins de couraiges et de meurs’ (p. 10). It is not clear whether Chartier's likening of the English soldiers to women a few years later in his description of their reaction to Joan of Arc in Orleans (‘ex viris mulieres facti’ [p. 327, l. 12] [as if men had been changed into women]) was likewise derogatory. Did he invoke this comparison because he saw women as bearers of peace or because he saw them as weak? See below the discussion of Chartier's subsequent emphasis on Joan of Arc as female warrior in his epistola.

18. In his Brévaire des Nobles, for example, Chartier has Noblesce and Proesce speak.

19. For a listing of these manuscripts, see Laidlaw, The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier, pp. 43-46.

20. Cited from the Droz edition, which is based solely on MS BN fr. 126.

21. In manuscript BN fr. 24441 (fol. 5^v), France is more ‘appropriately’ portrayed in a disordered state, with wild hair and her crown awry. The design of her robe likewise follows the text more closely, with its sleeve of fleurs-de-lis and dolphins prominently located. The structure of the palace she holds up is in even greater disrepair than in the MS 126 miniature. For a reproduction of this miniature, see Patricia M. Gathercole, ‘Illuminations on the Manuscripts of Alain Chartier’, Studi Francesi, XX (1976), 509.

22. See, for example, manuscripts BN fr. 1133 (fols 1, 4, 7), BN fr. 19127 (fols 19, 24^v, 35^v, 39, 43, 60^v, 63), BN fr. 24441 (fols 2, 5^v), MS BN Rothschild 2796 (fols 1, 3, 10, 12^v, 18^v, 22), and MS Typ 92, Houghton Library, Harvard University (fols 2, 4, 5^v).

23. The work is also referred to as ‘L'Esperance ou consolation des trois vertus’ and ‘L'Exil’. In MS BN fr. 24440, the work is entitled ‘La calamité de France’ in the colophon (fol. 74^v). Manuscript BN fr. 126 mistakenly refers to the Livre de l'Espérance as Le Curial, the title of a different work by Chartier, which also criticized corruption at the court. I have adopted the title of the most recent edition by François Rouy (Paris, Champion, 1989), from which all subsequent references are taken.

24. Chartier's speech to the king of Scotland during a mission in 1428 prefigures the Livre de l'Espérance, according to Champion, Histoire poétique du quinzième siècle, pp. 122-31.

25. For example, Indignation violently denounces the court as a den of ingratitude and hypocrisy (p. 6), while Defiance paints the general anguish of the French people who have been betrayed by the French government (pp. 11-15). Desesperance criticizes the knights and the clergy (pp. 19-20). Foy condemns the sins of princes, courtisans and kings, decries the Church's misuse of temporal goods, and denounces the indifference and inconstancy of French subjects (pp. 24-26). Esperance attacks those who have turned from God as well as man's excessive confidence in false hopes (pp. 92-133).

26. For Joan's possible knowledge and manipulation of such lore, see Charles T. Wood, Joan of Arc and Richard III (New York, Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 138-42.

27. See also the miniatures of this scene that decorate BN fr. 2265 (fol. 2), Houghton Library Typ 92, Harvard (fol. 41), and Pierpont Morgan Library manuscript 438 (fol. 1).

28. This idea is subsequently condemned and rejected by Entendement, not surprising given the author's prominent clerical position in a very Catholic world. For details about Chartier's religious affiliations, see Walravens, Alain Chartier, pp. 35-39, and Laidlaw, The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier, pp. 26-27.

29. The depictions of these supposedly monstrous figures are much less negative in the beautifully decorated miniature of MS fr. 126. Compare with manuscripts BN fr. 2265 (fol. 12^v), Houghton Library Typ 92, Harvard (fol. 4), and PML 438 (fol. 4).

30. In his description of the images in this manuscript, BN fr. 126 (p. xvii), as well as in mss. BN fr. 2265 (p. xxv), BN fr. 2441 (pp. xxix-xxxi), Houghton Library 92 (p. xxxvi), and PML 438 (pp. xxxviii-xxxix), François Rouy, editor of the Livre de l'Espérance, has surprisingly confused the depiction of the acteur and Entendement. (Folio references and the description of the miniature in Houghton Library 92 are filled with errors too.) However, Chartier's text clearly indicates that the acteur is the figure whom Melencolie ‘vint porter au logeis d'enfermeté, et … getta en la couche d'angoisse et de maladie’ (p. 3), while Entendement ‘demoura de coste … estourdi, estonné, et comme en litargie’ (p. 4).

31. See also the images in manuscripts 2265 (fols 17 and 64) and PML 438 (fols 15 and 51^v). Although Chartier never added the discourse of Charité to his work, she is always portrayed in miniatures decorating the manuscripts of the Livre de l'Espérance.

32. Although referring to specific moments in French history in the following passage (pp. 143-48), Chartier never mentions contemporary events.

33. Deschaux, p. 145, makes a similar association between Chartier's Livre de l'Espérance and the renewed hope generated by Joan of Arc.

34. See stanzas xxxv-xxxvi of the Ditié de Jehanne d'Arc.

35. Contamine, p. 74, describes Chartier's letter in the following terms: ‘… la dimension prophétique et mythique est à dessein occultée au profit d'une image plus positive et, en un certain sens, réductrice’.

36. E. Jane Burns, ‘The Man Behind the Lady in Troubadour Lyric’, Romance Notes, XXV, 3 (Spring 1985), 254-70. Chartier's own Belle Dame sans merci and the public's strong reaction against his lady's refusal to get involved with the lover constituted another curious stage in this development.

37. For a fascinating account of the endurance of her legend, see Michel Winock's ‘Jeanne d'Arc’, in Les Lieux de Mémoire, ed. by Pierre Nora (Paris, Gallimard, 1992), iii, 674-733.

38. See, for example, Kevin J. Harty, ‘Jeanne au Cinéma’, in Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc, ed. by Bonnie Wheeler and Charles Wood (New York, Garland, 1996), pp. 237-64.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference on Joan of Arc in History and Film sponsored by UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in May 1996. I wish to thank Nadia Margolis for her invaluable bibliographical suggestions and editorial comments. Readers are directed to her comprehensive bibliography, Joan of Arc in History, Literature and Film (New York, Garland, 1990).