Most accounts of Joan’s life follow a similar pattern, beginning with the quiet of the French countryside interrupted by heavenly visions given to a simple teenage girl, who then goes to the disinherited dauphin Charles and convinces him that God has given her a mission to expel the English and see him crowned as the rightful King of France. We shape the narrative to fit the hero’s expected journey. Not only does the light of their reputation obscure our perception of the real human being behind that fame, but also, as Castor notes, the “vast gravitational pull” of their stardom distorts our reading of history. This is the problem with treating a historic figure as a star, after all. The Joan of traditional narratives had a life trajectory like a shooting star: brief, brilliant and destined for a fiery demise The destiny Joan believed in was rather different from the one that would be written for her in the decades and centuries after her death. Yet the Joan of contemporary records seems to have had no desire to be a martyr she was frightened of the prospect of death by fire, and let down by the heavenly voices who had promised she would be saved from the flames. The Joan of traditional narratives had a life trajectory like a shooting star: brief, brilliant and destined for a fiery demise. She is a worthy patron saint of France, a country that on Joan’s canonisation in 1920 badly needed a heroine. The latter Joan, according to the popular mythology that has seen her immortalised in song, wartime propaganda posters and even the packaging for an American brand of butter beans, was implacable in pursuit of her mission, unshakeable in her faith, untouchable in her virginal purity. The motivations and desires of the historic Joan – peasant girl, French woman and 15th-century human being – have been cast into shadow by the blinding light cast by Joan, warrior-saint.

But although stars may be brilliant, celestial bodies have no agency: their function is to shine, not to want or to think. As Helen Castor writes in this illuminating new biography, in the history of 15th-century France the woman known as the Maid of Orleans “shines brighter than that of any other figure”. She was undoubtedly echoing the words of Pope Pius X, who 90 years earlier had described the soon-to-be beatified Joan as “a new star destined to be the glory not only of France but of the universal Church as well”. A star and a saint shine forever”, concluded Josephine Poole in her 1998 children’s book Joan of Arc.

Joan of Arc by Helen Castor