ABSTRACT

In Jules Bastien-Lepage's painting, Joan of Arc stands in an orchard outside her father's house in Domremy. Her spinning lies unattended behind her, the stool from which she has presumably just arisen, overturned. In her roughly laced jerkin and thick brown skirt, she seems the young village girl that she was before her departure for France, yet her gaze is directed on an object beyond the trees and foliage of her immediate, empirical surroundings. Readers of the transcripts of Joan' Rouen heresy trial have traditionally s concentrated on their content rather than form and on Joan' answers rathers than on the questions that provoked her answers. In the transcripts of Joan's trial for heresy in Rouen in 1431, the clerics examining her, like Bastien-Lepage, seek access to the inner experience of her voices, yet they strive to attain it not through imaginative depictions, but through interrogations that compel her to share with them her experiences of these voices.