ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the unstable and potentially shifting relationships between bodies and texts, and their relation to institutional and counter-institutional claims to interpretive authority in the trial of Joan of Arc. For Joan's secrets go far beyond questions of whether or not she was a woman; they are also symptomatic of the frenzied clamoring for religio political legitimacy and the very authority to affirm that legitimacy in the turbulent decade of the 1420s. In terms of textual interpretation, the Bourgeois's grisly account of Joan's execution points to a fantasy of reading Joan not possible in her lifetime. So while the body of Joan is made manifest to the crowd, her secrets, not fully contained in the body, become the latent text of which the crowd has no real comprehension. The speculation surrounding Joan's secrets, fueled rather than extinguished by the sight of this undressed text, becomes an exercise of hopeless indeterminacy.