ABSTRACT
Was Joan a witch or a saint? Like Richard III, about to enter from the wings, Shakespeare's fiendish female character would triumph on stage, against all moral or historical justice.3 She is a malevolent invention, according to our modern historians, who dispute among themselves within a narrow polemical frame without revealing how they managed to discern truth from falsehood in an epic mixing brute reality with myths from all origins. The need for literary analysis is plain at this point, yet this material and approach are seldom considered as serious research tools. What Pierre Duparc meticulously applies to historiography when dissecting the contradictions between historical authors and the trial records, he considers 'obviously useless to do for literary works, for writers who only sought
provoked a quick retort from Emmanuel Bourassin, L 'Eveque Pierre Cauchon: Coupable ou non coupable, prefaced by Regine Pernoud (Paris: Librairie Academique Perrin, 1988). 2 'Bond et les mediants', Le Nouvel Observateur, n° 1776, 19 November 1998.
