ABSTRACT
In the Rehabilitation Trial of 1456, Bishop Elie de Bourdeilles confronts the Condemnation Trial verdicts and narrates a salvation history of the French people with Joan of Arc as God's protagonist. This chapter examines the latter aspect of this trial and specifically its effort to rehabilitate Joan of Arc's mystical voices, which the condemnation trial had cast into disrepute. Joan had asserted that angels and saints from heaven commissioned her to liberate France from the English, and it was upon their divine directives that she based the authority of her mission. The political backdrop for the fifteenth-century events shows that Joan of Arc was a powerful symbol for both sides of the FrenchEnglish conflict. The treatise of Elie de Bourdeilles offers a theological embrace of Joan of Arc as a legitimate focus of devotion as well as a negative judgment upon the condemnation trial for its method of interpreting Joan in the worst light.
