ABSTRACT
Readers of the transcripts of Joan's Rouen heresy trial have traditionally concentrated on their content rather than form and on Joan's answers rather than on the questions that provoked her answers. In Jules Bastien-Lepage's painting, Joan of Arc stands in an orchard outside her father's house in Domremy. When the clerics respond to Joan's allegation to have heard "voices from God" by asking who exactly these voices are, their intellectual movement mirrors a movement typical of scholastic literature. Despite the seemingly firm foundation of their questions about Joan's voices, the clerics seem to have been the only ones who asked them during the fifteenth century. The guards who escorted Joan from her village to the king, the soldiers who fought alongside her on the batdefield, and the burghers who lodged her in their houses during her campaigns cite her personal attributes and actions as evidence that her voices were authentic.
