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. Anne Llewellyn Barstow offers the most literal explanation, linking the Bourgeois's morbid description to the crowd's fascination with and confusion over Joan's sexual identity. Barstow's reading of the crowd's confusion over Joan's sexuality is strengthened by another passage from the Parisian Journal. 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 religiopolitical legitimacy and the very authority to affirm that legitimacy in the turbulent decade of the 1420s. The fixation on Joan's secrets and what they might mean reveals more about male secular and ecclesiastical anxieties displaced onto Joan than it ever could about Joan herself.
