ABSTRACT
Jean Chapelain's poem celebrating the liberation of Orleans, the restoration of the French throne, and the reunification of France was the product of a thirty year effort underwritten by the due de Longueville, a descendant of the comte de Dunois, one of Joan of Arc's companion-at-arms. Chapelain's The Maid or the Heroic Poem of France Delivered begins with Joan receiving a visit from an angel while guarding sheep in the fields by the Meuse River. Chapelain's fictionauzations not only add romance to Joan's resolutely celibate biography, they also serve to flatter the author's contemporaries. The humorous, sexually charged, and often ridiculous nature of what will come in Voltaire's account is established in Joan's first bold act on her journey to the Court of France. As Lynn Hunt concluded, the queen's trial made "manifest, more, perhaps, than any other single event of the Revolution, the underlying interconnections between pornography and politics".
