CMS150 - Winter 2001

A. Put Sullivan on continuum of positivist to critical theory historians does she believe that evidence can reveal truth about a matter in the past?
1.what is her method?

a. what do people believe transcripts can do?
b. What do people believe interrogation can do?
c. What does Sullivan suggest that the transcripts of Joan’s interrogations tell us about the nature of transcripts, interrogations, and Joan
i. transcripts can tell us about cleric’s culture and cultural assumption, but not about Joan’s
ii. interrogation creates subjects [nb the Joan the trial creates is the collaboration of the clerics and Joan]
iii.
B. Fairy Tree
1. clerical intellectual culture divided the supernatural manifestions of world into divine miracles and satanic magic; and analyzed it hypotactically
1. forced all phenomena into one or other category
2. read all evidence associated w/ phenomena as part of argumentative whole
3. Fairy Tree has to be from the devil bc the supernatural phenom associated with it can’t be from god.
4. all activities associated w/ tree must be rites associated with worship of fairies [i.e., evil spirits from devil]
5. J’s withdrawal from activities had to be because of her perception that they were diabolic and serious. => she should condemn fellow villagers.  => her refusal to condemn is ev that she w/drew to master even more diabolic activity
2. popular culture divided the supernatural into three catagories and analyzed phenomena paratactically [could tolerate inconsistences]
1. could just add new category
2. could tolerate inconsistencies in readings of evidence related to same phenomena
3. Joan’s discussion of Fairy Tree refuses dichotmy clerics want to draw; it can be a "fairy tree" and not from the devil.  When clerics try to force Joan to choose between devil and god for fairies, she answers that she knows nothing
4. Joan’s activities near tree as she describes them have nothing to do with devil [garlands on tree are for our lady; it’s a pleasant place for kids to play]
5. For Joan, w/drawal is ev that she found activities around tree juvenile, not serious and that she had come to believe that she was born to a serious and divine mission.  Refusal to condemn villagers is ev that she found nothing serious or evil in activities.
C. The Voices from God
1. how did Joan describe her experience of communication with God before her heresy trial; during the first days of her heresy trial, at the end?
a. b4 trial: god told her to save France
b. During first days of trial she continued to claim that she had been sent by God, but minimized political purpose of her mission; -> focus increasingly on personal, mystical experience.  Shift inspired clerics to ask her repeatedly for identification of voice [angel, God, saint].  Joan resisted these requests.
i. J’s depiction of her voices as anonymous beings who brought her comfort when she was distressed, who reassured her of their help when she was discouraged, and who brought her a joy that shw wanted to retain forever resulted, in contrast, from her own free avowal
c. eventually, in terms of St. Catherine, Margaret, Michael and Gabriel.
2. why did her description change
a. clerics insisted on specific id; type of voice, id of voice
b. Joan gains from shift in description of "a voice" to "voices" associated with the saints whom she chose.
i. she chose saints who would/could inspire her
ii. she continued to have relationship with voices whom she now perceived understood as these saints
iii. she began to reassess her own prior experiences, reinterpret them and understand them differently in light of this new perception of the voices.
iv. => J’s understanding of self, J’s self radically changed during course of trial.
c. J is subject to power of language in speech community she has entered [a community in which she has no power; -> they can make of her what they want (construct her identity)].  She has two strategies
i. resist their linguistic power ­ refuse choices, languages, categories they offer
ii. usurp those categories for her own benefit; i.e., learn how to manipulate them so she can express herself in this community’s language.  In doing so she must inevitably reshape her own experience.
iii. But note, she is inexpert in manipulation of these categories and this mode of expression: she doesn’t distintuish between the corporeal appearnce of St. Michael and the incorporeal truth of St. Michael.
iv. Time and again, J rejected questions that encouraged her to speak of the angels in terms of corporality and hence, encouraged her to speak of the angels factually, neutrally, scientifically.  time and again, J insited upon speaking of the angels in terms of her own inner sensations, usch as her joy when she was near them or her sorrow when they had departed."  The clerics insisted on treating voices/angels as anonymous cadavers to be broken up and analyzed ­ J insisted upon treating them as living beings, to be respect in their integrity and lvoed in their goodness.  J resisted attributing corporality to angels not like the clerics bc angels can’t have corporality logically, but bc describing the angels as corporeal suggested an emotional neutrality that would strip the angels of their affective power.
v. The conflict bt the clerics and J reflects, therefore, not so much a conflict bt investigators who strive [41] to verify certain claims and a respondent who resists that verfication as a conflict between the learned, who are steeped in the assumptions of an academic discourse, and the unlearned, who do not share their assumptions, who do not partake in their discourse, and whose responses, thus, often go unheard.
D. The Departure for France
1. The heresy court and the nullification court offer two different pictures of Joan as a subject:
a. heresy: she acts of her own motivation [the humanist subject ­ she creates herself]
i. she achieves her agency through openly relying on her own acts; [therefore she knowingly chooses] or
ii. she characterizes her self as agent of divine, disguising the fact that she will perform feats through diabolical magic [therefore she willfully chooses and cleverly masks the choice]
b. nullification: she is object of God’s construction through whom God attacted [the theistic subject]
c. Joan’s self description, however, is somewhere in the middle
i. J is always careful to characterize everything as God’s deeds.  She’s the meesenger.
ii. But J also has this notion of God’s permission as well as his command.  God’s permission becomes apparent when actions she wills are successful and his refusal of permission apparent when her actions unsuccessful. [e.g. escaping prison]

2. decision to go to France
a. clerics: voices promised her glory; promise -> she chose to go
i. -> her subversion of family sturcture was volunatry
b. defenders: God commanded her to go
i. Joan characters voice as impersonal necessity that she leave her village; issue was family in opposition to God’s will, not her own.
3. decision to adopt male dress
a. clerics: she dressed like fops [in haircut and style of increasingly fancy clothes she got as gifts]; -> she experienced her dress as an end and pleasure in itself
i. dress as man disrupts symbolic structures: clothing shd subordinate itself to the body as a sign to the thing and creature to the creator out of recog of natural correspndence between the two categories: female costume -> affinity bt sex and gender, femaleness and femininity, natural and cultural identity.  J defies not merely biblical prohibition but also the relationship between nature and art; symoblic structures that make communication possible
ii. clerics: having abandoned habitu of women she imitated habitus of men.  The double meaning of clerics’ term habitus as indicating both clothing and comportment, points to a connection bt the habits of one’s wardrobe and the habits of one’s behavior.  It suggests that what one wears will influence what one does, so that a woman who dresses like a man will start to act like a man as well.
iii. thus Joan’s dress upsets social order ordained by god as well: she dominated men [gender], she dominated nobles [class]
iv. contemp french usage of curiositas is "perverse taste" ­ unseemly, erotic inclinations -> Joan’s desire to act on her own will leads to male clothes, and hence to unnatural male sexual identity [she’s a queeny man]; she becomes assimilated to a sodomite because they can’t accuse her of female sexual perversions [she’s a virgin]
v. her curiosity is not only for inappropriate dress but also for inappropriate knowledge [i.e. visions and voices] ­ she’s an unlearned peasant desiring to converse w/ god w/o constraints of theologians
vi. Throught he double resonance of curiositas, Joan’s dress linked to her visions and her transgression of sexual boundaries to her transgression of social boundaries.
b. Joan and defenders:
i. Though the clerics repeatedly attempted to trace the source of this impersonal necessity that made her adopt men’s attire, J repeatedly deflected these attempts by repsonding to their specific queries about her assumption of this constume with general answers about her deeds altogther.  When clerics asked if voices demanded she were men’s clothes, she says she does nothing but by the command of god.  Even if she wouldn’t say they demanded it, she would say being a warrior demanded it and they compelled her to be a warrior.
ii. J insists she is essentially and socially unalterted by her dress and her actions: she’s just a shepard girl who spins and sews and as soon as god is done w/ her that’s what she’ll do again, throwing off masculine clthoes and activities; these were simply a role, which she played very well, but a role separate from what she perceived as her self.
iii. One can argue that J was distinguashed by an active, almost Blaken initiative in transforming herself into what she wanted to be and that she was marked by a more passive, almost Marian willingness to serve as the handmaid of the lord.  These aren’t mutually exclusive.  She could take pleasure in that to which she was ordained; her problem was she cdn’t articulate this pleasure, defined it or integrate it into her self-image….."In their failure to reconcile J’s subjectivity and her objectivity, her transgressiveness and her submissiveness, her pleasure and her duty, the transcripts illustrate the difficult, then as now, of perceving these categories as not intrinsically opposed.
iv. Joan had to understand herself paratactically ­ when god required her to be a shephard gilr she would, when he reuqired her to free fRance she would the sequence makes sense in terms of God’s demands.  Clerics couldn’t hold the two categories in succession because they felt them to be in fundamental opposition and therefore her capacity to hold the two intrinsically evil.
E. The Sign For the King
1. Visionaries required signs to vouch for the divine origin of their signs
a. words of visionary that she is from god inherently insufficient
b. God requires us to demand signs [cf. , Mary thinking about Gabriel]
2. Clerics (and most folks) thought of signs as objective, material evidence (independent of the person who offered it)  that could be subjected to independent examination
a. stigmata
b. this analysis assumes sign inherently valid and inherently compelling (intrinsic ability to persuade)
i. which avoids question, what if the sign is there but they refuse to read it [He who has ears, let him hear; if today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts] (i.e., subjective nature of sign; dependent on perception of viewer)
c. this analysis required clerics to be judicial investigators more than theologians or confessors
d. assumes identity is established soley by one’s self; inherently stable
3. Joan understood where clerics coming from [i.e., not the gap as with the Fairy Tree] and could talk about the nature of her sign as objective; but she also insisted on the inherently subjective nature of her sign
4. Signs that vouched for Joan to the Dauphin (C7)
a. recognition of Charles
i. Joan never claims other than she recognized him
ii. Armagnac stories about scene romanticize it, and reveal the inherently miraculous nature of the recognition ­ she recognized him as a man, and who he was (lawful heir to throne of France)
b. conversation between Charles and Joan
i. Joan’s account ­ I want to drive the English out of France for you and crown you king
ii. Armagnac stories ­ revealed secrets, dreams of king -> secrets/dreams/prayers are anxiety over his own legitimacy as son and ruler: she resolves "I tell you, on the part of messire, that you are the true heir of france and the son of the king, and he sends me to ou to lead you to Reims."
c. for Joan these are "signs" [and for the Armagnac supports of the Dauphin].  But for the Burgundians, they are not
i. sign is inherent in Joan ­ she is the sign, this is how Charles accepted her
ii. -> if sign is not subjective at least signs can’t be inherently compelling [reader has to bring something to the text]
d. the Angel’s crown
i. clerics insist on "sign" that persuaded Charles to trust her [obviously her recognition of Charles and promise to crown him aren’t signs for them]
ii. she tells them the story of the angel’s crown
1) once they hear this story they’re satisfied that Charles had a sign
a) outside of Joan
b) publicly observed by many
c) inherently compelling
2) did Joan lie when she told them the story of the angel’s crown?
a) note qualifications: she won’t describe crown; she uses mystical language to describe event
b) Joan speaking metaphorically and allegorically
i. clerics don’t "get it"
c) J is angel and crown is her promise
i) she portrays herself as both the thing signified by the sign and the sign that signified the thing
ii) the human J is to the angelic J as the literal level of the text is to an allegory
iii) outside the cleric’s semiotic universe; people have to be initiated into the allegorical universe to understand allegory
* in literature, symbolic story that serves as a disguised  representation for meanings other than those indicated  on the surface. The characters in an allegory often have no individual personality, but are embodiments of moral qualities and other abstractions. The allegory is closely related to the parable, fable, and metaphor, differing from them largely in intricacy and length.
* For Christians, allegory has additional meaning because of spirit ­ letter; new testament, old testament oppositions [people who read the letter "harden their hearts" and don’t hear the word]
iv) by moving to the allegorical register J is suggesting that the sign is not separate from the thing it signifies but rather a new level of meaning within it [look harder at Joan and you will see the angel ­ as the King and the Armagnacs did]
iii. Note it was not until the King properly read Joan that Joan could fulfill her promise
1) via persuading Armagnac soldiers that god was on their side
2) -> The recognition of her ability to rout the English preceded her ability to rout the english
3) -> The recognition of the thing preceeded the existence of the thing
4) -> the existence of the thing depended on the willingness of the beholder of the sign to seek out the deeper level of meaning inherent in it
5) => the sign does not exist objectively and does not possess w/in it the ability to persuade
6) => identity established by interaction between self and the beholder of self; inherently contingent, unstable operation