she accomplished her mission, Joan would have attended the highest state function mounted on a white horse, dressed in armor, and cloaked in red velvet as she processed before courtiers and nobles, escorting her gentil dauphin to the altarof Reims’s cathedral, where he would be anointed Charles VII, his title secure, as no mortal could undo what God ordained. Unarmored, Joan wore clothes that befit a national heroine: conspicuously stylish and costly, as noted both by her worshipful, approving followers and by her enemies, who would call attention to her dress as evidence of decadence and, worse, pride. As they understood it, Joan had seized a set of symbols she didn’t merit, and what delight they would take in the role a golden cloak would play in her capture and defeat, how outraged at the vanity and self-indulgence they saw in its rich weight on her shoulders.
What Joan wore—and what she didn’t—announced what was more powerful for not being spoken aloud. Under interrogation, she said she dressed as a man as a practical concession to a life spent making war among men, but Joan wore male clothing under all circumstances, among soldiers or not. Schiller’s Joan seizes a helmet before leaving home to embark on her crusade; from it“warlike thoughts” pour into her head and make her eyes flash, her cheeks red. The costly male costume in which Joan cloaked her virgin female body transcended the pragmatic. It was the physical manifestation—the announcement—of her refusal to abide by patriarchal strictures, a defiance that was absolute and uncompromising, and both Joan and her judges knew that. The extravagant attention the inquisitorial trial paid her clothing and the role her cross-dressing would play in the decision to execute her reveal how subversive and genuinely dangerous the clerics who ruled society considered Joan’s assuming the right to wear male attire. No one, especially not Joan, thought her dressing as a man was “a small, nay, the least thing,” as she dismissed the topic when under interrogation.
Womanly duties, as Joan thought of them, were fine for girls who imagined themselves as Cinderellas or Sleeping Beauties, good girls rewarded for menial housework and, in the case of Sleeping Beauty, a passivity so profound it was deaf, dumb, blind, and comatose. There were, as Joan observed, enough of those women already. Only shackles and a prison cell would halt the trajectory of a young woman who understood herself as the leader of a holy quest, summoned by the patron saint of the crusaders, Saint Michael—whose slaying of the dragon was considered“the primordial feat of arms” from whichknighthood sprang—to join Perceval, Lancelot, and Galahad, especially Galahad, the Christ figure of medieval romance. When Galahad came to King Arthur’s court, he saw that a single seat at the Round Table stood vacant.
“It belongs to one who hasn’t yet come,” the knights assembled told him. “It belongs to the Virgin Knight who will find the Holy Grail.” Others had come before him, the knights told Galahad, they’d wanted to take the one seat left at the table, and all had died upon touching it.
Galahad sat down at the table and lived.
A sacred vessel borrowed from a Celtic myth about a magic cauldron, the Grail first appears in an unfinished romance, Perceval le Gallois , by Chrétien de Troyes, who used the vessel to represent and contain God’s grace.Galahad wore flaming red armor when introduced to King Arthur’s court on Pentecost, the feast that celebrates the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the apostles in the form of tongues of fire. Galahad does indeed fulfill Merlin’s prophecy that it would be he, and no other, to find the Holy Grail, but before he can return to King Arthur’s court bearing the Grail that is his alone to find, he is visited bySaint Joseph of Arimathea, who claimed Jesus’s crucified body from Pilate and gave his own tomb for Jesus’s burial. The rapture to
What Joan wore—and what she didn’t—announced what was more powerful for not being spoken aloud. Under interrogation, she said she dressed as a man as a practical concession to a life spent making war among men, but Joan wore male clothing under all circumstances, among soldiers or not. Schiller’s Joan seizes a helmet before leaving home to embark on her crusade; from it“warlike thoughts” pour into her head and make her eyes flash, her cheeks red. The costly male costume in which Joan cloaked her virgin female body transcended the pragmatic. It was the physical manifestation—the announcement—of her refusal to abide by patriarchal strictures, a defiance that was absolute and uncompromising, and both Joan and her judges knew that. The extravagant attention the inquisitorial trial paid her clothing and the role her cross-dressing would play in the decision to execute her reveal how subversive and genuinely dangerous the clerics who ruled society considered Joan’s assuming the right to wear male attire. No one, especially not Joan, thought her dressing as a man was “a small, nay, the least thing,” as she dismissed the topic when under interrogation.
Womanly duties, as Joan thought of them, were fine for girls who imagined themselves as Cinderellas or Sleeping Beauties, good girls rewarded for menial housework and, in the case of Sleeping Beauty, a passivity so profound it was deaf, dumb, blind, and comatose. There were, as Joan observed, enough of those women already. Only shackles and a prison cell would halt the trajectory of a young woman who understood herself as the leader of a holy quest, summoned by the patron saint of the crusaders, Saint Michael—whose slaying of the dragon was considered“the primordial feat of arms” from whichknighthood sprang—to join Perceval, Lancelot, and Galahad, especially Galahad, the Christ figure of medieval romance. When Galahad came to King Arthur’s court, he saw that a single seat at the Round Table stood vacant.
“It belongs to one who hasn’t yet come,” the knights assembled told him. “It belongs to the Virgin Knight who will find the Holy Grail.” Others had come before him, the knights told Galahad, they’d wanted to take the one seat left at the table, and all had died upon touching it.
Galahad sat down at the table and lived.
A sacred vessel borrowed from a Celtic myth about a magic cauldron, the Grail first appears in an unfinished romance, Perceval le Gallois , by Chrétien de Troyes, who used the vessel to represent and contain God’s grace.Galahad wore flaming red armor when introduced to King Arthur’s court on Pentecost, the feast that celebrates the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the apostles in the form of tongues of fire. Galahad does indeed fulfill Merlin’s prophecy that it would be he, and no other, to find the Holy Grail, but before he can return to King Arthur’s court bearing the Grail that is his alone to find, he is visited bySaint Joseph of Arimathea, who claimed Jesus’s crucified body from Pilate and gave his own tomb for Jesus’s burial. The rapture to
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