Bitchy History - November 23, 2025


Joan of Arc： The Original Girlboss (Who Got Burned for It)


Episode Stats


Length

18 minutes

Words per minute

164.23

Word count

3,045

Sentence count

226


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Welcome to Bitchy History, where we cut through the myths and nostalgia to get to the raw,
00:00:17.360 unvarnished truth about the past. With sharp analysis, a feminist lens, and just the right
00:00:22.640 amount of bitchiness, we're here to show you that history isn't just something to study,
00:00:26.300 it's something to question. Let's get started.
00:00:30.000 Welcome to Arc 2 of the Women's History series from Bitchy History.
00:00:36.240 In this arc, we are following women who scared people simply by stepping outside the lines drawn for them.
00:00:42.160 Joan of Arc hears voices, leads armies, and suddenly the English are extremely concerned about her outfit,
00:00:47.800 fit, and whether her visions are real or evil.
00:00:51.120 Midwives catch babies and manage pain, and somehow that turns into,
00:00:54.940 she must be sleeping with the devil.
00:00:57.140 And later, when the witch fires burn down,
00:00:59.020 we get the angel in the house and the cult of domesticity,
00:01:02.040 a prettier cage, but still a cage,
00:01:04.360 insisting that proper women stay in their sphere
00:01:07.080 while the public world belongs to men.
00:01:09.740 Underlying all of this is a much older global anxiety
00:01:12.820 about women who move too freely,
00:01:14.800 across land, sky, and social boundaries.
00:01:17.700 From bird women and swan maidens who refuse to stay caught
00:01:21.160 to flying witches and mystics whose bodies and spirits defy gravity,
00:01:24.640 cultures have repeatedly imagined powerful women as airborne, untameable, and therefore in need of
00:01:30.420 control. When we get to the early modern witch hunts, that fantasy turns lethal. Tens of thousands
00:01:35.960 of mostly poor women are tortured and executed for crimes that range from my cow died to she
00:01:41.800 seemed a little too confident with her herbs. Modern feminist writers point out that this
00:01:46.220 wasn't random superstition. It was a sustained campaign about who gets to have knowledge,
00:01:51.020 authority, and autonomy over their own body and work. We'll move from battlefields and
00:01:55.780 steak smoke to Girl Scout badges and parlor angels, tracing the through line from Joan
00:02:00.220 of Arc's armor to the salesmanship of the Fendment Mafia. Let's get started.
00:02:05.680 Imagine being a teenage girl who tells a king what to do, terrifies his enemies,
00:02:10.900 turns a losing war around, and then gets executed for wearing pants.
00:02:15.480 Welcome to Joan of Arc's life. Today we're diving into the paradox of the exceptional woman.
00:02:20.880 She's a hero when her success benefits the people in charge,
00:02:23.960 a witch, a hysteric, or a heretic the moment she breaks their rules.
00:02:27.780 Joan is Exhibit A.
00:02:29.060 She was canonized as a saint in 1920,
00:02:31.680 but in 1431 she was burned alive by clerics acting in lockstep with the English regime.
00:02:37.160 She remains one of the best documented medieval women,
00:02:39.820 thanks to two vast collections,
00:02:41.180 the 1431 Trial of Condemnation and the 1456 Nullification Trial that rehabilitated her name.
00:02:48.180 We have letters in her own voice, interrogations that were written down,
00:02:51.780 and witnesses from her village and the battlefield.
00:02:54.340 It's as close to a medieval microphone as we're going to get.
00:02:57.580 But having a microphone doesn't mean you control the soundboard.
00:03:00.460 Every retelling then and now gets distorted by politics and hindsight.
00:03:04.820 Joan is a massive star.
00:03:06.080 The evidence orbits her like planets,
00:03:08.360 and the gravitational pull of myth bends every beam of light that tries to reach us.
00:03:12.580 Meanwhile, in the courtroom at Ruin,
00:03:14.160 and every question was engineered to entrap, and every answer was filtered into clerical Latin
00:03:18.780 before it hit the page. So we have to keep that agenda in mind when we look at any of the receipts
00:03:23.280 left to us from history. So today, we will thread the needle. Joan the teenage commander,
00:03:28.460 Joan the defendant tried for pants, Joan the political problem, and Joan the ever-reusable
00:03:33.580 symbol. Spoiler, the patriarchy loves an exception, because it proves the rule.
00:03:38.980 By the time Joan walks on stage, France is exhausted.
00:03:42.680 The Hundred Years' War has become a multi-generational custody battle with sieges.
00:03:47.460 Factions split the French court, Armagnacs versus Burgundians,
00:03:50.980 while the English press their claim through the Treaty of Troye.
00:03:54.080 The country is desolate and divided, and the war feels accursed of God.
00:03:58.920 Later on, a gender plot twist.
00:04:00.900 Early 15th century jurists had hardened a no-queens custom
00:04:04.380 into what later readers call Salic Law,
00:04:06.640 a convenient ancient rule invoked to exclude women, or claims through women, from the French
00:04:12.200 throne. It's less a timeless law than a legal fig leaf designed to solve a political emergency and
00:04:17.940 erase inconvenient women's lines from the family tree. Enter Charles, the disinherited Dauphine
00:04:24.280 holed up in Chinon, and a peasant girl from Domreme, who insists heaven has a plan and that
00:04:30.080 she should be in charge of the logistics. This is also a good place for me to pause and let you guys
00:04:35.280 know that French is my arch nemesis as a language. I don't trust any language that has that many
00:04:41.100 silent letters. So please, please just accept that my pronunciation of these words are going
00:04:46.500 to be atrocious and just go with it. Many French historians have been emphatic that Joan should
00:04:53.180 step into the record not as dark, a later habit of attaching her father's name as in the noble style,
00:04:58.920 but Jean the Poussel, Joan the Maid, an identity that broadcasts chastity, divine mission,
00:05:04.080 and proximity to the Virgin, all in one tidy brand. And the brand works. In a kingdom whose
00:05:09.740 elites are out of ideas, a teenage girl with unblinking conviction looks like strategy.
00:05:14.820 Imagine Twitter-era virality, minus the internet. Suddenly, there's attention, movement, morale,
00:05:20.540 everything. The French don't just need troops, they need meaning, and Joan gives them both.
00:05:25.860 In early 1429, Joan reaches the Dauphine and persuades him to let her try the unthinkable,
00:05:31.700 Relieve Orléans. Soon after, she sends a letter to the English that is still epic six centuries
00:05:36.860 later. You men of England, go back to your own country. If not, I will make a war cry that will
00:05:42.520 be remembered forever. 5th of May, 1429. That's not modest piety from a maid. That's strategic
00:05:49.720 intimidation. Her role as commander is part tactics, part theater. She rides in white armor,
00:05:55.780 carries a banner painted with the names of Jesus and Mary, and insists on confession and discipline.
00:06:01.280 Soldiers who swore were fined. She ejected the camp followers, i.e. prostitutes. Somehow with
00:06:07.100 even those two rules, she improves morale, which is odd. She's not just a mascot. Contemporary
00:06:13.640 witnesses and accounting records place her in planning councils and at siege works. She pushes
00:06:18.940 for aggressive moves that hardened captains resist, and she wins. It works. Orleans is relieved. The
00:06:25.980 momentum flips. Within months, she's escorting Charles to Rims for the coronation that he
00:06:30.740 couldn't manage a decade ago. The theological payoff? A crowned king, blessed in the Cathedral
00:06:36.080 of Clovis, staged as God's endorsement. And yes, she did all of this while dressed in male
00:06:41.780 military clothing. Because that's what you wear to a war. The clothes are safety, practical on
00:06:48.180 horseback, protective in camp, and crucial in prison when you need to secure your body from
00:06:52.640 assault. We'll come back to that, because her enemies never stopped coming back to that.
00:06:56.840 In May of 1430, Joan is pulled from her horse during a sortie captured by Burgundian forces
00:07:03.360 and sold, yes, sold, to the English. She spends months in chains while a bishop on the make,
00:07:09.640 Pierre Cauchon, builds a French-language show trial for an English audience. Do not picture
00:07:14.860 a neutral courtroom like an episode of Law and Order. Picture inquisitorial procedure,
00:07:19.960 hostile examiners, and a defendant without counsel. Let's lay out the timeline.
00:07:25.260 Preliminary inquiries in January of 1431, public sessions begin 21st of February,
00:07:31.360 private interrogations, and a verdict by late May.
00:07:34.580 Joan's answers are razor sharp.
00:07:36.640 Asked whether she knows she's in God's grace, a trick,
00:07:39.840 Orthodox theology says no one can be certain,
00:07:42.340 and she famously replies that if she is not, she prays God will put her there.
00:07:46.620 If she is, he keep her there, a theologically elegant dodge that refused the trap.
00:07:52.120 But the court decides to invoke a simpler weapon.
00:07:54.360 gender panic. Among the articles against her, one repeatedly reappears, male dress. The judges
00:08:00.760 treat it not as logistics, but as rebellion against God's order. They had already forced
00:08:05.600 her into recantation, the so-called abjuration, after which she was told to dress properly.
00:08:11.120 Then, in a prison staffed by male guards, her woman's dress was reportedly removed or she was
00:08:16.320 harassed, and she put her men's clothing back on to protect herself. The court promptly declared
00:08:21.680 her a relapsed heretic. She is then abandoned to the secular arm. Juridical code for handed over
00:08:28.380 to be burned. Let's underline this hypocrisy. The same authorities who refused her an ecclesiastical
00:08:34.400 prison with women, who knew the risks she faced in a men's prison, then used her self-defense as
00:08:40.580 proof of damning obstinacy. The outfit became evidence because they decided that clothing
00:08:46.420 defined obedience. When a woman uses men's tools, male power calls it sorcery, not competence.
00:08:53.320 And then they lit the fire. May 30th, 1431. 19 years old. Last request, a cross held before her
00:09:00.960 eyes. Last word, Jesus. So now that we've gotten to the gory burning, let's talk about the politics
00:09:07.700 behind it. Heretic was the legal pretext. The political theater belongs to the Anglo-Burgundian
00:09:13.660 regime. The motives are painfully clear. Delegitimize the coronation at Reims by discrediting
00:09:19.420 its agent. If Joan's voices are demons and her clothing an abomination, then Charles' kingship
00:09:24.940 is tainted by the devil's midwife. Burn the messenger, scorch the message. Careers were
00:09:30.140 also at stake. The future bishop of Lizeau, Cajon, needed a victory that pleased his English overlords,
00:09:36.740 and swift execution demonstrates loyalty and doctrinal zeal. And the trial's circulation,
00:09:41.700 sermons, summaries, notarial abstracts, read like a media kit. Regine Pernaud notes how widely
00:09:48.760 versions of Joan's stories, pro and con, have proliferated. The point wasn't truth, it was
00:09:54.380 memory management, who gets to tell the story first. So yes, the English were furious at losing
00:09:59.760 to a teenage girl, but more importantly, they were furious at losing the brand war. Joan's banner
00:10:05.020 out-marketed their siege engines. Their only remedy was reputational arson. 25 years later,
00:10:11.300 the French crown is stable, the English have been ejected from most of France, and Charles VII is
00:10:16.100 ready for a do-over. The 1456 nullification proceedings interrogate dozens of witnesses,
00:10:22.060 Joan's family, soldiers, clerics that worked with her, and they shred the trial on procedural and
00:10:27.760 moral grounds. Regine Pernod emphasizes how Joan's self-chosen identity, La Poussel, becomes central
00:10:34.340 to her rehabilitation. Not a witch, but a maid. Not a demonic fraud, but a woman of innocence
00:10:39.600 misjudged by corrupted men. The earlier verdict is annulled. Cue the centuries of myth-making.
00:10:45.940 In Shakespeare's Henry VI Part I, he makes her a whore and a witch. Voltaire mocks, romantic poets
00:10:51.680 and novelists resurrect, Mark Twain idolizes, and in 1920, Rome canonizes. From witch to saint in
00:10:58.580 500 years, that's not historical correction alone, it's cultural need. Which brings us to the other
00:11:04.120 thing Joan became, a mirror for whoever needed one. If there's a contest for most appropriated
00:11:10.400 woman in European history, Joan wins the gold medal. In France, she oscillates between left
00:11:15.940 resistance and right nationalism. Francois Meltzer tracks how Maurice Bars in World War I
00:11:21.760 casts her as the model French woman, how right-wing polemicists make her a mascot of Catholic monarchy,
00:11:27.700 and how Jean-Marie Le Pen in the late 20th century literally uses her in a campaign imagery while
00:11:32.780 claiming to receive his orders from her. An irony, as Meltzer points out, considering the twin
00:11:38.420 hegemonies that murdered her were church and monarchy. Cross the Atlantic and Joan pops up
00:11:43.900 on U.S. propaganda posters in World War I, sword arm raised, face airbrushed into Hollywood chic.
00:11:50.580 She walks through cinema history with Meltzer cataloging at least 40 major film versions by
00:11:55.780 the end of the 20th century, diametrically opposed both in ideology and intent. She's a resistance
00:12:01.960 Dancefighter, Proletarian Saint, Marianne, and Mother Courage all in one. Every generation
00:12:07.680 remixes the same girl like a Taylor Swift rerecord. New production, same voice. But notice
00:12:13.460 the pattern. When Joan flatters our values, we praise her. When she violates our codes,
00:12:18.440 we punish her. The meanings change. The stakes—women's authority, bodies, and clothes—somehow
00:12:23.980 don't. Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan in 1923 is one of the single most influential modern
00:12:30.080 restagings of the story. Shaw flips Shakespeare's vilification into a portrait of rational,
00:12:35.600 principled stubbornness, a heroine whose clarity indicts the institutions around her.
00:12:40.560 Shaw also uses Joan to advance a theory of gender. In a world that assigns woman as a social role,
00:12:46.500 emancipation demands, in his words, that a woman repudiates her womanliness, that is,
00:12:51.820 refuses the prescribed duties that define her sex. Dr. Karma Waltonen folds this into a larger
00:12:58.380 shift charted by Thomas LeCour from medieval one-sex to modern two-sex systems, which then
00:13:04.380 gets weaponized to enforce a strict two-gender regime, which we've talked about in previous
00:13:08.920 episodes. Joan breaks that regime by simply doing what needs doing, and dressing accordingly.
00:13:15.440 Shaw's Joan becomes one of his unwomanly women, figures who refuse the trap of gendered scripts.
00:13:21.680 So what do we make of Joan? Feminist icon or patriarchal cautionary tale? Maybe both.
00:13:27.100 The benefits of exception are real. Joan's existence refutes claims that women can't lead
00:13:32.460 armies, strategize, or carry a nation's morale on their backs. But as Castor notes, contemporaries
00:13:38.360 framed her success as divine exception, not a precedent for other women. God can raise up a maid
00:13:44.500 when men fail. That's providence, not policy. Pernod shows that the maid's chastity and singular
00:13:50.540 calling insulated the public from needing to change anything systemic. She's a holy anomaly,
00:13:55.680 not a political argument. Elizabeth Fox Genovese gives us a helpful lens for how women like Joan
00:14:02.520 wielded power through without institutional office. Mystical authorization. In an era of
00:14:08.340 tightening clerical control, visionary women carved out authority by claiming God's direct
00:14:13.220 mandate. It's a workaround, not a revolution. It works precisely because it doesn't threaten
00:14:18.200 the structure, until it does. Joan is trusted while she's useful, when her banner leads beyond
00:14:23.560 the script, when she insists on more campaigns, challenges strategy, or simply survives long
00:14:28.780 enough to make men nervous, mystical authorization gets relabeled as heresy. The lesson for feminist
00:14:34.880 history is grim and clarifying. The patriarchy loves an exception. It adores heroines who leave
00:14:40.520 no heirs. But now, let's return to the clothing, because I know you want to. It's satisfying to
00:14:46.720 laugh at medieval courts criminalizing trousers, until you realize how contemporary this feels.
00:14:51.960 Joan's male dress was about practicality and bodily safety, full stop.
00:14:57.220 On campaign, it's armor.
00:14:58.780 In prison, it's a protection for her chastity.
00:15:01.440 The court framed it as a violation of divine order,
00:15:04.260 then used a forced relapse to trigger her execution.
00:15:07.580 That logic survives whenever women are punished for violating dress codes,
00:15:11.480 whenever trans and gender non-conforming people are criminalized for how they appear,
00:15:16.500 whenever decency laws police the bodies of those with less power.
00:15:20.000 The medieval case study is blunt. Clothing is governance. Governance is about who gets to live.
00:15:26.220 If we want a modern echo, look at the benevolent sexism that dresses domination as protection,
00:15:31.180 the chivalric impulse that insists women are honored when they are controlled for their own
00:15:35.540 good. We'll unpack more of this in the future when we do our chivalry episode, but flag it here.
00:15:41.180 When institutions talk about preserving order and modesty, you're about to see somebody get caught
00:15:46.100 on fire. Joan is a celebrity because she answers multiple cravings. Conviction in an era that
00:15:52.420 prizes irony. Purity in a culture that prizes scandal. Certainty in a discourse that distrusts
00:15:58.320 it. Meltzer calls it a nostalgia for certainty amid blurred boundaries. Gender, church, authority.
00:16:05.200 The paradox is that those blurred boundaries were Joan's literal skill set. She cross-dressed for
00:16:10.380 combat readiness. She crossed institutional boundaries with visions. She crossed the line
00:16:15.520 constantly between the proper sphere for women and a messy sphere where history actually happens.
00:16:21.060 She also shows how easy it is to be devoured by your own story. Everyone wants a piece of Joan.
00:16:27.300 Monarchists and revolutionaries, Catholics and secularists, French patriots and American
00:16:32.080 propagandists, playwrights who want an icon, and politicians who want a brand. That's why she
00:16:37.320 lasts. She's an inexhaustible symbol printed on every piece of flammable paper. So what are we
00:16:43.620 supposed to learn from Joan, and what do we actually learn? The official moral is, God can
00:16:49.220 raise up anyone, be brave, obey your calling. The actual moral is that structures that depend on
00:16:55.660 women's obedience will cannibalize a woman the second her competence becomes a threat.
00:17:00.420 If you're looking for systemic change in Joan's wake, you won't find it. There's no 15th century
00:17:05.800 reform bill opening the officer's corps to women. There's a saint's day, some statues, a thrilling
00:17:11.060 chapter in national history and an unshakable cautionary tale about how quickly institutions
00:17:15.860 will call a woman's defense defiance. To be fair, the legacy isn't nothing. Women who come after
00:17:22.820 Joan could point to her and say, there, there is proof that no metaphysical law forbids a woman
00:17:28.680 from being the bravest person in the room. But pointing isn't policy. So a teenage girl walks
00:17:34.900 into a war. Talks to a king. Wins. Gets burned for it. She's a saint because we needed one. She's a
00:17:41.960 witch because power needed one. She's a girl because she never had the time to be anything else.
00:17:47.600 Thanks for listening to Bitchy History. The lesson isn't that exceptional women don't exist.
00:17:52.300 It's that we keep building systems where they have to be exceptional to survive.
00:17:56.200 And even then, we light the pyre. And speaking of fire, we're not done yet. Because they didn't
00:18:01.340 just fear women's power, they feared women's knowledge, and they burned both. That's next
00:18:06.180 time when we talk about witch hunts, midwives, and how modern medicine got built on women's ashes.
00:18:14.240 That's it for this episode of Bitchy History. If you enjoyed the show, don't keep it to yourself.
00:18:19.080 Subscribe, review, and share it with someone who loves history as much as we do.
00:18:23.280 Until next time, stay curious and keep questioning the world around you.
00:18:31.340 What a bitch, right?