Wow, that was long. And interesting in the bits I read/scanned. But I must have missed somewhere what the essay is a "review" of. I thought maybe it would end up being about Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc but no. Or perhaps review in this case means historical summary.
Except that one asshole who "reviewed" The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe by saying "It's good. Read it." Wasted a perfectly good slot on the Book Review series last year.
If it is Scott, then he is has deliberately changed his style a bit, inserting 98 footnotes is not usual for him. I am also not sure that the author is enthusiastic about exactly the things Scott would be enthusiastic about. I would expect Scott to care more about the psychiatric side of things and less about breastplates, personally.
Also, if this is indeed Scott, I must conclude that he possesses a time-turner.
The writing was overall enjoyable, but there were a few needlessly complicated sentences and the occasional forgotten word. Nothing major in relation to the length of the essay, but I found it noticable, and less careful than Scott's.
I think I have a pretty good guess as to who wrote this, and I don't think it's Scott. But they're both quite engaging writers on a sentence-by-sentence basis, in a way that's not common even among people who make the finals.
I am nitpicking, but I am from Newcastle so Bede is one of my local saints. Bede was born in 672 and Cuthbert died in 687. Cuthbert lived and died in Lindisfarne, about 60 miles up the coast from where Bede was in Jarrow. At the very least, Bede knew people who had met and talked to Cuthbert, he did not need a book written twenty years later. I think that this illustrates that you do not need distance or time to create fantastic stories about heroes.
Artillery would have been a fairly novel aspect of European warfare at the time, wouldn't it? If so, there wasn't yet a large body of hard-won practical knowledge that one had to internalize just to get to the level of the average artillery strategist. That's exactly the sort of environment where one would expect a gifted but untutored novice to excel. It doesn't look very miraculous.
It indeed was fairly novel. During the second phase of the Hundred Year's war, France was the first European country to make a mass use of artillery, notably under the command of Jean Bureau which was a key figure of this phase of the conflict.
Depends on what you mean by "novel". Cannons were used in European warfare since at least the 14th century. They were notably present during the Siege of Marienburg in 1410, before Joan was even born. The issue was more that the metalworking technology of the day was too primitive to contain the pressure needed to use cannons like artillery. They were more akin to large shotguns that were loaded with arrows or shrapnel, although larger bombard cannons used in sieges did develop around this time period. Most famously at the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
So, I'm a big fan of this review, and I understand that the author doesn't contend actual divine intervention on her behalf, but presents documentation of a life which is, in conventional terms, pretty hard to explain.
But I'd like to note that some of this becomes, I think, more explicable, with the context that Jean didn't actually need extraordinary abilities of military command to achieve success above the baseline that the French forces were experiencing before her. The French nobility at the time were extremely fractious and jockeying for power, and battles at the time were often terribly coordinated, with different nobles failing to use the forces under their control cooperatively, because they were all aiming for their own glory more than collective success.
I'm afraid that I can't cite a specific source, because this comes from some book I read over a decade ago, whose title I can't remember, but it documented some firsthand accounts of Jean's participation in some battles at the time, where various nobles were all in disagreement about when to attack. Jean deployed her own forces into battle at a time that the various leaders generally considered stupid and reckless, but they felt forced to send their own forces in after her to salvage the situation, and although the timing was bad, they thereby achieved better coordination than they would have without a schelling point to rally around.
Jean definitely achieved greater success than other leaders at the time, but it seems that her contemporaries did not hold any kind of unanimous consensus that she was actually competent at what she was doing; it seems that some of them saw her as reckless and constantly needing to be bailed out of the consequences of her own poor judgment. I don't know any firsthand sources that address whether she was actually skilled in martial disciplines like the use of the sword or lance, and I have spent some time looking; I think it's likely that she wasn't actually particularly skilled in these areas either, but as a military leader, she didn't particularly need to be, and any attributions of her being exceptionally skilled were likely confabulations after the fact.
There's still plenty left over about Jean's life afterwards which is strange and exceptional, but I think it would be a mistake to imagine that it takes decades for a person to become shrouded in rumor, and for stories about them to become more grounded in legend than true recollection.
I believe that there are several martial disciplines that she could have learned on the farm, without much in the way of teaching. Horsemanship, in particular, was learnable on a farm, in that the same horses were used for heavy cavalry as for pulling a plough. And she'd have learned it better bareback than in a saddle. Lance, too, is about aim -- it's not something you really need to have a partner to learn.
"Horsemanship, in particular, was learnable on a farm, in that the same horses were used for heavy cavalry as for pulling a plough."
This is absolutely not true. Warhorses were specially bred for aggression and speed, and were a prized and expensive possession of the nobility. Plough horses needed to be docile and have long term endurance, which selected for rather different traits. Maybe you could learn to ride a horse in the general sense as a 15th century French peasant, but it certainly would not be the same as riding a warhorse into battle with full kit.
I don't think you were breeding warhorses for aggression. You'd breed them for "steadiness" and ability to be turned while using "no hands."
Still point taken -- there are different horses. I'm still going to maintain that any of the heavier breeds are in general less "flighty" than Arabians, and not bred to be high-strung.
Aggression was important, because a horse is naturally averse to charging into a mass of other people/animals. We know that warhorses were indeed aggressive due to accounts of them generally being temperamental and on occasion a hazard even to their own handlers.
I saw you mentioned Shire horses in another comment, but I think you had it backwards. The European Destrier, or great horse, was often used as a warhorse before the widespread adoption of gunpowder. After this, mobility became more important than brute strength and most cavalry transitioned to lighter horse. Possibly modern draft breeds like the Shire are descendants of the old great horse after it no longer had a place on the battlefield; but this is disputed due to the various physical differences between martial and draft horses.
Lindybeige had a recent video about how horses were trained to charge masses of pikemen though a few months of conditioning them not to associate that with danger (by having a "dummy" group of people who all move out of the way): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zviMg5Bkt8g.
If that's historically accurate – it sounds plausible to me – aggression wouldn't be as important as mass and trainability.
And about being "temperamental" hazards to their trainers, that fits with them being skittish, easily frightened and hurting people while panicking, quite the opposite of being aggressive.
Specifically, they tended to bite or kick people. Which would be handy if you were surrounded by a bunch of hostile infantry. On charging into pikes, that one is pretty contentious. I know Brett Deveraux wrote a piece in support of the "that didn't actually happen" camp.
< You'd breed them for "steadiness" and ability to be turned while using "no hands."
In the Dark Tower there’s a scene where Roland of Gilead, on horseback, charges at his foe holding the reins in this teeth, pistols in both hands, shooting both at once.
I think this is the missing part of the argument. Her military results are outstanding, but her strategy seems to be very heavy on “throw the whole army at them” shock tactics. Taking from the build-up, I don’t understand what she was doing to not get shredded by longbows. All this requires extreme piety, charisma and self belief but not much else. Tends towards mad as opposed to faking it.
As for military skills, she’s got a month to learn to wear armour and control a warhorse, which is doable. There doesn’t seem to be any suggestion that she’s storming in like Master Chief and killing 500 Englishmen single-handedly. Not dying is notable but not out of distribution.
The predictions seem pretty “eh.” The wind one was cool, ignoring that it’s not technically a prediction, but it’s the sort of “darndest thing” story you get all the time, as is the cannonball. The grand scale predictions are run of the mill for charismatic leaders, and the fact she was the 1 in 50 where it paid off is why we’re talking about her.
The trial skills are a matter of taste. They remind me of all Jesus’ irritating non-answers in the gospel, and of my broader experience of having to cross-examine grandiose buffoons; they’re not heresy because she doesn’t say all that much beyond not doubting the pope and only reporting what the voices told her.
Overall, it looks like impressive results attributable to conviction and charisma resulting from insanity.
> Taking from the build-up, I don’t understand what she was doing to not get shredded by longbows.
Archers are light infantry, who are typically vulnerable to heavy cavalry (knights), who despite what the above post said were known to put armor on their horses (although I don't know if that was commonly the case in this conflict). If horses have to charge through a muddy field (as at Agincourt), that does much to negate their advantage. It should be noted that the English continued to rely on knights in their wars (including civil wars) rather than thinking they could just rely on longbows to negate them. Getting spearmen (heavy infantry) to stand in place against a horse charge actually undermined the dominance of knights, but it was hard to do that in the medieval era and it took a long time before Swiss pikemen emerged as able to do it reliably.
What's fun for me about this is I used to be an agnostic secular humanist semi-rationalist (postrat?) who became a Mutazili Muslim (the most rationalist type of Muslim) and I have a model of divine guidance in history involving a series of persons like this and God tilting various political factions based on how less wrong they were about divine justice and theology.
So this checks out.
Little things like the cannonball dodge are how miracles work. I've experienced a few of these such as an accidental trade on the day of my son's birth based on some risk-management orders I forget to cancel that knocked me into a massive long (the orders were to unwind funding arbitrage positions, long/short big size to earn a few basis points over time) and I paid for my house with that, then became more religious.
I think Islam is more correct than Christianity but Muslims cheesed it up so much that Protestants who were slightly less corrupt got the edge but now that the US is fully supporting mass starvation the ball may well slide into China's court despite them being atheist, that's how Less Wrong divine favor works. Humans are very bad and God doesn't have a lot to work with in terms of optimizations. A reformed Muslim confederation of nations could also get a lot more power or a gaggle of loosely assorted "network state" parties if the Muslims don't figure it out (and let's be honest we're not sending our best).
The artillery question is really the uh... smoking gun for the Joan investigation. One thing you learn contemplating theology is to not quibble over direct vs. proxy concepts of divinity, sure God is One, above all etc. but when it comes down to free will vs. determinism, divine agents vs. divine acts, just go with the flow you can sharpshoot all combinations into an attribution bias if you're faithful enough. One thing you learn from studying hadith, gospels etc. is that indeed history is a major wikipedia edit tournament in the making for hundreds of years without a meta-data record of edits, psuedo-epigripha and such, and it's more egregious the further back you go in history but doesn't much improve. Which is why the Qur'an being widely considered by non-believing academics to be historically intact from the 600s is so exceptional - one might say miraculously so - you can't really say that about much documentation until perhaps before WWI, perhaps the 1850s, maybe 1600s kinda.
The attempts to do revisionism on the Gaza Genocide have been noted and have largely failed because people who are actively starving or semi-starving are posting live video on Twitter from their phones and these things mirror onto new media. I saw some pro-genocide account posting about how the NYTimes is anti-semetic because their photo of a near-death starving child didn't diclose he has cerebral pasly, - not correlated to starvation! - the only thing that can reverse this trend of well-documented live history would be AI deepfakes saturating fog of war once again.
"Walter not everything has to do with the Gazan genocide?"
"Well it has something to do with it"
"No Walter!"
"Dude the supreme court has roundly rejected prior restraint!"
> "The attempts to do revisionism on the Gaza Genocide have been noted and have largely failed because people who are actively starving or semi-starving are posting live video on Twitter from their phones"
Some of these pics are obviously fake, unless extremely rubenesque mothers taking videos of their skeletal offspring doesn't raise any red flags for you.
tl;dr the penultimate phase of starvation before autophagyian and then death is fat liquidation, so an adult woman with a hormonal tendency to accumualte fat reserves foremost among the demographics of our species is going to be emaciated later than her young child who has far less accumulated reserves.
Oh, okay, so I assume we have photographic evidence for 200-pound jewish mothers waddling around the yard in Auschwitz while their daughters were reduced to emaciated husks, because they were fasting on slightly different timelines. Suuuuure.
By the way, if the Israelis were planning a genocide and thought they could get away with it, why not just turn off the water supply on day one?
I'm not intimately familiar with the causes of death which were most typical at different concentration camps, but life-threatening malnutrition was clearly a problem for a lot of jewish inmates in the death-camp system more broadly. My point is that I don't think there's any historical precedent for a population afflicted by mass starvation where you see chubby mothers and skeletal children.
The thing is, there is a plausible case that Gaza actually *will* enter a state of famine in the not-so-distant future, but left-wing reporting on the topic has been so consistently hysterical, retarded and partisan that it's hard to take the pro-Palestine camp seriously at this point.
The Israelis aren't planning a genocide. It would be more accurate to say the Israeli establishment is in a state of political quagmire, with the result that they have no overarching plan at all. This is bad, but it's a different problem.
Thanks for the comment, I'm actually really interested in hearing more backstory of a rationalist convert to Islam!
Somewhat related, I recall a review last year of a book about a former ISIS fighter who became a UK spy (while remaining muslim). As I recall, the pivotal moment for him was going in person to research various hadiths, and finding that what was _actually_ in them vs what was _claimed_ to be in them varied quite a bit. The review author talked about being impressed that people whom we normally think of as unreachable zealots could, in fact, be persuaded by evidence. The reviewer suggested that one thing the world greatly needs is:
"Authenticity of the various hadiths: much more than you wanted to know"
I realize I'm out on a limb here, but what you've written so far implies you might be an excellent candidate for such a project...
France is mostly cursed because of the French. I like how they finessed getting the English to kill her so they could blame them and act like she was their amazing girl. The Monty Python skit always comes to mind when I think of the French.
If you read the literature on auditory hallucinations, Joan's symptoms match nearly perfectly. I think it's nearly beyond dispute that she was in fact hearing voices and not just faking it for fame/credibility.
Of course, what we call auditory hallucinations could in this case actually be the voices of saints (please don't tell your neighborhood schizophrenic about this).
Here's my theory of what was going on, offered as one thought among many:
1) Joan of Arc was extremely intelligent. Like Von Neumann level or higher, though focused in rather different directions.
2) My model of intelligence is that what it mainly represents is learning rate. High intelligence means fast, intuitive learning. People who are intelligent make better predictions because they know more things. Not necessarily in a way fully available to conscious processing, but more in the way that an LLM "knows" things it was trained on and the right prompt can elicit those things.
3) Consciousness is very flexible. We tend to think in terms of a "homunculus" that drives our behavior but this is an illusion. People who believe in spirit possession can easily be possessed, which doesn't mean actual supernatural entities, but rather an altered state of consciousness in which the mind reinterprets how decisions are being made to attribute them to an external spirit instead of an internal homunculus (both equally fictional).
4) Joan of Arc, a naturally pious peasant girl living in late medieval france, ended up adopting a frame that all of her intelligent insights came from an external source: God. This made a lot of sense to everyone (including her) because the types of thoughts her brain was generating seemed wildly implausible to be coming from a random peasant girl.
5) Her high learning rate included physical tasks like riding, lancing, etc. Some people are just really good at this. They can see you do something once or twice and immediately copy it almost perfectly. She didn't need to be trained at this explicitly because she was spending a fair amount of time around military people so she just naturally absorbed it all. It also helped that this fit within her "chosen by god" frame. Without that frame in place her unconscious mind might have blocked her from getting too good at things she wasn't supposed to be good at (I expect this happens all the time in all sorts of cultural contexts. Often, "training" exists to create a social context for learning that isn't necessarily that difficult once you convince the learning part of your brain that it's supposed to care about this stuff).
6) She also got very good at theology for similar reasons. Think of her almost like a rogue superintelligence picking up on clues nobody else would even realize are there. Not necessarily in a conscious way, but as a constant background task. When challenged on theological matters, she knew enough theology to triangulate the rest, at least enough of it that it was difficult to catch her slipping up. Notably it helps that she can dodge lots of questions by saying God told her what to do directly.
I already brought this up in my own comment a while ago, but I don't think the primary source material substantiates the idea that Jean was actually especially competent at skills like riding, swordsmanship, lancing, etc, but these sorts of skills weren't particularly material to her success as a commander, and it's easy for people to confabulate stories about them after the fact, when she's already famous as a miraculously successful leader. Some people are notably physically gifted and quick to pick up athletic skills, although I don't think this correlates particularly well with cognitive intelligence, but I don't think we have to suppose that Jean was to make sense of her story.
I also don't think she necessarily needed much expertise in theology. All accounts agree that she was notably charismatic, and it's probable that she was quite good at reading people, assessing intent, etc. I don't think I'm by any means exceptional at reading people, but reading through the questions that she was supposedly asked in her interrogation, before reading her answers, I could intuit the sort of answers they were trying to get out of her, and think of ways out of them similar to the ones she offered, just given the context that they were hostile interrogators asking her leading questions trying to catch her in some sort of heresy, and thinking "Assuming that this question is intended to lead me into admitting heresy, what might that heresy entail, and how would I avoid that?" I'm not operating under stress or strict time pressure, but I also didn't have any nonverbal cues from the interrogators to draw on. All in all, I don't think this is a particularly hard feat to explain given ordinary human abilities.
We ALSO don't need to say that she didn't know horseback riding before she was 15. Or, perhaps, lance-holding. Riding is something perfectly practiceable on a farm (heavy horse at the time being both used for battle and for farmwork, I believe -- citing Shire horses as your prototype, though you'd have had a french breed), and one might say she'd have been better learning to ride bareback than with a heavy saddle. Lances, not so much, but much much more likely than swordsmanship (which pretty much requires a partner in order to learn how to counter/defend, and attack weaknesses).
Come to think, swordsmanship on the ground is a "long term learning project" -- how is it on a horse? If you're coming up against pikes, you turn around, but on a horse against footmen, you're above them. Is that significantly easier to learn? I'd wager so.
Re: her swordsmanship skills, from another comment
> As for military skills, she’s got a month to learn to wear armour and control a warhorse, which is doable. There doesn’t seem to be any suggestion that she’s storming in like Master Chief and killing 500 Englishmen single-handedly. Not dying is notable but not out of distribution.
Most people bow to interrogation. It's why you're advised not to speak to the FBI or the police under any circumstances without legal counsel. Anything you say can and will be used against you.
That said, a particularly smart child could pull off "don't say yes to heresy." A particularly coached adult (like one that's been through a few "extreme" exorcisms, as opposed to the minor exorcism that occurs every Easter Sunday) could do so as well, I believe. [Not that I have the book-learning to know what a "standard" exorcism of the time would have been like.]
Here's one I thought Joan had a very theologically sophisticated answer to when reading quotes from her trial: "Do you know whether or not you are in God's grace?" Try to answer it yourself, avoiding heresy.
ROT13 of Joan's own answer, along with an explanation: Vs V nz abg, znl Tbq chg zr gurer; naq vs V nz, znl Tbq fb xrrc zr. V fubhyq or gur fnqqrfg perngher va gur jbeyq vs V xarj V jrer abg va Uvf tenpr.
Wbna pnaabg fnl "Lrf," nf Pngubyvp qbpgevar ubyqf gung ab bar pna xabj gung gurl ner va n fgngr bs tenpr. Guvf vf abg n gevivny znggre; Cebgrfgnagf bayl n uhaqerq be fb lrnef yngre uryq qvssreragyl, fbzr rira fhttrfgvat gung vs lbh *qvqa'g* xabj lbh jrer va n fgngr bs tenpr, gung vaqvpngrq n qrsvpvrapl va lbhe snvgu.
Wbna tvirf gur pbeerpg Pngubyvp nafjre. Ubcr gung lbh ner va n fgngr bs tenpr, ohg qb abg cerfhzr. Abgr gung ure nafjre urer vf qvssrerag sebz ure nffhenapr gung, riraghnyyl, fur jvyy ernpu fnyingvba. Gur qvfgvapgvba orgjrra "orvat riraghnyyl qrfgvarq sbe fnyingvba" naq "orvat va n fgngr bs tenpr" vf n gurbybtvpnyyl fbcuvfgvpngrq bar, ohg Wbna vf noyr gb anivtngr vg cresrpgyl pbeerpgyl, ol Pngubyvp gurbybtvpny fgnaqneqf.Vs V nz abg, znl Tbq chg zr gurer; naq vs V nz, znl Tbq fb xrrc zr. V fubhyq or gur fnqqrfg perngher va gur jbeyq vs V xarj V jrer abg va Uvf tenpr.
Wbna pnaabg fnl "Lrf," nf Pngubyvp qbpgevar ubyqf gung ab bar pna xabj gung gurl ner va n fgngr bs tenpr. Guvf vf abg n gevivny znggre; Cebgrfgnagf bayl n uhaqerq be fb lrnef yngre uryq qvssreragyl, fbzr rira fhttrfgvat gung vs lbh *qvqa'g* xabj lbh jrer va n fgngr bs tenpr, gung vaqvpngrq n qrsvpvrapl va lbhe snvgu.
Wbna tvirf gur pbeerpg Pngubyvp nafjre. Ubcr gung lbh ner va n fgngr bs tenpr, ohg qb abg cerfhzr. Abgr gung ure nafjre urer vf qvssrerag sebz ure nffhenapr gung, riraghnyyl, fur jvyy ernpu fnyingvba, dhbgrq va gur negvpyr. Gur qvfgvapgvba orgjrra "orvat riraghnyyl qrfgvarq sbe fnyingvba" naq "orvat va n fgngr bs tenpr" vf n irkvat bar, ohg Wbna vf noyr gb anivtngr vg cresrpgyl pbeerpgyl, ol Pngubyvp gurbybtvpny fgnaqneqf. V guvax guvf vfa'g n fznyy srng, naq fhttrfgf fur npghnyyl unq fvtavsvpnag gurbybtvpny yrneavat.
One thought I haven't seen explicitly: it's possible that a member of the Trial of Condemnation was repulsed by the kangooroo-ness of it all, and was feeding her info about what kinds of question she was likely to be asked (possibly with safe answers). I have zero evidence for this suspicion, but it certainly wouldn't be the first time something similar had happened
3) is helped by poor performance on the marshmallow test. when you are literally a different person than last week's you... yeah, "demonic possession" seems about as plausible as any other explanation for "I didn't do nuttin" (which, if you score poorly enough on the marshmallow test, is kinda true. Yesterday's you did that).
The overall war reminds me of a few other situations from history, like the mid Roman Empire and Song dynasty China. Where you've got a great power that is far more powerful than any of its immediate neighbors, ruled by a single monarch who is in theory "all powerful" but in practice sharply limited by lack of information and fragmented loyalty. So they end up being much more concerned with the threat of a coup d'etat or civil war than with foreign invasion, and deliberately weaken the military to keep the peace. And you see an example of that here where they lost more from Burgundy switching sides than they did from any battle.
This all works well during ordinary times. Even if they lose a minor border war it's no real concern to the monarch and most of his people, who are safe behind many layers of fortifications. The enemy will eventually sign peace for a minor amount of money, or just fragment themselves and go home.
It doesn't work well when you're suddenly confronted with a force that is extremely well organized and intent on taking everything, like the Jin/Mongols against the Song, or in this case the highly centralized and professional army of the Edwards. Then suddenly all your numbers count for nothing, because all your troops are routing in a panic that cascades.
In that situation, where "you" are the young Dauphin, what you need isn't necessarily a brilliant general. In fact that might make things worse, since the brilliant general might just take over for themselves. What you want is someone fanatically loyal who can also inspire the troops to be loyal.
Joan seems perfect for that, a fanatic to both king and God. God is conveniently far away in the aether, not a political threat, but makes a great rallying call for everyone, and can inspire the soldiers to fight to the death. Her open, fanatical loyalty to the king inspires others and makes all the other nobles look selfish. So they all kind of follow along behind her, mumbling the right platitudes and getting their soldiers to actually fight in an organized way for once, instead of everyone looking out for themselves. And once you do that, they naturally win the war, since they had a huge advantage in both numbers and most forms of equipment. Along the way she was saying great rallying calls like "we shall surely in the war soon," as if they were prophecies, and then it all gets turned into a miracle after she died.
I don't know, I'm not an expert or religious. But that's my take on it.
This reminds me of Robert E. Lee, in that he was trying to uplift morale via battles (and failed in such a fundamental way that it is difficult to see even a counterfactual of the South winning... and staying together. They'd have been reabsorbed into the Union after fracture, of course).
maybe in some ways, but I don't think that's a good analogue. Politics and morale are important in any war, but the 19th century south was just way more modern than medieval France. They had railroads, newspapers, telegraphs, and a much more cohesive sense of being part of a nation (or at least a state). The medieval people could easily just see themselves as loyal to their local noble, with the king as this far distant figure that they'd never even seen a picture of, who seemed to just extract taxes while providing no useful services.
I imagine the Dauphin meeting random French peasants would be more like King Arthur meeting the peasants in Monty Python ("Who are you? King of the who? I didn't vote for you!")
Hmm, I wasn't trying to argue that he was a genius, just a reasonably sharp guy who understood the predicament he was in. He was "king" in name only, surrounded by nobles who cared more about their own personal gain than the kingdom of France. He needed someone who was loyal to him and could convince others to also be loyal.
Going for Rheims to crown himself king in the traditional way might not make much military sense, but it might have been very politically important to demonstrate his legitimacy as king.
(The link goes directly to the play, skipping Shaw's long-winded preface. I will note that the play does its best to smooth over the rough edges of the characters, especially the English, who are characterized as thinking they're doing the right thing as they burn her -- naturally -- but what a play!)
I had missed this review when they were released earlier, and as a Catholic convert enjoyed it mightily (despite growing up playing the Britons in AOEII and loving longbowmen).
Fun read. Though the structure of "saint vs schizophrenic" kind of left me cold since the answer comes down to your belief about whether an interventionist god exists or not rather than anything to do with Joan specifically, except as one of a million pieces of evidence to be considered in making that larger philosophical judgement.
Not really. This is a better argument for Clown World (where god arbitrarily changes the rules in order to test various social/society level experiments). We get ONE Joan d'Arc. Experiment OVER. Never repeated.
A long and challenging review. I do have two spots that I could not understand in the end though.
>afterwards took to believing that he was made of glass and would shatter if he fell, but through the decision of his regent, one Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.
"But through the decision of his regent" ...what? Is that an incomplete sentence, or is "but" used in the sense of "except", meaning Phillip the Bold would decide whether or not Charles VI would shatter like glass?
>Footnote 48: Score: First-principles theories of how a rational religion ought to work, 0; the intercession of the saints, 1.
Sorry, I thought it was the nested footnote formatting that was confusing.
Charlemagne is generally not considered a saint by the Church. I read that as a criticism of this ad hoc/folk canonization that nevertheless seems to have empowered him to intercede in working miracles.
It's a long complicated sentence- the part that confused you references back to before the part you quoted. Basically France acted in Burgundy's interests not because of the King's choices, but because the Duke of Burgundy was ruling France as the King's regent. The part about shattering like glass is a contained sub-clause explaining why the King was not the one making the decisions.
There were also perfectly servicable ways to convey the same information through a less complex sentence, or two if need be. I want to grapple with the content, not so much its presentation.
That first part really should have been in parentheses, not commas.
>The Kingdom of France had done this not by the will of the King of France*... ...but through the decision of his regent, one Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.
*(Charles VI, Philip the Fortunate's grandson, who at that time was seriously mentally ill and who the year before his regency started had murdered several people in a paranoid fit and afterwards took to believing that he was made of glass and would shatter if he fell)
It depends. If you are approaching from the scientific world view and just want to know if the source can be trusted, then indeed this is enough to know that the source can not be fully trusted.
If you want to know if miracles are real, and reject any story which contains a miracle as obviously false, then you are begging the question.
I think something along this lines was discussed on an OT this Monday.
Perhaps you were a bit blindsided by the dry delivery of a joke. Yes, all the preceding stuff about milk and doves is a rather bigger counterpoint than the source not having been around to witness all that personally.
Great review! Normally my eyes would glaze over on a piece this long, but in this case I was fascinated all the way to the end.
Also: ah, yes, the English longbow. Amazing how nobody else at the time thought of making bows that could outrange everyone else's and then actually requiring the commons to train in their usage. If we'd required every mid-20th Century man of able body to maintain a sniper rifle and practice regularly in its use, we'd probably still have the Empire.
Really the English just appropriated it from the Welsh. And it clearly wasn't a good enough system in isolation to protect the Welsh from being conquered.
Pretty sure if you looked over at Russia/Poland, you'd discover a very different model of feudalism. (bows, for example, were proper knightly gear, as opposed to Western Europe).
Siberians trained women and children. They weren't using "longbows" but compound bows. Compound bows can have more draw force than longbows, and did at the time of the Mongols. Afterwards, one assume they were adopted by the current tribes.
Arguably the point of firearms is that you *don't* need to practice constantly from childhood to be good with them, you can have your citizens do something more useful and then put them through a few months of boot camp when you need a soldier. (And modern war is probably not going to be settled by individual marksmanship skill, anyway.)
I do think we should teach kids the NATO alphabet, though. You can use it to spell things out over the phone instead of doing that "A as in Apple, D as in Dog, M as in Mancy" nonsense. It's a practical life skill!
I'm not sure about the soundness of the atheistic argument.
Joan wasn't performing miracles, she simply seems to be that way because she's the one who shows up when you sort the world by who appears to be performing miracles.
A reductio ad absurdum could look like: Einstein wasn't actually smart, he's just who shows up when you sorting the world by who appeared to be smart.
> Einstein wasn't actually smart, he's just who shows up when you sorting the world by who appeared to be smart.
AFAIK some historians do hold that view. That is, yes, Einstein was of course very smart, but he wasn't the uniquely smartest man in human history (in fact, he had plenty of colleagues like Heisenberg who were arguably just as smart as he was). Perhaps the discovery of the Theory of Relativity (not the mention the Photoelectric Effect) was more or less inevitable. Someone would've done it eventually (or perhaps several different people), and in fact quite soon; Einstein was just the one who got there first.
Einstein wasn't very smart. He did like to make funny faces, and was very convenient for the CIA. (Tom Lehrer, on the other hand, was extremely inconvenient for the CIA, as was his song pointing out one of the famous people in Operation Paperclip).
General theory of relativity was inspired, I'll admit, but Einstein was notably inflexible and couldn't take a world that refuted his priors.
Consider that our standard for what "miracles" look like in the modern conception is essentially "apparently purposeful coincidences." We could be living in a world where people regularly part seas, cure amputees, raise the dead, split the earth to swallow their enemies, etc., but these sorts of things appear to occur in inverse proportion to how well documented the events in question are. But if "apparently purposeful coincidences" is our standard for what miracles look like, it's more or less inevitable that some events will appear miraculous just as a result of rolling the dice enough times.
Some events do seem suspiciously improbable (although I don't think Jean's story is *as* improbable as it appears, I've already left a couple comments in this thread discussing some reasons,) but if we suppose that God really did intervene through her, it suggests a God with rather odd priorities, since he was apparently concerned enough to make sure that the English didn't conquer the French, but has allowed countless other conquests, genocides, and other tragedies throughout history, without any apparently consistent concern for the moral character of the participants, or their alignment with the Christian religion.
What can look very purposeful when looked at in isolation, when we see one particular person or side getting what they want against apparently great odds, may look a lot less purposeful as we broaden our view and see that there isn't a consistent directionality to all the coincidence. There are diabolus ex machinas throughout history just as much as deus ex machinas, and the righteous or the Christian, let alone some specific brand of Christian, don't appear to be consistently favored.
I actually looked up the correct plurals while writing up my post, but I decided on balance that using them was more likely to be an impediment to clarity.
I think this is my favorite review so far, well done !
One thing I've learned from it (perhaps erroneously) is the sheer extent to which Medieval warfare and politics were based on "vibes". People like Machiavelli and Bismarck are often credited with inventing realpolitik, but until now I don't think I've been able to fully appreciate what that means. It means that people must have really and truly, in their heart of hearts, based critically important geopolitical decisions on their loyalty to their liege lord, or the line of descent of an heir, or on omens and portents like the color of the sparrow outside their window last Tuesday. This wasn't a callous post-hoc rationalization made up to justify an unpopular decision (at least, not always), but the accurate description of the flow of their conscious thought. Thus situations like "the King died and thus the army immediately fell apart" were not merely more common then than they are now, but in fact routine.
Which might explain (at least in part) how Joan of Arc was able to accomplish all those miracles. It sounds like the French had every ingredient they needed to defeat the English: manpower, materiel, terrain, supplies, even military training (maybe). What they utterly lacked was coordination, and perhaps morale. All of that military power was useless when it just sat there bickering endlessly with itself. Enter Joan of Arc, who could establish a command structure and inspire overwhelming morale advantage at the same time. Perhaps it was already virtually impossible for the French to lose the war given their overwhelming advantage in resources, as long as all of those resources were brought to bear on the enemy; and all it took was a charismatic leader who got them to do something, *anything*, and to do it with total and unyielding commitment. Even an less-than-brilliant general can win a war when all the advantages are on her side, and all she needs to do is push over the first domino.
And I think this disorganization might have been fractal (to an extent). The government was disordered; the generals were disordered; their captains and their sergeants and all the way down to the common infantryman, all were in disorder. Which might also explain Joan's amazing feats of military prowess. We don't have a record (unless I'm mistaken ?) of her ever personally defeating scores of enemies with her lance or hitting a remote target with her cannon. Rather, she lead teams of lancers and artillerists to actually do their jobs for once in their lives -- the jobs which they have been trained for. In a world of vibes, such sudden competence must have looked miraculous indeed.
People started wars because one guy thought it would be funny to pantz another guy (China). When you understand "realpolitik" understand that you're dealing with 15 year olds, a good deal of the time. And 15 year olds often do things because they want to impress a girl... Or think it would be funny to make someone else look bad.
It's not quite that simple. At the time the idea of nations or states of people hadn't really developed yet. Most places in medieval Europe were the personal possession of a monarch. You can see how people didn't have loyalty to France or Burgundy, but to the King of France or Duke of Burgundy. When nations operate on such a personal level and at the whims of a single figure, politics can seem more like a soap opera.
Similarly armies were usually the sole creations of monarchs, cobbled together from a fraction of their kingdom's levies and also mercenaries. The idea of a professional army serving a nation hadn't really developed yet either. So when the King died, the army often lost a reason to fight (this generally being to claim land for the King's person), and also their reason for being paid.
This is pretty close to my own model of what happened. She wasn't especially good at anything, except maybe persuasion. It's just that the French royal court were *that bad*.
I enjoyed reading the review although it was a bit on the long side, as I am regularly confused on how much the story of Joan of Arc is based on myth or reality.
However I think it gives a poor account of the course of the hundred year wars until Orleans. The review is confusing in making it sound like Agincourt (1415) took place right after Crecy (1346) and Poitiers (1356), while 6 decades are separating those.
Moreover it gives the impression that the french were constantly being defeated until the arrival of Joan of Arc. Actually between 1364 and 1380 french regained the upper side and conquered back most of the territory, under the command of Du Guesclin, with a strategy of putting cities controlled by the british under siege methodically one after the other. Then there was a long break as both countries suffered internal unrest, and the war restarted in 1415 as the english profited of the french division between Armagnacs and Bourguinons.
Edit: Thank you EngineOfCreation for spotting the typo on the date of Agincourt, now it's corrected.
It's really rather interesting how the course of the war seemed to depend more on the state of infighting within each of the two sides, more than any brilliant strategies or anything like that.
Reading about Joan of Arc I am reminded a little of Greta Thunberg. A slightly weird teenaged girl gets elevated to the status of a leader/figurehead of some larger movement, presumably by more sophisticated actors working behind the scenes, and presumably because the symbolic purity of a young girl plays much better than some old bearded dude.
Is this a pattern that has occurred elsewhere in history, or just a two-off?
I think the Sybils in Rome made some convenient prophesies and boosted morale. Not very close, but maybe you could see that as part of this pattern if you squint?
Yeah, you get it. The English were so furious about "how the hell is this bitch doing this to us? it must be evil pacts with the Devil!" that they wanted her burned at the stake. Even Shakespeare writes propaganda about this because they are still so butt-hurt about it a hundred and sixty years later.
"A considerable time ago (at far too early an age, in fact) I read Voltaire's "La Pucelle," a savage sarcasm on the traditional purity of Joan of Arc, very dirty, and very funny. I had not thought of it again for years, but it came back into my mind this morning because I began to turn over the leaves of the new "Jeanne d'Arc," by that great and graceful writer, Anatole France. It is written in a tone of tender sympathy, and a sort of sad reverence; it never loses touch with a noble tact and courtesy, like that of a gentleman escorting a peasant girl through the modern crowd. It is invariably respectful to Joan, and even respectful to her religion. And being myself a furious admirer of Joan the Maid, I have reflectively compared the two methods, and I come to the conclusion that I prefer Voltaire's.
When a man of Voltaire's school has to explode a saint or a great religious hero, he says that such a person is a common human fool, or a common human fraud. But when a man like Anatole France has to explode a saint, he explains a saint as somebody belonging to his particular fussy little literary set. Voltaire read human nature into Joan of Arc, though it was only the brutal part of human nature. At least it was not specially Voltaire's nature. But M. France read M. France's nature into Joan of Arc--all the cold kindness, all the homeless sentimental sin of the modern literary man. There is one book that it recalled to me with startling vividness, though I have not seen the matter mentioned anywhere; Renan's "Vie de Jesus." It has just the same general intention: that if you do not attack Christianity, you can at least patronise it. My own instinct, apart from my opinions, would be quite the other way. If I disbelieved in Christianity, I should be the loudest blasphemer in Hyde Park. Nothing ought to be too big for a brave man to attack; but there are some things too big for a man to patronise.
...It is no exaggeration to say that this is the manner of M. Anatole France in dealing with Joan of Arc. Because her miracle is incredible to his somewhat old-fashioned materialism, he does not therefore dismiss it and her to fairyland with Jack and the Beanstalk. He tries to invent a real story, for which he can find no real evidence. He produces a scientific explanation which is quite destitute of any scientific proof. It is as if I (being entirely ignorant of botany and chemistry) said that the beanstalk grew to the sky because nitrogen and argon got into the subsidiary ducts of the corolla. To take the most obvious example, the principal character in M. France's story is a person who never existed at all. All Joan's wisdom and energy, it seems, came from a certain priest, of whom there is not the tiniest trace in all the multitudinous records of her life. The only foundation I can find for this fancy is the highly undemocratic idea that a peasant girl could not possibly have any ideas of her own. It is very hard for a freethinker to remain democratic. The writer seems altogether to forget what is meant by the moral atmosphere of a community. To say that Joan must have learnt her vision of a virgin overthrowing evil from a priest, is like saying that some modern girl in London, pitying the poor, must have learnt it from a Labour Member. She would learn it where the Labour Member learnt it--in the whole state of our society."
Thank you for this review, which I greatly enjoyed (as I hope you can tell).
Okay, I also have to quote from "Là-Bas" by J.K. Huysman:
"What was the conduct of Gilles de Rais toward Jeanne d'Arc? We have no certain knowledge. M. Vallet de Viriville, without proof, accuses him of treachery. M. l'abbé Bossard, on the contrary, claims—and alleges plausible reasons for entertaining the opinion—that he was loyal to her and watched over her devotedly.
"What is certain is that Gilles's soul became saturated with mystical ideas. His whole history proves it.
"He was constantly in association with this extraordinary maid whose adventures seemed to attest the possibility of divine intervention in earthly affairs. He witnessed the miracle of a peasant girl dominating a court of ruffians and bandits and arousing a cowardly king who was on the point of flight. He witnessed the incredible episode of a virgin bringing back to the fold such black rams as La Hire, Xaintrailles, Beaumanoir, Chabannes, Dunois, and Gaucourt, and washing their old fleeces whiter than snow. Undoubtedly Gilles also, under her shepherding, docilely cropped the white grass of the gospel, took communion the morning of a battle, and revered Jeanne as a saint.
"He saw the Maid fulfil all her promises. She raised the siege of Orléans, had the king consecrated at Rheims, and then declared that her mission was accomplished and asked as a boon that she be permitted to return home.
"Now I should say that as a result of such an association Gilles's mysticism began to soar. Henceforth we have to deal with a man who is half-freebooter, half-monk. Moreover—"
"Pardon the interruption, but I am not so sure that Jeanne d'Arc's intervention was a good thing for France."
"Why not?"
"I will explain. You know that the defenders of Charles were for the most part Mediterranean cut-throats, ferocious pillagers, execrated by the very people they came to protect. The Hundred Years' War, in effect, was a war of the South against the North. England at that epoch had not got over the Conquest and was Norman in blood, language, and tradition. Suppose Jeanne d'Arc had stayed with her mother and stuck to her knitting. Charles VII would have been dispossessed and the war would have come to an end. The Plantagenets would have reigned over England and France, which, in primeval times before the Channel existed, formed one territory occupied by one race, as you know. Thus there would have been a single united and powerful kingdom of the North, reaching as far as the province of Languedoc and embracing peoples whose tastes, instincts, and customs were alike. On the other hand, the coronation of a Valois at Rheims created a heterogeneous and preposterous France, separating homogeneous elements, uniting the most incompatible nationalities, races the most hostile to each other, and identifying us—inseparably, alas!—with those stained-skinned, varnished-eyed munchers of chocolate and raveners of garlic, who are not Frenchmen at all, but Spaniards and Italians. In a word, if it hadn't been for Jeanne d'Arc, France would not now belong to that line of histrionic, forensic, perfidious chatterboxes, the precious Latin race—Devil take it!"
Durtal raised his eyebrows.
"My, my," he said, laughing. "Your remarks prove to me that you are interested in 'our own, our native land.' I should never have suspected it of you."
"Of course you wouldn't," said Des Hermies, relighting his cigarette. "As has so often been said, 'My own, my native land is wherever I happen to feel at home.' Now I don't feel at home except with the people of the North. But I interrupted you. Let's get back to the subject. What were you saying?"
"I forget. Oh, yes. I was saying that the Maid had completed her task. Now we are confronted by a question to which there is seemingly no answer. What did Gilles do when she was captured, how did he feel about her death? We cannot tell. We know that he was lurking in the vicinity of Rouen at the time of the trial, but it is too much to conclude from that, like certain of his biographies, that he was plotting her rescue.
"At any rate, after losing track of him completely, we find that he has shut himself in at his castle of Tiffauges.
"He is no longer the rough soldier, the uncouth fighting-man. At the time when the misdeeds are about to begin, the artist and man of letters develop in Gilles and, taking complete possession of him, incite him, under the impulsion of a perverted mysticism, to the most sophisticated of cruelties, the most delicate of crimes.
..."But all this," said Des Hermies, "does not explain how, from a man of piety, he was suddenly changed into a Satanist, from a placid scholar into a violator of little children, a 'ripper' of boys and girls."
"I have already told you that there are no documents to bind together the two parts of this life so strangely divided, but in what I have been narrating you can pick out some of the threads of the duality. To be precise, this man, as I have just had you observe, was a true mystic. He witnessed the most extraordinary events which history has ever shown. Association with Jeanne d'Arc certainly stimulated his desires for the divine. Now from lofty Mysticism to base Satanism there is but one step. In the Beyond all things touch. He carried his zeal for prayer into the territory of blasphemy. He was guided and controlled by that troop of sacrilegious priests, transmuters of metals, and evokers of demons, by whom he was surrounded at Tiffauges."
"You think, then, that the Maid of Orleans was really responsible for his career of evil?"
"To a certain point. Consider. She roused an impetuous soul, ready for anything, as well for orgies of saintliness as for ecstasies of crime.
"There was no transition between the two phases of his being. The moment Jeanne was dead he fell into the hands of sorcerers who were the most learned of scoundrels and the most unscrupulous of scholars. These men who frequented the château de Tiffauges were fervent Latinists, marvellous conversationalists, possessors of forgotten arcana, guardians of world-old secrets. Gilles was evidently more fitted to live with them than with men like Dunois and La Hire. These magicians, whom all the biographers agree to represent—wrongly, I think—as vulgar parasites and base knaves, were, as I view them, the patricians of intellect of the fifteenth century. Not having found places in the Church, where they would certainly have accepted no position beneath that of cardinal or pope, they could, in those troubled times of ignorance, but take refuge in the patronage of a great lord like Gilles. And Gilles was, indeed, the only one at that epoch who was intelligent enough and educated enough to understand them."
I don't get the whole last bit about claiming there's some big mystery here. Of course someone who's a charismatic national hero is going to have people tell all sorts of implausible stories about how great she was, especially twenty years after her heroic death. The details don't seem particularly beyond what I'd expect people to say about their cool local hero (who actually performed at about the background level for an unusually charismatic young woman).
Why can't she be a very gifted (140 IQ?) peasant girl with mild to moderate schizotypal mania and/or scrupulosity OCD who spends all her time learning about religion from her local priest and has a great reputation in her village and develops strong charisma. Then she shows up and after proving how incredible she is at boosting morale and motivating troops, slowly but surely the military leaders around her realize how useful she can be, and start saying things like "oh wow everyone we have a saint and a genius on our side!" which inevitably drastically improves military outcomes, since most pre-modern battle outcomes are decided heavily by morale. None of her predictions are impressive beyond her being convinced she'd win and see the kind crowned and happening to be right, which was in fact downstream of her confidence and devotion being so inspiring.
You can mix her being an intelligent and mild lunatic with the people around her choosing to see her as even more competent than she was because she was so inspiring, without requiring it to be full lies on their part or for her to be a raving madwoman incapable of inspiring others.
This is also my preferred explanation. She’s undeniably brilliant, charismatic, insanely confident, and those together sometimes lead to incredible victory, especially if she wins once or twice and everyone decides she’s inspired by god and decides to do what the bold and brilliant military genius thinks they should. If she’d lost we’d never have heard of her. It’s amazing and awe-inspiring, but I don’t think it has to be divine.
The maiden commands her own particular kind of respect. Men cannot look to her as just another man giving orders, even if she's clad as one. Maybe she reminds them of their daughters, or their dear sisters. Of course, she had to be clad as a, to put it politically correctly, Person of War - so, in effect, a man, with his war accoutrements, even as a bannerma- I mean, bannermaid - in order to command respect in the military context. Anyway, by having everyone focus on her, she gives everyone a sense of shared purpose. And, perhaps, while she makes calls, competent people do advise her.
Though in insisting on getting the king crowned at France's Scone, well, that was putting aside military pragmatism for symboloprophetic imperative. Some things are more important than doing things by the book. The tactics are the tactics, but the maiden is the soul of the enterprise, and her story needs to work - indeed, it has sort of done for France what King Arthur does for England, maybe? And it's telling that both "legends" are Christian. But I am much more satisfied with Joan's historicity (and the preponderance of truthiness in it - you know, direct is-ness applicableness, if such a thing can even be truly said to be) than I am of other legendary figures, but FWIW I'm on the JHC was a thing team, not necessarily by those initials in a legal sense, and not necessarily capital Charlie either. It seems like he must have been a wise guy, in a sardonic sense at a bare minimum, but you need like ancient astronauts theories or theism (which have a dearth of falsifiability, which is a problem in reasontopia) to explain stuff like loaves and fishes, if you take it to be literally true. Like I'm not sure Penn and Teller could actually fill people up with the appearance of a bare severality of loaf and fish done with literal smoke and mirrors or something. But I think something like a precocious kid arguing with clerics is quite plausible, and I think I read somewhere that there was a Jewish historian that reported some rabble rouser or other dying on the cross. But Jesus Christ, Inc. is so much bigger than that now, especially taking the whole dang Club Jesus as a singularity.
(Footnote: It has had many schisms, and can hardly be all said to be the same religion, except in a share of memetic antecedence and concordance. Of course, many sects think of themselves as Universal, or Catholic. Or the Greek Orthodox are carrying on the True and Honest Roman Christian Tradition or something.)
Wow, an amazing review. I learned more about J of A than I ever had before. I actually have a feel for who she was and what she was like.
As for the miracle thing, well, I think the answer is obvious. Clearly, a time traveler went back, implanted a mic in her ear, and was advising her the entire time.
How much of a complexity penalty does that explanation get?
I'd just like to add that the English army under King Edward was not composed *only* of professional soldiers, but also of knights and their retinues. One of these, the 11th Earl of Warwick, was instrumental in 1346 in enabling the English troops to land at La Hogue. He attacked 100 French soldiers who were trying to stop the landing with his squire and six archers, killing 60 enemy soldiers and forcing the rest to flee.
We don't see many miraculous "saints" like her in the more modern era of better record keeping. Similarly, it has been quipped that there are fewer sightings of Bigfoot & UFOs by civilians in this era of widespeared digital cameras.
I really liked this essay. But the talk about her tactical brilliance made me a little curious about what Joan was actually concretely doing with the army. A lot of the discussion of her military campaign reads like "Joan's allies suggested strategy A, which was a complex and cautious plan which would definitely not win the war, and Joan instead suggested strategy B, a balls-out direct assault that would win a great victory if they were very lucky and lose the whole war if they weren't. And they were miraculously lucky."
So like, when you say that Joan of Arc was a miraculous prodigy at commanding an army, do you mean she demonstrated some specific facet of generalship, like when she's setting up for a battle she recognizes good terrain or a good place to set up cannons, or do you mean she kept going all-in on simple and direct strategies that kept working because she had the manic charisma to get the whole army behind her on them?
(Side note: You mention at the start that the English were actually heavily outnumbered, but kept winning because they had a professional, well-motivated army. Were they still outnumbered by Joan's time? Joan's religious discipline seems like it might have served a similar purpose.)
I'm especially curious about what she did with artillery, since you spend a while talking about how it's a uniquely technical branch of the military. But if you're a general rather than an artillery officer, do you actually need to know those fiddly details? Did Joan figure out something really cool to do with the newly introduced cannons, or did she just tell her artillerymen "God requires you to flatten this next fortification" and let the people who know the business get to work? Like, one of those two sounds a bit more miraculous than the other.
I guess I'll be the downer and say I wasn't a super fan of this one. As I read I just wished more and more to instead go listen to the episodes of The Rest is History covering Agincourt and the later episodes covering Joan of Arc (actually I'll go download the Joan ones now). By the time I got to the "value add" of the review being the deliberation of the evidence, I was tired of it, and when it came to the fictional debate I gave up. Someone do tell me if that part is particularly worthy of reading and I'll come back to it, but I'm just not feeling it right now.
Edit: apparently I hallucinated the existence of Joan of Arc episodes, shame.
Only an ACX review could relate the story of St. Catherine and present as the first piece of evidence that it is, in fact, fiction that an untrained teenager outdebated a roomful of philosophers.
Why do reviewers feel the need to be funny? It is possible to write an entertaining, even a gripping, review without being supercilious. Otherwise, good.
Wow, that was long. And interesting in the bits I read/scanned. But I must have missed somewhere what the essay is a "review" of. I thought maybe it would end up being about Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc but no. Or perhaps review in this case means historical summary.
It’s a review of the evidence for Joan of Arc
“This is, then, an agnostic’s review of the evidence for Joan of Arc - artillerist, fraudbuster, confirmed saint, and Extremely Documented Person.”
All of the "reviews" I've read so far are actually essays.
It's a regular Amateur Philosophy Club in here!
I think this follows this site's announced series of Not-A-Book Reviews, after the blogger realised there are things to be reviewed other than books.
Guess I missed that episode, thanks.
Most people didn't write reviews. I'm pretty sure a good many of these "reviews" are essays that people wrote in some other context.
Except that one asshole who "reviewed" The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe by saying "It's good. Read it." Wasted a perfectly good slot on the Book Review series last year.
Good writing, with above-average similarity to Scott's own.
If it is Scott, then he is has deliberately changed his style a bit, inserting 98 footnotes is not usual for him. I am also not sure that the author is enthusiastic about exactly the things Scott would be enthusiastic about. I would expect Scott to care more about the psychiatric side of things and less about breastplates, personally.
Also, if this is indeed Scott, I must conclude that he possesses a time-turner.
But yes, the writing was great.
The writing was overall enjoyable, but there were a few needlessly complicated sentences and the occasional forgotten word. Nothing major in relation to the length of the essay, but I found it noticable, and less careful than Scott's.
I think I have a pretty good guess as to who wrote this, and I don't think it's Scott. But they're both quite engaging writers on a sentence-by-sentence basis, in a way that's not common even among people who make the finals.
I think I know who it is (not Scott!) But yes, excellent writer.
I am nitpicking, but I am from Newcastle so Bede is one of my local saints. Bede was born in 672 and Cuthbert died in 687. Cuthbert lived and died in Lindisfarne, about 60 miles up the coast from where Bede was in Jarrow. At the very least, Bede knew people who had met and talked to Cuthbert, he did not need a book written twenty years later. I think that this illustrates that you do not need distance or time to create fantastic stories about heroes.
Artillery would have been a fairly novel aspect of European warfare at the time, wouldn't it? If so, there wasn't yet a large body of hard-won practical knowledge that one had to internalize just to get to the level of the average artillery strategist. That's exactly the sort of environment where one would expect a gifted but untutored novice to excel. It doesn't look very miraculous.
It indeed was fairly novel. During the second phase of the Hundred Year's war, France was the first European country to make a mass use of artillery, notably under the command of Jean Bureau which was a key figure of this phase of the conflict.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Bureau
Depends on what you mean by "novel". Cannons were used in European warfare since at least the 14th century. They were notably present during the Siege of Marienburg in 1410, before Joan was even born. The issue was more that the metalworking technology of the day was too primitive to contain the pressure needed to use cannons like artillery. They were more akin to large shotguns that were loaded with arrows or shrapnel, although larger bombard cannons used in sieges did develop around this time period. Most famously at the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
So, I'm a big fan of this review, and I understand that the author doesn't contend actual divine intervention on her behalf, but presents documentation of a life which is, in conventional terms, pretty hard to explain.
But I'd like to note that some of this becomes, I think, more explicable, with the context that Jean didn't actually need extraordinary abilities of military command to achieve success above the baseline that the French forces were experiencing before her. The French nobility at the time were extremely fractious and jockeying for power, and battles at the time were often terribly coordinated, with different nobles failing to use the forces under their control cooperatively, because they were all aiming for their own glory more than collective success.
I'm afraid that I can't cite a specific source, because this comes from some book I read over a decade ago, whose title I can't remember, but it documented some firsthand accounts of Jean's participation in some battles at the time, where various nobles were all in disagreement about when to attack. Jean deployed her own forces into battle at a time that the various leaders generally considered stupid and reckless, but they felt forced to send their own forces in after her to salvage the situation, and although the timing was bad, they thereby achieved better coordination than they would have without a schelling point to rally around.
Jean definitely achieved greater success than other leaders at the time, but it seems that her contemporaries did not hold any kind of unanimous consensus that she was actually competent at what she was doing; it seems that some of them saw her as reckless and constantly needing to be bailed out of the consequences of her own poor judgment. I don't know any firsthand sources that address whether she was actually skilled in martial disciplines like the use of the sword or lance, and I have spent some time looking; I think it's likely that she wasn't actually particularly skilled in these areas either, but as a military leader, she didn't particularly need to be, and any attributions of her being exceptionally skilled were likely confabulations after the fact.
There's still plenty left over about Jean's life afterwards which is strange and exceptional, but I think it would be a mistake to imagine that it takes decades for a person to become shrouded in rumor, and for stories about them to become more grounded in legend than true recollection.
I believe that there are several martial disciplines that she could have learned on the farm, without much in the way of teaching. Horsemanship, in particular, was learnable on a farm, in that the same horses were used for heavy cavalry as for pulling a plough. And she'd have learned it better bareback than in a saddle. Lance, too, is about aim -- it's not something you really need to have a partner to learn.
"Horsemanship, in particular, was learnable on a farm, in that the same horses were used for heavy cavalry as for pulling a plough."
This is absolutely not true. Warhorses were specially bred for aggression and speed, and were a prized and expensive possession of the nobility. Plough horses needed to be docile and have long term endurance, which selected for rather different traits. Maybe you could learn to ride a horse in the general sense as a 15th century French peasant, but it certainly would not be the same as riding a warhorse into battle with full kit.
I don't think you were breeding warhorses for aggression. You'd breed them for "steadiness" and ability to be turned while using "no hands."
Still point taken -- there are different horses. I'm still going to maintain that any of the heavier breeds are in general less "flighty" than Arabians, and not bred to be high-strung.
Aggression was important, because a horse is naturally averse to charging into a mass of other people/animals. We know that warhorses were indeed aggressive due to accounts of them generally being temperamental and on occasion a hazard even to their own handlers.
I saw you mentioned Shire horses in another comment, but I think you had it backwards. The European Destrier, or great horse, was often used as a warhorse before the widespread adoption of gunpowder. After this, mobility became more important than brute strength and most cavalry transitioned to lighter horse. Possibly modern draft breeds like the Shire are descendants of the old great horse after it no longer had a place on the battlefield; but this is disputed due to the various physical differences between martial and draft horses.
Lindybeige had a recent video about how horses were trained to charge masses of pikemen though a few months of conditioning them not to associate that with danger (by having a "dummy" group of people who all move out of the way): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zviMg5Bkt8g.
If that's historically accurate – it sounds plausible to me – aggression wouldn't be as important as mass and trainability.
And about being "temperamental" hazards to their trainers, that fits with them being skittish, easily frightened and hurting people while panicking, quite the opposite of being aggressive.
Specifically, they tended to bite or kick people. Which would be handy if you were surrounded by a bunch of hostile infantry. On charging into pikes, that one is pretty contentious. I know Brett Deveraux wrote a piece in support of the "that didn't actually happen" camp.
Yes, cavalry that charges formed pikemen get skewered. You have to break the formation first.
Charging them sometimes works, since a formation of charging cavalry is really scary to stand in front of. But it's a game of chicken.
Cavalry however are really good at killing people running away, since they move faster.
< You'd breed them for "steadiness" and ability to be turned while using "no hands."
In the Dark Tower there’s a scene where Roland of Gilead, on horseback, charges at his foe holding the reins in this teeth, pistols in both hands, shooting both at once.
Aw, I posted something similar in my own comment, but you beat me to it !
I think this is the missing part of the argument. Her military results are outstanding, but her strategy seems to be very heavy on “throw the whole army at them” shock tactics. Taking from the build-up, I don’t understand what she was doing to not get shredded by longbows. All this requires extreme piety, charisma and self belief but not much else. Tends towards mad as opposed to faking it.
As for military skills, she’s got a month to learn to wear armour and control a warhorse, which is doable. There doesn’t seem to be any suggestion that she’s storming in like Master Chief and killing 500 Englishmen single-handedly. Not dying is notable but not out of distribution.
The predictions seem pretty “eh.” The wind one was cool, ignoring that it’s not technically a prediction, but it’s the sort of “darndest thing” story you get all the time, as is the cannonball. The grand scale predictions are run of the mill for charismatic leaders, and the fact she was the 1 in 50 where it paid off is why we’re talking about her.
The trial skills are a matter of taste. They remind me of all Jesus’ irritating non-answers in the gospel, and of my broader experience of having to cross-examine grandiose buffoons; they’re not heresy because she doesn’t say all that much beyond not doubting the pope and only reporting what the voices told her.
Overall, it looks like impressive results attributable to conviction and charisma resulting from insanity.
> Taking from the build-up, I don’t understand what she was doing to not get shredded by longbows.
Archers are light infantry, who are typically vulnerable to heavy cavalry (knights), who despite what the above post said were known to put armor on their horses (although I don't know if that was commonly the case in this conflict). If horses have to charge through a muddy field (as at Agincourt), that does much to negate their advantage. It should be noted that the English continued to rely on knights in their wars (including civil wars) rather than thinking they could just rely on longbows to negate them. Getting spearmen (heavy infantry) to stand in place against a horse charge actually undermined the dominance of knights, but it was hard to do that in the medieval era and it took a long time before Swiss pikemen emerged as able to do it reliably.
What's fun for me about this is I used to be an agnostic secular humanist semi-rationalist (postrat?) who became a Mutazili Muslim (the most rationalist type of Muslim) and I have a model of divine guidance in history involving a series of persons like this and God tilting various political factions based on how less wrong they were about divine justice and theology.
So this checks out.
Little things like the cannonball dodge are how miracles work. I've experienced a few of these such as an accidental trade on the day of my son's birth based on some risk-management orders I forget to cancel that knocked me into a massive long (the orders were to unwind funding arbitrage positions, long/short big size to earn a few basis points over time) and I paid for my house with that, then became more religious.
I think Islam is more correct than Christianity but Muslims cheesed it up so much that Protestants who were slightly less corrupt got the edge but now that the US is fully supporting mass starvation the ball may well slide into China's court despite them being atheist, that's how Less Wrong divine favor works. Humans are very bad and God doesn't have a lot to work with in terms of optimizations. A reformed Muslim confederation of nations could also get a lot more power or a gaggle of loosely assorted "network state" parties if the Muslims don't figure it out (and let's be honest we're not sending our best).
The artillery question is really the uh... smoking gun for the Joan investigation. One thing you learn contemplating theology is to not quibble over direct vs. proxy concepts of divinity, sure God is One, above all etc. but when it comes down to free will vs. determinism, divine agents vs. divine acts, just go with the flow you can sharpshoot all combinations into an attribution bias if you're faithful enough. One thing you learn from studying hadith, gospels etc. is that indeed history is a major wikipedia edit tournament in the making for hundreds of years without a meta-data record of edits, psuedo-epigripha and such, and it's more egregious the further back you go in history but doesn't much improve. Which is why the Qur'an being widely considered by non-believing academics to be historically intact from the 600s is so exceptional - one might say miraculously so - you can't really say that about much documentation until perhaps before WWI, perhaps the 1850s, maybe 1600s kinda.
The attempts to do revisionism on the Gaza Genocide have been noted and have largely failed because people who are actively starving or semi-starving are posting live video on Twitter from their phones and these things mirror onto new media. I saw some pro-genocide account posting about how the NYTimes is anti-semetic because their photo of a near-death starving child didn't diclose he has cerebral pasly, - not correlated to starvation! - the only thing that can reverse this trend of well-documented live history would be AI deepfakes saturating fog of war once again.
"Walter not everything has to do with the Gazan genocide?"
"Well it has something to do with it"
"No Walter!"
"Dude the supreme court has roundly rejected prior restraint!"
"Walter this is not a first amendment thing."
"Shomer Shabbos..."
"Walter..."
"Shomer f'ing Shabbos!"
Good day to do you.
> "The attempts to do revisionism on the Gaza Genocide have been noted and have largely failed because people who are actively starving or semi-starving are posting live video on Twitter from their phones"
Some of these pics are obviously fake, unless extremely rubenesque mothers taking videos of their skeletal offspring doesn't raise any red flags for you.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/07/29/g-s1-79830/gaza-starvation-death-malnutrition
tl;dr the penultimate phase of starvation before autophagyian and then death is fat liquidation, so an adult woman with a hormonal tendency to accumualte fat reserves foremost among the demographics of our species is going to be emaciated later than her young child who has far less accumulated reserves.
Modern day holocaust denial is very strange.
Oh, okay, so I assume we have photographic evidence for 200-pound jewish mothers waddling around the yard in Auschwitz while their daughters were reduced to emaciated husks, because they were fasting on slightly different timelines. Suuuuure.
By the way, if the Israelis were planning a genocide and thought they could get away with it, why not just turn off the water supply on day one?
I'm probably shouldn't touch this, but it's my understanding the women and children at auschwitz weren't killed by starvation...
I'm not intimately familiar with the causes of death which were most typical at different concentration camps, but life-threatening malnutrition was clearly a problem for a lot of jewish inmates in the death-camp system more broadly. My point is that I don't think there's any historical precedent for a population afflicted by mass starvation where you see chubby mothers and skeletal children.
The thing is, there is a plausible case that Gaza actually *will* enter a state of famine in the not-so-distant future, but left-wing reporting on the topic has been so consistently hysterical, retarded and partisan that it's hard to take the pro-Palestine camp seriously at this point.
https://scottkahn.substack.com/p/will-there-be-a-famine-in-gaza
https://nonzionism.com/p/israel-is-a-borderline-failed-state
The Israelis aren't planning a genocide. It would be more accurate to say the Israeli establishment is in a state of political quagmire, with the result that they have no overarching plan at all. This is bad, but it's a different problem.
Have you written anywhere on why you became muslim? It sounds so impossible to me to be religious in general, but muslim specially, that I'm curious.
Thanks for the comment, I'm actually really interested in hearing more backstory of a rationalist convert to Islam!
Somewhat related, I recall a review last year of a book about a former ISIS fighter who became a UK spy (while remaining muslim). As I recall, the pivotal moment for him was going in person to research various hadiths, and finding that what was _actually_ in them vs what was _claimed_ to be in them varied quite a bit. The review author talked about being impressed that people whom we normally think of as unreachable zealots could, in fact, be persuaded by evidence. The reviewer suggested that one thing the world greatly needs is:
"Authenticity of the various hadiths: much more than you wanted to know"
I realize I'm out on a limb here, but what you've written so far implies you might be an excellent candidate for such a project...
You're thinking of Nine Lives by Aimen Dean. al-Qaeda, not ISIS.
Ah, that sounds right, thank you!
> the ball may well slide into China's court despite them being atheist, that's how Less Wrong divine favor works
China is not only ruled by the officially atheist communist party, they also put Muslim Uighurs in re-education camps.
France is mostly cursed because of the French. I like how they finessed getting the English to kill her so they could blame them and act like she was their amazing girl. The Monty Python skit always comes to mind when I think of the French.
I really loved this essay.
If you read the literature on auditory hallucinations, Joan's symptoms match nearly perfectly. I think it's nearly beyond dispute that she was in fact hearing voices and not just faking it for fame/credibility.
Of course, what we call auditory hallucinations could in this case actually be the voices of saints (please don't tell your neighborhood schizophrenic about this).
Here's my theory of what was going on, offered as one thought among many:
1) Joan of Arc was extremely intelligent. Like Von Neumann level or higher, though focused in rather different directions.
2) My model of intelligence is that what it mainly represents is learning rate. High intelligence means fast, intuitive learning. People who are intelligent make better predictions because they know more things. Not necessarily in a way fully available to conscious processing, but more in the way that an LLM "knows" things it was trained on and the right prompt can elicit those things.
3) Consciousness is very flexible. We tend to think in terms of a "homunculus" that drives our behavior but this is an illusion. People who believe in spirit possession can easily be possessed, which doesn't mean actual supernatural entities, but rather an altered state of consciousness in which the mind reinterprets how decisions are being made to attribute them to an external spirit instead of an internal homunculus (both equally fictional).
4) Joan of Arc, a naturally pious peasant girl living in late medieval france, ended up adopting a frame that all of her intelligent insights came from an external source: God. This made a lot of sense to everyone (including her) because the types of thoughts her brain was generating seemed wildly implausible to be coming from a random peasant girl.
5) Her high learning rate included physical tasks like riding, lancing, etc. Some people are just really good at this. They can see you do something once or twice and immediately copy it almost perfectly. She didn't need to be trained at this explicitly because she was spending a fair amount of time around military people so she just naturally absorbed it all. It also helped that this fit within her "chosen by god" frame. Without that frame in place her unconscious mind might have blocked her from getting too good at things she wasn't supposed to be good at (I expect this happens all the time in all sorts of cultural contexts. Often, "training" exists to create a social context for learning that isn't necessarily that difficult once you convince the learning part of your brain that it's supposed to care about this stuff).
6) She also got very good at theology for similar reasons. Think of her almost like a rogue superintelligence picking up on clues nobody else would even realize are there. Not necessarily in a conscious way, but as a constant background task. When challenged on theological matters, she knew enough theology to triangulate the rest, at least enough of it that it was difficult to catch her slipping up. Notably it helps that she can dodge lots of questions by saying God told her what to do directly.
I already brought this up in my own comment a while ago, but I don't think the primary source material substantiates the idea that Jean was actually especially competent at skills like riding, swordsmanship, lancing, etc, but these sorts of skills weren't particularly material to her success as a commander, and it's easy for people to confabulate stories about them after the fact, when she's already famous as a miraculously successful leader. Some people are notably physically gifted and quick to pick up athletic skills, although I don't think this correlates particularly well with cognitive intelligence, but I don't think we have to suppose that Jean was to make sense of her story.
I also don't think she necessarily needed much expertise in theology. All accounts agree that she was notably charismatic, and it's probable that she was quite good at reading people, assessing intent, etc. I don't think I'm by any means exceptional at reading people, but reading through the questions that she was supposedly asked in her interrogation, before reading her answers, I could intuit the sort of answers they were trying to get out of her, and think of ways out of them similar to the ones she offered, just given the context that they were hostile interrogators asking her leading questions trying to catch her in some sort of heresy, and thinking "Assuming that this question is intended to lead me into admitting heresy, what might that heresy entail, and how would I avoid that?" I'm not operating under stress or strict time pressure, but I also didn't have any nonverbal cues from the interrogators to draw on. All in all, I don't think this is a particularly hard feat to explain given ordinary human abilities.
We ALSO don't need to say that she didn't know horseback riding before she was 15. Or, perhaps, lance-holding. Riding is something perfectly practiceable on a farm (heavy horse at the time being both used for battle and for farmwork, I believe -- citing Shire horses as your prototype, though you'd have had a french breed), and one might say she'd have been better learning to ride bareback than with a heavy saddle. Lances, not so much, but much much more likely than swordsmanship (which pretty much requires a partner in order to learn how to counter/defend, and attack weaknesses).
Come to think, swordsmanship on the ground is a "long term learning project" -- how is it on a horse? If you're coming up against pikes, you turn around, but on a horse against footmen, you're above them. Is that significantly easier to learn? I'd wager so.
Re: her swordsmanship skills, from another comment
> As for military skills, she’s got a month to learn to wear armour and control a warhorse, which is doable. There doesn’t seem to be any suggestion that she’s storming in like Master Chief and killing 500 Englishmen single-handedly. Not dying is notable but not out of distribution.
Most people bow to interrogation. It's why you're advised not to speak to the FBI or the police under any circumstances without legal counsel. Anything you say can and will be used against you.
That said, a particularly smart child could pull off "don't say yes to heresy." A particularly coached adult (like one that's been through a few "extreme" exorcisms, as opposed to the minor exorcism that occurs every Easter Sunday) could do so as well, I believe. [Not that I have the book-learning to know what a "standard" exorcism of the time would have been like.]
Here's one I thought Joan had a very theologically sophisticated answer to when reading quotes from her trial: "Do you know whether or not you are in God's grace?" Try to answer it yourself, avoiding heresy.
ROT13 of Joan's own answer, along with an explanation: Vs V nz abg, znl Tbq chg zr gurer; naq vs V nz, znl Tbq fb xrrc zr. V fubhyq or gur fnqqrfg perngher va gur jbeyq vs V xarj V jrer abg va Uvf tenpr.
Wbna pnaabg fnl "Lrf," nf Pngubyvp qbpgevar ubyqf gung ab bar pna xabj gung gurl ner va n fgngr bs tenpr. Guvf vf abg n gevivny znggre; Cebgrfgnagf bayl n uhaqerq be fb lrnef yngre uryq qvssreragyl, fbzr rira fhttrfgvat gung vs lbh *qvqa'g* xabj lbh jrer va n fgngr bs tenpr, gung vaqvpngrq n qrsvpvrapl va lbhe snvgu.
Wbna tvirf gur pbeerpg Pngubyvp nafjre. Ubcr gung lbh ner va n fgngr bs tenpr, ohg qb abg cerfhzr. Abgr gung ure nafjre urer vf qvssrerag sebz ure nffhenapr gung, riraghnyyl, fur jvyy ernpu fnyingvba. Gur qvfgvapgvba orgjrra "orvat riraghnyyl qrfgvarq sbe fnyingvba" naq "orvat va n fgngr bs tenpr" vf n gurbybtvpnyyl fbcuvfgvpngrq bar, ohg Wbna vf noyr gb anivtngr vg cresrpgyl pbeerpgyl, ol Pngubyvp gurbybtvpny fgnaqneqf.Vs V nz abg, znl Tbq chg zr gurer; naq vs V nz, znl Tbq fb xrrc zr. V fubhyq or gur fnqqrfg perngher va gur jbeyq vs V xarj V jrer abg va Uvf tenpr.
Wbna pnaabg fnl "Lrf," nf Pngubyvp qbpgevar ubyqf gung ab bar pna xabj gung gurl ner va n fgngr bs tenpr. Guvf vf abg n gevivny znggre; Cebgrfgnagf bayl n uhaqerq be fb lrnef yngre uryq qvssreragyl, fbzr rira fhttrfgvat gung vs lbh *qvqa'g* xabj lbh jrer va n fgngr bs tenpr, gung vaqvpngrq n qrsvpvrapl va lbhe snvgu.
Wbna tvirf gur pbeerpg Pngubyvp nafjre. Ubcr gung lbh ner va n fgngr bs tenpr, ohg qb abg cerfhzr. Abgr gung ure nafjre urer vf qvssrerag sebz ure nffhenapr gung, riraghnyyl, fur jvyy ernpu fnyingvba, dhbgrq va gur negvpyr. Gur qvfgvapgvba orgjrra "orvat riraghnyyl qrfgvarq sbe fnyingvba" naq "orvat va n fgngr bs tenpr" vf n irkvat bar, ohg Wbna vf noyr gb anivtngr vg cresrpgyl pbeerpgyl, ol Pngubyvp gurbybtvpny fgnaqneqf. V guvax guvf vfa'g n fznyy srng, naq fhttrfgf fur npghnyyl unq fvtavsvpnag gurbybtvpny yrneavat.
One thought I haven't seen explicitly: it's possible that a member of the Trial of Condemnation was repulsed by the kangooroo-ness of it all, and was feeding her info about what kinds of question she was likely to be asked (possibly with safe answers). I have zero evidence for this suspicion, but it certainly wouldn't be the first time something similar had happened
3) is helped by poor performance on the marshmallow test. when you are literally a different person than last week's you... yeah, "demonic possession" seems about as plausible as any other explanation for "I didn't do nuttin" (which, if you score poorly enough on the marshmallow test, is kinda true. Yesterday's you did that).
The overall war reminds me of a few other situations from history, like the mid Roman Empire and Song dynasty China. Where you've got a great power that is far more powerful than any of its immediate neighbors, ruled by a single monarch who is in theory "all powerful" but in practice sharply limited by lack of information and fragmented loyalty. So they end up being much more concerned with the threat of a coup d'etat or civil war than with foreign invasion, and deliberately weaken the military to keep the peace. And you see an example of that here where they lost more from Burgundy switching sides than they did from any battle.
This all works well during ordinary times. Even if they lose a minor border war it's no real concern to the monarch and most of his people, who are safe behind many layers of fortifications. The enemy will eventually sign peace for a minor amount of money, or just fragment themselves and go home.
It doesn't work well when you're suddenly confronted with a force that is extremely well organized and intent on taking everything, like the Jin/Mongols against the Song, or in this case the highly centralized and professional army of the Edwards. Then suddenly all your numbers count for nothing, because all your troops are routing in a panic that cascades.
In that situation, where "you" are the young Dauphin, what you need isn't necessarily a brilliant general. In fact that might make things worse, since the brilliant general might just take over for themselves. What you want is someone fanatically loyal who can also inspire the troops to be loyal.
Joan seems perfect for that, a fanatic to both king and God. God is conveniently far away in the aether, not a political threat, but makes a great rallying call for everyone, and can inspire the soldiers to fight to the death. Her open, fanatical loyalty to the king inspires others and makes all the other nobles look selfish. So they all kind of follow along behind her, mumbling the right platitudes and getting their soldiers to actually fight in an organized way for once, instead of everyone looking out for themselves. And once you do that, they naturally win the war, since they had a huge advantage in both numbers and most forms of equipment. Along the way she was saying great rallying calls like "we shall surely in the war soon," as if they were prophecies, and then it all gets turned into a miracle after she died.
I don't know, I'm not an expert or religious. But that's my take on it.
This reminds me of Robert E. Lee, in that he was trying to uplift morale via battles (and failed in such a fundamental way that it is difficult to see even a counterfactual of the South winning... and staying together. They'd have been reabsorbed into the Union after fracture, of course).
maybe in some ways, but I don't think that's a good analogue. Politics and morale are important in any war, but the 19th century south was just way more modern than medieval France. They had railroads, newspapers, telegraphs, and a much more cohesive sense of being part of a nation (or at least a state). The medieval people could easily just see themselves as loyal to their local noble, with the king as this far distant figure that they'd never even seen a picture of, who seemed to just extract taxes while providing no useful services.
I imagine the Dauphin meeting random French peasants would be more like King Arthur meeting the peasants in Monty Python ("Who are you? King of the who? I didn't vote for you!")
So you are hypothesizing that the Dauphin was some sort of hidden political genius? Huh, I don't anyone else has come up with that one. Kudos.
Hmm, I wasn't trying to argue that he was a genius, just a reasonably sharp guy who understood the predicament he was in. He was "king" in name only, surrounded by nobles who cared more about their own personal gain than the kingdom of France. He needed someone who was loyal to him and could convince others to also be loyal.
Going for Rheims to crown himself king in the traditional way might not make much military sense, but it might have been very politically important to demonstrate his legitimacy as king.
I note with approval the mention of Shaw. His play, Saint Joan, was excellent, and I recommend anyone with free time to read it: https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200811h.html#C01
(The link goes directly to the play, skipping Shaw's long-winded preface. I will note that the play does its best to smooth over the rough edges of the characters, especially the English, who are characterized as thinking they're doing the right thing as they burn her -- naturally -- but what a play!)
I'm partial to Schiller. In particular, I love the great "… the gods themselves contend in vain" line (which I first learnt from Asimov's book).
I had missed this review when they were released earlier, and as a Catholic convert enjoyed it mightily (despite growing up playing the Britons in AOEII and loving longbowmen).
This was fab. Completely fascinating. Thank you.
Fun read. Though the structure of "saint vs schizophrenic" kind of left me cold since the answer comes down to your belief about whether an interventionist god exists or not rather than anything to do with Joan specifically, except as one of a million pieces of evidence to be considered in making that larger philosophical judgement.
Not really. This is a better argument for Clown World (where god arbitrarily changes the rules in order to test various social/society level experiments). We get ONE Joan d'Arc. Experiment OVER. Never repeated.
This is an excellent review.
Agreed !
A long and challenging review. I do have two spots that I could not understand in the end though.
>afterwards took to believing that he was made of glass and would shatter if he fell, but through the decision of his regent, one Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.
"But through the decision of his regent" ...what? Is that an incomplete sentence, or is "but" used in the sense of "except", meaning Phillip the Bold would decide whether or not Charles VI would shatter like glass?
>Footnote 48: Score: First-principles theories of how a rational religion ought to work, 0; the intercession of the saints, 1.
Someone explain to small brain like mine?
That was a sub-footnote about "Saint Charlemagne."
Technically correct, though I got that far myself. Got any more in-depth explanation what that sub-footnote means?
Sorry, I thought it was the nested footnote formatting that was confusing.
Charlemagne is generally not considered a saint by the Church. I read that as a criticism of this ad hoc/folk canonization that nevertheless seems to have empowered him to intercede in working miracles.
Makes sense, thanks.
> "But through the decision of his regent"
It's a long complicated sentence- the part that confused you references back to before the part you quoted. Basically France acted in Burgundy's interests not because of the King's choices, but because the Duke of Burgundy was ruling France as the King's regent. The part about shattering like glass is a contained sub-clause explaining why the King was not the one making the decisions.
Okay thanks. That is indeed a terribly written sentence then.
'Twas a perfectly serviceably phrased _complex_ sentence; for practice with such, Poe is useful training.
There were also perfectly servicable ways to convey the same information through a less complex sentence, or two if need be. I want to grapple with the content, not so much its presentation.
That first part really should have been in parentheses, not commas.
>The Kingdom of France had done this not by the will of the King of France*... ...but through the decision of his regent, one Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.
*(Charles VI, Philip the Fortunate's grandson, who at that time was seriously mentally ill and who the year before his regency started had murdered several people in a paranoid fit and afterwards took to believing that he was made of glass and would shatter if he fell)
"Our oldest source is six hundred years after the events it chronicles and therefore should not remotely be trusted as fact."
I thought that the milk flowing from her veins would have been enough to characterize it as false, independently from how the source was obtained.
It depends. If you are approaching from the scientific world view and just want to know if the source can be trusted, then indeed this is enough to know that the source can not be fully trusted.
If you want to know if miracles are real, and reject any story which contains a miracle as obviously false, then you are begging the question.
I think something along this lines was discussed on an OT this Monday.
Perhaps you were a bit blindsided by the dry delivery of a joke. Yes, all the preceding stuff about milk and doves is a rather bigger counterpoint than the source not having been around to witness all that personally.
bravo for this... I kept needing to do other things, but found myself getting sucked in by the writing
Great review! Normally my eyes would glaze over on a piece this long, but in this case I was fascinated all the way to the end.
Also: ah, yes, the English longbow. Amazing how nobody else at the time thought of making bows that could outrange everyone else's and then actually requiring the commons to train in their usage. If we'd required every mid-20th Century man of able body to maintain a sniper rifle and practice regularly in its use, we'd probably still have the Empire.
Really the English just appropriated it from the Welsh. And it clearly wasn't a good enough system in isolation to protect the Welsh from being conquered.
Pretty sure if you looked over at Russia/Poland, you'd discover a very different model of feudalism. (bows, for example, were proper knightly gear, as opposed to Western Europe).
Siberians trained women and children. They weren't using "longbows" but compound bows. Compound bows can have more draw force than longbows, and did at the time of the Mongols. Afterwards, one assume they were adopted by the current tribes.
Arguably the point of firearms is that you *don't* need to practice constantly from childhood to be good with them, you can have your citizens do something more useful and then put them through a few months of boot camp when you need a soldier. (And modern war is probably not going to be settled by individual marksmanship skill, anyway.)
I do think we should teach kids the NATO alphabet, though. You can use it to spell things out over the phone instead of doing that "A as in Apple, D as in Dog, M as in Mancy" nonsense. It's a practical life skill!
I'm not sure about the soundness of the atheistic argument.
Joan wasn't performing miracles, she simply seems to be that way because she's the one who shows up when you sort the world by who appears to be performing miracles.
A reductio ad absurdum could look like: Einstein wasn't actually smart, he's just who shows up when you sorting the world by who appeared to be smart.
> Einstein wasn't actually smart, he's just who shows up when you sorting the world by who appeared to be smart.
AFAIK some historians do hold that view. That is, yes, Einstein was of course very smart, but he wasn't the uniquely smartest man in human history (in fact, he had plenty of colleagues like Heisenberg who were arguably just as smart as he was). Perhaps the discovery of the Theory of Relativity (not the mention the Photoelectric Effect) was more or less inevitable. Someone would've done it eventually (or perhaps several different people), and in fact quite soon; Einstein was just the one who got there first.
Einstein wasn't very smart. He did like to make funny faces, and was very convenient for the CIA. (Tom Lehrer, on the other hand, was extremely inconvenient for the CIA, as was his song pointing out one of the famous people in Operation Paperclip).
General theory of relativity was inspired, I'll admit, but Einstein was notably inflexible and couldn't take a world that refuted his priors.
> Tom Lehrer, on the other hand, was extremely inconvenient for the CIA, as was his song pointing out one of the famous people in Operation Paperclip
Ah I knew it! That explains why he died.
Special Relativity might have been inevitable around that point, General Relativity is another story.
Consider that our standard for what "miracles" look like in the modern conception is essentially "apparently purposeful coincidences." We could be living in a world where people regularly part seas, cure amputees, raise the dead, split the earth to swallow their enemies, etc., but these sorts of things appear to occur in inverse proportion to how well documented the events in question are. But if "apparently purposeful coincidences" is our standard for what miracles look like, it's more or less inevitable that some events will appear miraculous just as a result of rolling the dice enough times.
Some events do seem suspiciously improbable (although I don't think Jean's story is *as* improbable as it appears, I've already left a couple comments in this thread discussing some reasons,) but if we suppose that God really did intervene through her, it suggests a God with rather odd priorities, since he was apparently concerned enough to make sure that the English didn't conquer the French, but has allowed countless other conquests, genocides, and other tragedies throughout history, without any apparently consistent concern for the moral character of the participants, or their alignment with the Christian religion.
What can look very purposeful when looked at in isolation, when we see one particular person or side getting what they want against apparently great odds, may look a lot less purposeful as we broaden our view and see that there isn't a consistent directionality to all the coincidence. There are diabolus ex machinas throughout history just as much as deus ex machinas, and the righteous or the Christian, let alone some specific brand of Christian, don't appear to be consistently favored.
> diabolus ex machinas
diaboli ex machina (and dii ex machina).
I actually looked up the correct plurals while writing up my post, but I decided on balance that using them was more likely to be an impediment to clarity.
Booo! :)
I read that to be saying essentially not to hail as a prophet someone who wins the lottery after dreaming the winning numbers.
I think this is my favorite review so far, well done !
One thing I've learned from it (perhaps erroneously) is the sheer extent to which Medieval warfare and politics were based on "vibes". People like Machiavelli and Bismarck are often credited with inventing realpolitik, but until now I don't think I've been able to fully appreciate what that means. It means that people must have really and truly, in their heart of hearts, based critically important geopolitical decisions on their loyalty to their liege lord, or the line of descent of an heir, or on omens and portents like the color of the sparrow outside their window last Tuesday. This wasn't a callous post-hoc rationalization made up to justify an unpopular decision (at least, not always), but the accurate description of the flow of their conscious thought. Thus situations like "the King died and thus the army immediately fell apart" were not merely more common then than they are now, but in fact routine.
Which might explain (at least in part) how Joan of Arc was able to accomplish all those miracles. It sounds like the French had every ingredient they needed to defeat the English: manpower, materiel, terrain, supplies, even military training (maybe). What they utterly lacked was coordination, and perhaps morale. All of that military power was useless when it just sat there bickering endlessly with itself. Enter Joan of Arc, who could establish a command structure and inspire overwhelming morale advantage at the same time. Perhaps it was already virtually impossible for the French to lose the war given their overwhelming advantage in resources, as long as all of those resources were brought to bear on the enemy; and all it took was a charismatic leader who got them to do something, *anything*, and to do it with total and unyielding commitment. Even an less-than-brilliant general can win a war when all the advantages are on her side, and all she needs to do is push over the first domino.
And I think this disorganization might have been fractal (to an extent). The government was disordered; the generals were disordered; their captains and their sergeants and all the way down to the common infantryman, all were in disorder. Which might also explain Joan's amazing feats of military prowess. We don't have a record (unless I'm mistaken ?) of her ever personally defeating scores of enemies with her lance or hitting a remote target with her cannon. Rather, she lead teams of lancers and artillerists to actually do their jobs for once in their lives -- the jobs which they have been trained for. In a world of vibes, such sudden competence must have looked miraculous indeed.
People started wars because one guy thought it would be funny to pantz another guy (China). When you understand "realpolitik" understand that you're dealing with 15 year olds, a good deal of the time. And 15 year olds often do things because they want to impress a girl... Or think it would be funny to make someone else look bad.
It's not quite that simple. At the time the idea of nations or states of people hadn't really developed yet. Most places in medieval Europe were the personal possession of a monarch. You can see how people didn't have loyalty to France or Burgundy, but to the King of France or Duke of Burgundy. When nations operate on such a personal level and at the whims of a single figure, politics can seem more like a soap opera.
Similarly armies were usually the sole creations of monarchs, cobbled together from a fraction of their kingdom's levies and also mercenaries. The idea of a professional army serving a nation hadn't really developed yet either. So when the King died, the army often lost a reason to fight (this generally being to claim land for the King's person), and also their reason for being paid.
This is pretty close to my own model of what happened. She wasn't especially good at anything, except maybe persuasion. It's just that the French royal court were *that bad*.
I enjoyed reading the review although it was a bit on the long side, as I am regularly confused on how much the story of Joan of Arc is based on myth or reality.
However I think it gives a poor account of the course of the hundred year wars until Orleans. The review is confusing in making it sound like Agincourt (1415) took place right after Crecy (1346) and Poitiers (1356), while 6 decades are separating those.
Moreover it gives the impression that the french were constantly being defeated until the arrival of Joan of Arc. Actually between 1364 and 1380 french regained the upper side and conquered back most of the territory, under the command of Du Guesclin, with a strategy of putting cities controlled by the british under siege methodically one after the other. Then there was a long break as both countries suffered internal unrest, and the war restarted in 1415 as the english profited of the french division between Armagnacs and Bourguinons.
Edit: Thank you EngineOfCreation for spotting the typo on the date of Agincourt, now it's corrected.
>Agincourt (14515) took place right after Crecy (1346) and Poitiers, (1356) while 6 decades are separating those.
My math is a bit rusty, but that looks like a separation of more than 13 millenia. Your point is qualitatively still valid though!
It's really rather interesting how the course of the war seemed to depend more on the state of infighting within each of the two sides, more than any brilliant strategies or anything like that.
Reading about Joan of Arc I am reminded a little of Greta Thunberg. A slightly weird teenaged girl gets elevated to the status of a leader/figurehead of some larger movement, presumably by more sophisticated actors working behind the scenes, and presumably because the symbolic purity of a young girl plays much better than some old bearded dude.
Is this a pattern that has occurred elsewhere in history, or just a two-off?
I think the Sybils in Rome made some convenient prophesies and boosted morale. Not very close, but maybe you could see that as part of this pattern if you squint?
Yeah, you get it. The English were so furious about "how the hell is this bitch doing this to us? it must be evil pacts with the Devil!" that they wanted her burned at the stake. Even Shakespeare writes propaganda about this because they are still so butt-hurt about it a hundred and sixty years later.
And now! time for a Chesterton quote!
https://www.online-literature.com/chesterton/all-things-considered/33/
"A considerable time ago (at far too early an age, in fact) I read Voltaire's "La Pucelle," a savage sarcasm on the traditional purity of Joan of Arc, very dirty, and very funny. I had not thought of it again for years, but it came back into my mind this morning because I began to turn over the leaves of the new "Jeanne d'Arc," by that great and graceful writer, Anatole France. It is written in a tone of tender sympathy, and a sort of sad reverence; it never loses touch with a noble tact and courtesy, like that of a gentleman escorting a peasant girl through the modern crowd. It is invariably respectful to Joan, and even respectful to her religion. And being myself a furious admirer of Joan the Maid, I have reflectively compared the two methods, and I come to the conclusion that I prefer Voltaire's.
When a man of Voltaire's school has to explode a saint or a great religious hero, he says that such a person is a common human fool, or a common human fraud. But when a man like Anatole France has to explode a saint, he explains a saint as somebody belonging to his particular fussy little literary set. Voltaire read human nature into Joan of Arc, though it was only the brutal part of human nature. At least it was not specially Voltaire's nature. But M. France read M. France's nature into Joan of Arc--all the cold kindness, all the homeless sentimental sin of the modern literary man. There is one book that it recalled to me with startling vividness, though I have not seen the matter mentioned anywhere; Renan's "Vie de Jesus." It has just the same general intention: that if you do not attack Christianity, you can at least patronise it. My own instinct, apart from my opinions, would be quite the other way. If I disbelieved in Christianity, I should be the loudest blasphemer in Hyde Park. Nothing ought to be too big for a brave man to attack; but there are some things too big for a man to patronise.
...It is no exaggeration to say that this is the manner of M. Anatole France in dealing with Joan of Arc. Because her miracle is incredible to his somewhat old-fashioned materialism, he does not therefore dismiss it and her to fairyland with Jack and the Beanstalk. He tries to invent a real story, for which he can find no real evidence. He produces a scientific explanation which is quite destitute of any scientific proof. It is as if I (being entirely ignorant of botany and chemistry) said that the beanstalk grew to the sky because nitrogen and argon got into the subsidiary ducts of the corolla. To take the most obvious example, the principal character in M. France's story is a person who never existed at all. All Joan's wisdom and energy, it seems, came from a certain priest, of whom there is not the tiniest trace in all the multitudinous records of her life. The only foundation I can find for this fancy is the highly undemocratic idea that a peasant girl could not possibly have any ideas of her own. It is very hard for a freethinker to remain democratic. The writer seems altogether to forget what is meant by the moral atmosphere of a community. To say that Joan must have learnt her vision of a virgin overthrowing evil from a priest, is like saying that some modern girl in London, pitying the poor, must have learnt it from a Labour Member. She would learn it where the Labour Member learnt it--in the whole state of our society."
Thank you for this review, which I greatly enjoyed (as I hope you can tell).
Okay, I also have to quote from "Là-Bas" by J.K. Huysman:
"What was the conduct of Gilles de Rais toward Jeanne d'Arc? We have no certain knowledge. M. Vallet de Viriville, without proof, accuses him of treachery. M. l'abbé Bossard, on the contrary, claims—and alleges plausible reasons for entertaining the opinion—that he was loyal to her and watched over her devotedly.
"What is certain is that Gilles's soul became saturated with mystical ideas. His whole history proves it.
"He was constantly in association with this extraordinary maid whose adventures seemed to attest the possibility of divine intervention in earthly affairs. He witnessed the miracle of a peasant girl dominating a court of ruffians and bandits and arousing a cowardly king who was on the point of flight. He witnessed the incredible episode of a virgin bringing back to the fold such black rams as La Hire, Xaintrailles, Beaumanoir, Chabannes, Dunois, and Gaucourt, and washing their old fleeces whiter than snow. Undoubtedly Gilles also, under her shepherding, docilely cropped the white grass of the gospel, took communion the morning of a battle, and revered Jeanne as a saint.
"He saw the Maid fulfil all her promises. She raised the siege of Orléans, had the king consecrated at Rheims, and then declared that her mission was accomplished and asked as a boon that she be permitted to return home.
"Now I should say that as a result of such an association Gilles's mysticism began to soar. Henceforth we have to deal with a man who is half-freebooter, half-monk. Moreover—"
"Pardon the interruption, but I am not so sure that Jeanne d'Arc's intervention was a good thing for France."
"Why not?"
"I will explain. You know that the defenders of Charles were for the most part Mediterranean cut-throats, ferocious pillagers, execrated by the very people they came to protect. The Hundred Years' War, in effect, was a war of the South against the North. England at that epoch had not got over the Conquest and was Norman in blood, language, and tradition. Suppose Jeanne d'Arc had stayed with her mother and stuck to her knitting. Charles VII would have been dispossessed and the war would have come to an end. The Plantagenets would have reigned over England and France, which, in primeval times before the Channel existed, formed one territory occupied by one race, as you know. Thus there would have been a single united and powerful kingdom of the North, reaching as far as the province of Languedoc and embracing peoples whose tastes, instincts, and customs were alike. On the other hand, the coronation of a Valois at Rheims created a heterogeneous and preposterous France, separating homogeneous elements, uniting the most incompatible nationalities, races the most hostile to each other, and identifying us—inseparably, alas!—with those stained-skinned, varnished-eyed munchers of chocolate and raveners of garlic, who are not Frenchmen at all, but Spaniards and Italians. In a word, if it hadn't been for Jeanne d'Arc, France would not now belong to that line of histrionic, forensic, perfidious chatterboxes, the precious Latin race—Devil take it!"
Durtal raised his eyebrows.
"My, my," he said, laughing. "Your remarks prove to me that you are interested in 'our own, our native land.' I should never have suspected it of you."
"Of course you wouldn't," said Des Hermies, relighting his cigarette. "As has so often been said, 'My own, my native land is wherever I happen to feel at home.' Now I don't feel at home except with the people of the North. But I interrupted you. Let's get back to the subject. What were you saying?"
"I forget. Oh, yes. I was saying that the Maid had completed her task. Now we are confronted by a question to which there is seemingly no answer. What did Gilles do when she was captured, how did he feel about her death? We cannot tell. We know that he was lurking in the vicinity of Rouen at the time of the trial, but it is too much to conclude from that, like certain of his biographies, that he was plotting her rescue.
"At any rate, after losing track of him completely, we find that he has shut himself in at his castle of Tiffauges.
"He is no longer the rough soldier, the uncouth fighting-man. At the time when the misdeeds are about to begin, the artist and man of letters develop in Gilles and, taking complete possession of him, incite him, under the impulsion of a perverted mysticism, to the most sophisticated of cruelties, the most delicate of crimes.
..."But all this," said Des Hermies, "does not explain how, from a man of piety, he was suddenly changed into a Satanist, from a placid scholar into a violator of little children, a 'ripper' of boys and girls."
"I have already told you that there are no documents to bind together the two parts of this life so strangely divided, but in what I have been narrating you can pick out some of the threads of the duality. To be precise, this man, as I have just had you observe, was a true mystic. He witnessed the most extraordinary events which history has ever shown. Association with Jeanne d'Arc certainly stimulated his desires for the divine. Now from lofty Mysticism to base Satanism there is but one step. In the Beyond all things touch. He carried his zeal for prayer into the territory of blasphemy. He was guided and controlled by that troop of sacrilegious priests, transmuters of metals, and evokers of demons, by whom he was surrounded at Tiffauges."
"You think, then, that the Maid of Orleans was really responsible for his career of evil?"
"To a certain point. Consider. She roused an impetuous soul, ready for anything, as well for orgies of saintliness as for ecstasies of crime.
"There was no transition between the two phases of his being. The moment Jeanne was dead he fell into the hands of sorcerers who were the most learned of scoundrels and the most unscrupulous of scholars. These men who frequented the château de Tiffauges were fervent Latinists, marvellous conversationalists, possessors of forgotten arcana, guardians of world-old secrets. Gilles was evidently more fitted to live with them than with men like Dunois and La Hire. These magicians, whom all the biographers agree to represent—wrongly, I think—as vulgar parasites and base knaves, were, as I view them, the patricians of intellect of the fifteenth century. Not having found places in the Church, where they would certainly have accepted no position beneath that of cardinal or pope, they could, in those troubled times of ignorance, but take refuge in the patronage of a great lord like Gilles. And Gilles was, indeed, the only one at that epoch who was intelligent enough and educated enough to understand them."
I don't get the whole last bit about claiming there's some big mystery here. Of course someone who's a charismatic national hero is going to have people tell all sorts of implausible stories about how great she was, especially twenty years after her heroic death. The details don't seem particularly beyond what I'd expect people to say about their cool local hero (who actually performed at about the background level for an unusually charismatic young woman).
Why can't she be a very gifted (140 IQ?) peasant girl with mild to moderate schizotypal mania and/or scrupulosity OCD who spends all her time learning about religion from her local priest and has a great reputation in her village and develops strong charisma. Then she shows up and after proving how incredible she is at boosting morale and motivating troops, slowly but surely the military leaders around her realize how useful she can be, and start saying things like "oh wow everyone we have a saint and a genius on our side!" which inevitably drastically improves military outcomes, since most pre-modern battle outcomes are decided heavily by morale. None of her predictions are impressive beyond her being convinced she'd win and see the kind crowned and happening to be right, which was in fact downstream of her confidence and devotion being so inspiring.
You can mix her being an intelligent and mild lunatic with the people around her choosing to see her as even more competent than she was because she was so inspiring, without requiring it to be full lies on their part or for her to be a raving madwoman incapable of inspiring others.
This is also my preferred explanation. She’s undeniably brilliant, charismatic, insanely confident, and those together sometimes lead to incredible victory, especially if she wins once or twice and everyone decides she’s inspired by god and decides to do what the bold and brilliant military genius thinks they should. If she’d lost we’d never have heard of her. It’s amazing and awe-inspiring, but I don’t think it has to be divine.
The maiden commands her own particular kind of respect. Men cannot look to her as just another man giving orders, even if she's clad as one. Maybe she reminds them of their daughters, or their dear sisters. Of course, she had to be clad as a, to put it politically correctly, Person of War - so, in effect, a man, with his war accoutrements, even as a bannerma- I mean, bannermaid - in order to command respect in the military context. Anyway, by having everyone focus on her, she gives everyone a sense of shared purpose. And, perhaps, while she makes calls, competent people do advise her.
Though in insisting on getting the king crowned at France's Scone, well, that was putting aside military pragmatism for symboloprophetic imperative. Some things are more important than doing things by the book. The tactics are the tactics, but the maiden is the soul of the enterprise, and her story needs to work - indeed, it has sort of done for France what King Arthur does for England, maybe? And it's telling that both "legends" are Christian. But I am much more satisfied with Joan's historicity (and the preponderance of truthiness in it - you know, direct is-ness applicableness, if such a thing can even be truly said to be) than I am of other legendary figures, but FWIW I'm on the JHC was a thing team, not necessarily by those initials in a legal sense, and not necessarily capital Charlie either. It seems like he must have been a wise guy, in a sardonic sense at a bare minimum, but you need like ancient astronauts theories or theism (which have a dearth of falsifiability, which is a problem in reasontopia) to explain stuff like loaves and fishes, if you take it to be literally true. Like I'm not sure Penn and Teller could actually fill people up with the appearance of a bare severality of loaf and fish done with literal smoke and mirrors or something. But I think something like a precocious kid arguing with clerics is quite plausible, and I think I read somewhere that there was a Jewish historian that reported some rabble rouser or other dying on the cross. But Jesus Christ, Inc. is so much bigger than that now, especially taking the whole dang Club Jesus as a singularity.
(Footnote: It has had many schisms, and can hardly be all said to be the same religion, except in a share of memetic antecedence and concordance. Of course, many sects think of themselves as Universal, or Catholic. Or the Greek Orthodox are carrying on the True and Honest Roman Christian Tradition or something.)
Wow, an amazing review. I learned more about J of A than I ever had before. I actually have a feel for who she was and what she was like.
As for the miracle thing, well, I think the answer is obvious. Clearly, a time traveler went back, implanted a mic in her ear, and was advising her the entire time.
How much of a complexity penalty does that explanation get?
I'd just like to add that the English army under King Edward was not composed *only* of professional soldiers, but also of knights and their retinues. One of these, the 11th Earl of Warwick, was instrumental in 1346 in enabling the English troops to land at La Hogue. He attacked 100 French soldiers who were trying to stop the landing with his squire and six archers, killing 60 enemy soldiers and forcing the rest to flee.
> took to believing that he was made of glass and would shatter if he fell
Greg Cochran claimed the same thing of the top Greek general during their war with Turkey after WW1 https://x.com/gcochran99/status/1631852711632334849 Doing some further digging on Wikipedia backs him up for this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgios_Hatzianestis and the condition had a wiki article as well.
> It’s happened before. It can happen again.
We don't see many miraculous "saints" like her in the more modern era of better record keeping. Similarly, it has been quipped that there are fewer sightings of Bigfoot & UFOs by civilians in this era of widespeared digital cameras.
I really liked this essay. But the talk about her tactical brilliance made me a little curious about what Joan was actually concretely doing with the army. A lot of the discussion of her military campaign reads like "Joan's allies suggested strategy A, which was a complex and cautious plan which would definitely not win the war, and Joan instead suggested strategy B, a balls-out direct assault that would win a great victory if they were very lucky and lose the whole war if they weren't. And they were miraculously lucky."
So like, when you say that Joan of Arc was a miraculous prodigy at commanding an army, do you mean she demonstrated some specific facet of generalship, like when she's setting up for a battle she recognizes good terrain or a good place to set up cannons, or do you mean she kept going all-in on simple and direct strategies that kept working because she had the manic charisma to get the whole army behind her on them?
(Side note: You mention at the start that the English were actually heavily outnumbered, but kept winning because they had a professional, well-motivated army. Were they still outnumbered by Joan's time? Joan's religious discipline seems like it might have served a similar purpose.)
I'm especially curious about what she did with artillery, since you spend a while talking about how it's a uniquely technical branch of the military. But if you're a general rather than an artillery officer, do you actually need to know those fiddly details? Did Joan figure out something really cool to do with the newly introduced cannons, or did she just tell her artillerymen "God requires you to flatten this next fortification" and let the people who know the business get to work? Like, one of those two sounds a bit more miraculous than the other.
I liked this one a lot.
I guess I'll be the downer and say I wasn't a super fan of this one. As I read I just wished more and more to instead go listen to the episodes of The Rest is History covering Agincourt and the later episodes covering Joan of Arc (actually I'll go download the Joan ones now). By the time I got to the "value add" of the review being the deliberation of the evidence, I was tired of it, and when it came to the fictional debate I gave up. Someone do tell me if that part is particularly worthy of reading and I'll come back to it, but I'm just not feeling it right now.
Edit: apparently I hallucinated the existence of Joan of Arc episodes, shame.
This one was so informative and well-written - and I loved the dialogue inserted towards the end. My favourite so far this year.
Only an ACX review could relate the story of St. Catherine and present as the first piece of evidence that it is, in fact, fiction that an untrained teenager outdebated a roomful of philosophers.
Why do reviewers feel the need to be funny? It is possible to write an entertaining, even a gripping, review without being supercilious. Otherwise, good.