The Interrogation of Joan of Arc (review)

Reviews 237 Sullivan, Karen, 77*e Interrogation of Joan of Arc (Medieval Cultures 20), Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1999; pp. xxv, 204; R R P US$42.95 (cloth), US$16.95 (paper); ISBN 0816632677 (cloth), 0816632685 (paper). Karen Sullivan's study begins with the promising premise that the surviving documents of the trial of Joan of Arc require closer textual scrutiny, and aims to assess their value as historical documents through investigating their construction as texts. Although these aims are partially achieved, this is in some respects afrustratingbook, containing certain inconsistencies of argument which threaten to obscure its many ^good points. The Introduction offers an important new perspective on the trial records. I t outlines the aims of medieval inquisitorial technique - that is, to extract 'the truth' (or what the inquisitors needed to hear), through interrogation and torture if necessary, and to record the truths uncovered in a document which makes strong claims to accuracy and authority. Sullivan summarises the process by which the surviving texts (two copies of the minutes and three official Latin transcripts) were composed, noting Bernard Gui's recommendation that inquisitorial scribes transcribe 'only those words that concern the substance of the matter and seem best to express the truth' (p. xvi). The composition of the record, then, requires discrimination, selection and arrangement on the part of the scribes. Rather than an in-depth discussion of this process of composition, Sullivan's seven concise chapters focus on the inquisitors and their modes of thought. She argues that in questioning Joan the interrogators adopted particular perspectives at different moments (shifting roles from scholastics, to inquisitors, to confessors), and that the broader intellectual contexts and discursive traditions associated with the three categories shaped the questions asked and attempts to press Joan to answer in a particular way. This offers a valuable contextualisation ofthe interrogation. What it does not do is demonstrate that Joan's answers as presented were controlled by the scribes. In many instances her responses do not express the kind of 'truth' the inquisitors were looking for. Indeed, Sullivan's focus in thefirstfour chapters is the frequent mutual incomprehension between interrogator and interrogated. She illustrates this with great insight and economy in her discussion of the 'fairy tree'. Joan and her village neighbours were able to accommodate their fascination with this tree into their patterns of Christian belief without any sense 238 Reviews of fundamental contradiction. The interrogators, on the other hand, trained by scholasticism to argue that 'What is A cannot be not A' were unable to accept that Joan and herfriendscould believe simultaneously in legends about the fairy tree and in Christian doctrine. To them, the fairies could only be evil spirits, and Joan risked idolatry in not condemning them. Thus the records reveal a deep cultural clash between the learned questioners and the unlettered w o m a n on trial, and subsequent chapters examine similar clashes over perceptions of visionary experience, over justification for cross-dressing, and over what counted as a 'sign' from God. Through these readings Sullivan demonstrates a capacity for careful reading and offers useful insights into the trial, but does not convince the reader that the texts 'constitute not a representation but a production of the truth of Joan of Arc' (p. xxiv). For these readings to work, Sullivan is required to take the records at face-value, and thus the work is littered with such phrases as 'she really believed', 'the clerics thus recognised', 'they presupposed', 'the clerics took for granted', 'Joan appears to have imagined', 'as the clerics saw it', and so on. Far from demonstrating complete inquisitorial control over the production of the record, this revelation of a cultural gulf between Joan and her examiners indicates the limitations of the process. Sullivan offers a half-hearted acknowledgement of this, offering the explanation that 'The interrogation itself, even prior to its transcription, represented a collaboration between the respondent and her interrogators' (p. xvii). I find this glib and misleading, especially as the bulk of Sullivan's study reveals not 'collaboration' but struggle and conflict between the parties (and this point is partially acknowledged, p. xxiv). It would be more interesting, from the point of...