Trial and Execution of Joan of Arc

Joan had helped rally French forces during the Hundred Years' War and supported Charles VII's coronation at Reims. Burgundian troops captured her near Compiègne in May 1430 and transferred her to the English. Bishop Pierre Cauchon organized a church court in Rouen, where Joan remained guarded by English soldiers rather than held in an ordinary ecclesiastical prison.

Preliminary inquiries began in January 1431, followed by public and private sessions in which judges repeatedly questioned Joan without a defense advocate. The prosecution focused especially on claimed divine guidance and refusal to abandon men's clothing. The military and political interests surrounding the captive shaped the setting, personnel, pressure, and consequences of the church proceeding.

Under threat of execution, Joan signed or marked an abjuration and received a sentence of perpetual imprisonment. Within days, the court declared that she had relapsed after she resumed men's clothing and maintained her claims about her voices. She was handed to secular authorities and burned publicly. Her ashes were placed in the Seine to prevent the collection of relics.

Charles VII authorized a new inquiry after the war shifted in his favor. In 1456, a papal commission heard witnesses, reviewed the trial, and declared the conviction null. Joan later became a national, religious, artistic, and political symbol interpreted in conflicting ways. The surviving records also became an unusually detailed source for a fifteenth-century defendant's words and judicial treatment.

The case shows how law, theology, occupation, gender expectations, and military power can converge in a prosecution. Its two trials also let readers compare an original judgment with a later institutional effort to expose procedural abuse.

Official copies of the condemnation and rehabilitation proceedings survive in archives. Rouen preserves the trial landscape through the archbishop's palace, the remaining castle tower, Place du Vieux-Marché, a memorial cross, museums, and a public heritage route.

The extensive trial record preserves mediated Latin and French versions rather than an unaltered transcript of every spoken exchange. Historians debate individual motives, the circumstances of Joan's abjuration and resumed clothing, and how to interpret her visions without converting religious testimony into a modern clinical claim.