Saint Joan Themes

In Saint Joan, Shaw takes issue with previous adaptations of the Joan of Arc narrative that situate Joan as the undeniable heroine and her accusers as inarguable villains. To Shaw, such interpretations oversimplify Joan’s story and don’t try to understand the institutional structures that informed Joan’s and her accusers’ ethical frameworks and, subsequently, influenced their actions. Peter Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais and a French ally to the English, for example, condemns Joan…

Although Shaw maintains that Joan of Arc’s trial was fairer and more partial than previous fictitious interpretations of it would suggest, he also illustrates how significantly Joan’s gender influenced the way her accusers and allies alike perceived of her character and actions. Joan’s trial might have been fair in the sense that she was given ample opportunity to recant and repent, but Shaw’s rhetorical choices throughout Saint Joan suggest that the accusations brought against…

The primary reason Joan’s accusers perceive her as a threat is because her relationship to religion requires no temporal, institutional intermediaries. In other words, she can understand God and religion on her own, without the Church’s supervising guidance. While such a liberated, personal experience of Christianity would later be espoused by Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, the fifteenth-century Catholic Church of Joan’s world kept a close hold on its…