Akademik

(d. 1431)

   Peasant girl who, in 1429, arrived at the court of the French king Charles VII (1422-1461), claiming to have been divinely commissioned by the voices of saints to maintain the king's cause against his rival, King Henry V of England. Although both Joan and the Hundred Years' War that she played a major role in bringing to an end are conventionally regarded as belonging to medieval history, her role in stimulating the French ruler to action did much to rally French support behind King Charles. Although Joan herself was captured in battle by the Burgundian allies of England, sold to the English, and condemned and executed as a witch by a church court, the renewed French consciousness that she both expressed and stimulated created the foundation for emergence of French Renaissance culture. Up to the French Revolution, the monarchy avoided acknowledging her share in French recovery, but in the 19th century, French nationalists transformed her into a national hero, the church reversed her condemnation, and in 1920 she was canonized as Saint Joan.