My grandmother gave my brothers and sisters and I many saints books when we were little. I loved to flip through them. I would read the stories and gaze at the pictures, always wondering how much was true. Did Saint Francis really talk to animals? Did God really give Saint Lucy a new pair of eyes when hers were plucked out?

Now as a teacher, I find my students asking the same questions, and the truth is that I really don’t know any better today than I did when I was little girl. It is extremely hard to draw the line between fact and fiction, legend and history when it comes to the saints. To deny a single aspect of their story can feel tantamount to a loss of faith. Likewise, to accept it all can feel absurdly naïve.

So, how does one reconcile these extremes? The short answer is—we can’t. We have to accept our own limitations and make room for any apparent contradictions in reality. After all, that’s what faith is all about. 

The trouble is, that answer is terribly unsatisfactory, especially for a child. For that reason, I have tried to develop a framework for students to decide for themselves what they can and want to legitimately believe.

In this series, I am going to show how I use that framework for my class’s study of Saint Joan of Arc, a peasant-turned-soldier who played a critical role in the French victory over the English during the Hundred Years War and ultimately died a brutal martyr’s death at the fiery stake.

Like so many saints, questions abound as to who Joan really was: a devout Catholic, a crazed lunatic, or something else entirely. Perhaps the world will never know, but we can certainly try to find out by comparing and questioning the myriad of stories about her.

My class does this by drawing together the history of the Hundred Years War, Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, along with several other great literary works and spiritual reflections. Thus, this study cuts across Religion, History, and Literature.

As pointed out in the last post, saints like Joan of Arc make for illuminating case studies across disciplines. Joan, fascinating in her own right, reveals so much more than the life of a single individual. She is also a model of the time in which she lived as well as a leader for countless future generations. 

In subsequent posts, I will present a basic summary of the life of Joan of Arc, followed by a breakdown of Mark Twain’s depiction both as an author and a narrator. Then, I will summarize several other popular stories about Joan that have arisen over the years. Finally, I will share the methods I use to help students make sense of these various characterizations of her.

By the end, I hope you will feel like you really know Joan of Arc and the world she lived in, even if aspects of her life remain a mystery.

Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.