We invited Jake Rose, the author of JOAN, to reflect on Winnifred Sullivan’s Making a King: The Political Theology of Joan of Arc. Last week, we ran an essay by Sullivan reflecting on Rose’s book of poems.
Travelling through contested Burgundian territory in February 1429, Joan of Arc, or Jeanne, as she was known to her peers, arrived at the castle of Chinon in the Loire river valley. She and her small party had traveled for ten days, much of it at night, through enemy-held land. At this time, Chinon was the residence of Charles VII, king of France. But that was a title another had claim to as well. After the death of King Charles VI of France in 1422, both Charles VII and Henry VI of England claimed the throne. That dispute had been formalized two years earlier in the Treaty of Troyes, which disinherited Charles in favor of Henry V and his heirs. English forces, allied with Burgundians, had taken several key cities and territories in France, including control of Reims, the traditional site of coronation for French kings, and the drawn-out civil war was taking a severe toll across the countryside.
Joan arrives, attended by her voices, at a moment when Charles’ position was weak and his fortunes uncertain, his court confined to territory south of the Loire. When they meet, she does not address him as king, but uses the term dauphin, traditionally given to the eldest son of a French king or heir. While others refer to Charles as the dauphin in order to delegitimize his authority, Joan uses it for another curious purpose. She insists that as dauphin, Charles must go north to the cathedral at Reims, and be crowned king in the traditional sacre, arguing against a kingship of inheritance and for a consecration so urgent it would necessitate an improbable string of military victories through Burgundian controlled territory. Charles would only become king on Joan’s terms, forced into being through her intervention.
Political power enters the stage here from the margins, from a small village and an unlikely player, asking what has already been fixed to reopen. It is a dangerous moment, to confront a king and name so boldly the fragility of his authority. And it is in this moment of turmoil that Sullivan begins Making a King. By drawing our attention to this uniquely fluid historical moment, she compels a closer look at the nature of power, how authority can be assembled outside the structures of the state, and how religious belief, acted upon, can make a king. In Sullivan’s perception, Joan’s single desire to coronate Charles’ at Reims contains the larger problem of how authority is created and undone. The book follows the emergence of this new politics and its newly skilled politician.
Modern culture has endlessly recycled Joan: nationalist saint, feminist martyr, queer icon, fraud. However, few perceive Joan as an inventor with a method as persistent as her visions. As Sullivan opens her work with a description of the “messy” civil war in France, the fractured loyalties and contested throne, we begin to understand the political landscape not as a vacuum but as a gap, one she describes as being pried open just enough for Joan’s intervention to take hold. To be clear, the sacre in Reims that Joan insists upon is not an invention, it is an honored tradition for French kings. Joan does not create ex nihilo.
One of the book’s strengths is its attention to creative reuse: Joan repurposes rituals to fit her needs, working through a community of friends and allies with the political knowledge of someone who grew up in a war-torn country. Her village of Domremy suffered raids from Burgundian forces and her family was forced to abandon their home for a time to avoid an assault from a band of soldiers that left the town partially burned. At a time when Charles’ viewed his kingship as settled, Joan arrives to tell him that it is not, and Sullivan observes that this remaking of kingship recenters political authority into a triangular alignment of God, King, and people. This is where the book’s argument becomes most persuasive and where its stakes come most clearly into view. In insisting on the sacre, Joan does not reject the structure of kingship but reworks it in practice, reassembling the relation between God, king, and people into something like a constitutional act.
Here, Sullivan’s account recalls another distinct figure to me, Emily Dickinson. Dickinson’s poems unsettle what would otherwise appear fixed, suspending themselves between variant word choices scrawled above the poem, their final form contingent on reading. What remains open for Dickinson as a textual possibility becomes, in Joan’s case, a political one enacted through action in the making of a king.
Unlike Dickinson, though, Joan is never alone. She acts in relation to voices, advisors, soldiers, as well as objects like her suit, breeches, and armor that become, as Sullivan argues, the symbols of her “singular office.” The book handles Joan’s clothing in a refreshingly novel form, avoiding the reduction of modern identity categories or medieval curiosity. During this time, Sullivan observes, there were sumptuary laws which would have prohibited a person of Joan’s class from wearing clothes of the quality and fabric she was gifted with, but her unique position allowed her to transcend the conventional hierarchy.
As the campaign advances toward Reims, a temporary political body grows around her: soldiers, priests, townsfolk, courtiers, and the Duke of Alençon, whom she calls ‘the gentle duke’. Along the way, Joan also dictates letters to towns, to the English, even to the Pope, through which authority circulates without a fixed chain of command. These letters do not merely communicate decisions; they persuade, outlining new networks of participants. Sullivan is careful here not to overstate coherence, allowing readers to see the hesitation and disagreements within the movement without a neat resolution. At times, Joan’s authority depends less on agreement than on sheer momentum.
It is difficult to say now whether this conflict was viewed by participants as a civil war, an effort to legitimate a king, a defense of land and livelihood, or, increasingly, a struggle with new religious meaning, but it is clear there is no reducible principle that motivated each member. During a truce in 1430, while Joan was disempowered at court, the Burgundians recaptured several towns including Compiègne and began to lay siege. Without orders to leave, or even knowledge of the king, Joan left when she heard of the news, leading a band of volunteers to free the city where she was eventually captured. These events show a movement that assembles in moments of crisis, creating surges of action without any stable chain of command.
The way Joan presents herself is not always aligned with how she was perceived by her peers and enemies. Sullivan notes that her self-presentation was legible and even “wondrous” to companions on the battlefield but by contrast “monstrous” to her judges at trial. The difference in audience is clear, but Sullivan locates a deeper problem in how her presentation was read. Not that Joan herself changed — through her testimony she was remarkably constant — but the systems judging her did. During her trial, the assembled identity of soldier, visionary, and royal figurehead which seems to have protected her at the king’s court suddenly became evidence of deviance. Dismissed as such, how could the judges credit Joan’s speech as honest engagement with their pursuit of the truth? What the judges required was separation: body from belief, action from voice.
When asked directly whether she wanted to be a man, she says she has already answered, not so much replying as setting the question aside; elsewhere she calls the matter of her clothing “a small matter,” as though the judges were focused on the wrong point entirely. Sullivan is sharpest here, where Joan’s speech does not change but her accusers lose the ability to recognize it. She makes the case that Joan’s body and her political and religious life are, in fact, one, writing, “Her clothes, her gender expression, her voices, her political ambitions, her religion, her military vocation—they were not severable.” (40) Sullivan’s insistence on this point is key to understanding why Joan’s authority could not be cleanly separated from her perceived deviance. Once the judges begin to read it as such, it becomes impossible to conceal, and despite her frequent refusal to answer questions, Joan ends up caught between incompatible systems of reading. The qualities that enabled Joan’s authority became, at trial, evidence against her.
Joan’s uniqueness belongs to the conditions that produced her. Part of her genius was not the belief that the sacre would settle Charles’ authority once and for all, but an understanding of precarious states as moments of opportunity in which fractured structures could be shifted by unexpected people. Part of the book’s force comes from Sullivan’s ability to bring the reader into this harrowing moment, moving quickly between archival transcripts and conceptual argument without allowing either to dominate for too long. Sullivan’s account of this instability makes it clear this is not an anomaly but a recurring feature of political life under pressure. In just a few months Joan was able to move a king, court, and military force into alignment. And yet, those who enter such a space do not leave it unchanged. The coronation at Reims, when it comes, does secure Charles’s position; he is crowned, recognized, and, for a time, stabilized. But the scene does not close. The same conditions that made the act possible remain in play, and in their aftermath Joan herself is shifted from one system of reading to another, from battlefield to courtroom. The coronation does not resolve authority so much as arrange it, briefly, before it turns. What Sullivan has made visible here is a relationship between religion, law, and politics that medieval history can clarify in a way modern political theory often misses.
