Joan
of Arc at Bryn Mawr
by Marianne Hansen
Everyone knows the story of the young woman who led France to victory near the end of the Hundred Year’s War. And if, like Bryn Mawr’s library, you have eight hundred books telling the story, you might think that everyone has written about it. But I have been exploring our collection, and the most striking thing about the enormous number of works on Joan of Arc is the way each writer takes something different from the well known story – and creates something new.
You can write about Joan (or Jehanne, as she signed herself) as a military leader,
a heretic, a saint, a national savior, a lunatic, an inspiration. The basic
facts of her life and career are firmly established – we know a remarkable
amount about her from the records of her long examinations and trials. Even
in her lifetime, of course, there were widely varying opinions – she was
cheered by the French army, hated by the English, and burned by the Burgundians.
It seems to me that it is the great quantity of information that makes it possible
for individual writers to interpret her story differently. There are so many
facts you can easily choose those which are interesting, or which support a
point you want to make. Joan can stand for patriotism, for courage, for religious
faith, for women dealing with adversity – and so on.
Bryn Mawr’s extraordinary collection reflects this variety, and includes
many of the most famous and important works written about Joan. The earliest
“Joan” item we have is the Grandes Chroniques de France (also called
the Chronicles of St. Denis), printed in Paris in 1476. This is the first printed
book which includes the story of Joan of Arc – and, incidentally, the first
French-language book printed in Paris. For those who do not read French, we
have a handsome modern English translation of the part of this text dealing
with Joan (1938), printed at the Grabhorn Press and given to the library by
the publisher, Roy V. Sowers. Students who would like to look for themselves
at records of Joan’s trials can use our facsimiles of the court documents
or translations of the documents into English. Joan continues to fascinate scholars
as well as ordinary readers; the latest additions to the collection (on the
open shelves, rather than in Special Collections) are Françoise Meltzer’s
For Fear of the Fire: Joan of Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity (2001) and
Robin Blaetz’s Visions of the Maid: Joan of Arc in American Film and Culture
(2001).
The story of France’s famous Maid has inspired poets, playwrights, and
composers as well as historians. We have Schiller’s Jungfrau von Orleans
(which ends with Joan’s miraculous escape from prison to join the king,
and a heavenly vision before she dies wounded, rather than her historical execution),
many editions of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, and Jean Anouilh’s
Allouette. We are fortunate to have the bawdy mock-heroic work of Voltaire,
La Pucelle d’Orleans, Poeme in the first authorized edition of 1762 with
beautifully printed engravings – and also the 1822 English translation
by W. H. Ireland (gift of G. Malcolm Laws, Jr.).
We
have splendid illustrated versions of the stories, including Mark Twain’s
Saint Joan of Arc with paintings by Howard Pyle, and Lucy Foster Madison’s
version of the story illustrated by Pyle’s student at Drexel, Frank E.
Schoonover. Wallon’s Jeanne d’Arc (1876, the gift of Dr. Craig W.
Muckle) is enriched with reproductions of many famous paintings, prints, and
sculptures.
The Joan of Arc collection has been created through the generosity of many alumnae
and other donors. The core of the collection is the hundreds of books amassed
by Adelaide Brooks Baylis. She also gave us several important bronze statues,
including an equestrian statue by Emmanuel Fremiet, one of the finest and best
known of the French Animalier sculptors and the teacher of Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
We have just finished an inventory of our Joan of Arc materials and are actively building the collection. We hope to be able to show many of its highlights in an exhibition in 2003. Our media librarian has recently ordered six videos of films on Joan of Arc, including Joan the Woman from 1916. We are buying out-of-print books from the later part of the twentieth century, which is not covered by the Baylis collection. We are also adding some wonderful non-scholarly items that reflect the amazing popularity of Joan, even 500 years after her death. We have recently bought several pieces on eBay (bidding as bmcrare): a copy of the WWI sheet music, “Joan of Arc They Are Calling You,” a Life magazine with cover photo of Ingrid Berman in the stage show “Joan of Lorraine”, and – my favorite so far – the Classics Illustrated comic #78, “Joan of Arc”. We lost the bidding on the savings bond poster, the cigar box, and the Chocolat Suchard trade cards, but we’ll try again!