JOAN OF ARC was born in 1412 in Domremy (Lorraine) Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc in English) began hearing what she believed to be celestial voices at the age of 13. In 1429, during the Hundred Years' War, these voices called upon her to help the Dauphin, later Charles VII, king of France, as the English were about to capture Orleans. After several futile attempts, Joan finally convinced him that she had a divine mission to save France. Still, before Joan could be employed in military operations she was sent to Poitiers to be examined by a committee of learned bishops and doctors.

The board of theologians found nothing heretical in her claims to supernatural guidance and she was given troops to command. Dressed in armor and carrying a white banner that represented God's blessing and the French royal emblem, the fleur-de-lis, she led the French to a decisive victory over the English. At the subsequent coronation of the Dauphin in the cathedral at Reims, she was given the place of honor beside the king.
Charles opposed any further campaigns against the English. So, without the support of Charles, Joan conducted a military operation against the English at Compiègne, near Paris. She was captured by Burgundian soldiers, who sold her to their English allies. The English then turned her over to an ecclesiastical court at Rouen to be tried for heresy and sorcery. After 14 months of interrogation, she was accused of wrongdoing in wearing masculine dress and of heresy for believing she was directly responsible to God rather than to the Roman Catholic church.
The court condemned her to death, but she penitently confessed her errors, and the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Because she resumed masculine dress after returning to jail, she was condemned again-this time by a secular court-and, on May 30, 1431, Joan was burned at the stake in the Old Market Square at Rouen as a relapsed heretic, her ashes thrown into the Seine.
Twenty-five years after her death, the church retried her case. By that time, popular opinion was quite different and, with few exceptions, all the witnesses extolled the virtues and supernatural gifts of the Maid. The illegality of the original trial was made clear and an appellate court constituted by the pope reversed and annulled the sentence. But by then it was, of course, too late. In 1920 she was canonized by Pope Benedict XV.