/lit/ - Literature

>>12178883
>All that Sainte Jeanne
You're alright.
What Chinese and/or Eastern history should I read if I love Jeanne?

>>11864927
>>11864923
St. Jeanne best girl.
The pop culture depictions of her (WWI/II propaganda, Hollywood movies, anime heroines, coffee mugs and tumblr pics with secularized "feminist" quotes) don't do her the slightest justice. Let alone the slutty witch that the eternal-anglo bard depicts her as.

The seemingly impossible loyalty she gained from her battle weary career-soldier followers, her demanding pious temperament and insistence on Confession and Eucharist for herself and her soldiers, her charity and grace to enemy POWs, her fervent faith with God and her sometimes snarky but always steadfast understanding of theology that left the educated clergy out to condemn her at a loss, her desire to bring peace to her homeland so that she could retire from combat entirely and raise a family, the realization and struggle to accept that a dirty political system rife with sin turned on her and left her to die at the hands of cruel executioners who had to bend the established rules to even find reason to burn her, the passion of her trial and execution that 500+ years later still resonates brightly with Catholics, Protestants, and non-Christians alike.

She was an illiterate peasant girl who was granted immense qualities of leadership, military command, and political savvy and turned the course of a 100 year war despite only being active in it for less than 2 years.

Jehanne best girl.

>>11518646
>Joan of Arc: Her Story - Régine Pernoud
Author was a historian for the century preceding Joan's, and very reluctantly agreed to write something about her Nullification trial. Ended up falling in love with the story and wrote a book to cover her entire life. The chapter on the trial in particular is really well done. Lots of direct quotes used.
includes a decent appendix of characters short biographies, as well as a large appendix dealing with related topics such as when and how her different monikers came about, history of theatre productions about her, the still continued procession in her name in Orleans, her sword, etc.
Anecdotally, this one was told to me to be the standard to which all other contemporary books about her are judged. Originally published 1986.

>The Saint and the Devil; Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais - Frances Winwar
One of her followers and an ally. He wold also get burned at the stake, but the reasoning for his trial and death were the rape and murder of an estimated 100+ children, mostly boys.

>The Maid of Orleans: The Life and Mysticism of Joan of Arc - Sven Stolpe
This one is still in the mail, but Im looking forward to it because a goodreads review says that "the Swedish Stolpe, a convert to Catholicism, takes a decidedly religious angle, to the point of comparing Joan’s horrendous death to that of Jesus, a martyrdom both required for the sake of others" but he still presents events in an evenhanded way, "he does not support many legendary claims, like Joan’s recognizing in a crowded room of courtiers the king, Charles VII, she had come to crown. Stolpe finds this improbable and regularly tries to sort out truth from “the jungle growth of legend” surrounding Joan."

>The Virgin Warrior: The Life and Death of Joan of Arc - Larissa Juliet Taylor
a New England Patriots fan tries to downplay the miracles performed, even suggesting that Joan was simply an strong teenager girl that doesn't need no arranged marriage, and lied about her voices and her goals entirely as an excuse to go on a cross-France adventure instead of marrying young and staying in her tiny village, and that everything that came after leaving her village was a big convenient ruse. Aside from downplaying the religious aspects of the story, I read this right after the Régine Pernoud one and found it very flat in comparison.


>>11518920
>Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. - Mark Twain

Last novel he wrote, and she was his waifu in the later years of his life, first reading about her after finding a page about her from a history book on the ground, and considered this to be his best work. Originally wrote it under a fake name in the hopes that people would take it more seriously after being known for satire for so long.