{"product_id":"joan-of-arc-a-history","title":"Joan of Arc- A History","description":"Review\n\nA masterful, thrilling portrait of sinister power, magical charisma and gruesome death. -- Simon Sebag Montefiore ― Evening Standard Books of the Year\n\nEntirely convincing and gripping . . . Earlier this year, the city of Rouen opened a new museum dedicated to Joan of Arc, intended in part to rescue her image from the myths that have surrounded it. Castor's book is another important way of returning Joan's \"star\" to the realm where it belongs, the human one. -- Amanda Foreman ― New York Times\n\nWith elegant bravado, Helen Castor hacks through the different accounts, giving blood and sinew to a figure sassier than her saintly legend. ― Daily Telegraph Books of the Year\n\nA triumph - brings the real Joan and her time to dramatic, moving and brilliant life. ― Dan Jones, author of The Plantagenets\n\nCastor writes about the battles with astonishing beauty, making the complicated politics of the time unusually exciting and imbuing history with page-turning momentum. -- Laura Feigel ― Observer\n\nHelen Castor has brought back to life the fifteenth century's most famous woman . . . And she's done so with a true historian's care. -- Lucy Worsley ― Mail on Sunday 'My Book of the Year'\n\nProduct Description\n\nThe story of one of the most remarkable women of the medieval world, as you have never read it before\n\nA French peasant girl who heard voices from God, Joan convinced the royal court of her divine calling and became a teenage warrior, leading an army to victory against the English. Eventually captured and put on trial, she was denounced as a heretic and burned at the stake at the age of just nineteen. Five hundred years later, she was recognised as a saint.\n\nHere, Joan and her world are brought vividly to life by acclaimed historian Helen Castor, taking us to the heart of a tumultuous and bloody moment in the fifteenth century and the short by astonishing life of an extraordinary woman.\n\nBook Description\n\nExcitingly retold by one of our finest historians, this is the story of Joan of Arc as you have never read it before.\n\nFrom the Author\n\nHelen Castor is a medieval historian and a Bye-Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Her first book, Blood \u0026amp; Roses, a biography of the fifteenth-century Paston family, was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2005 and won the English Association's Beatrice White Prize in 2006. Her second book, She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth, was selected as one of the books of the year for 2010 in the Guardian, Times, Sunday Times, Independent, Financial Times and BBC History Magazine. Helen is one of the presenters of Radio 4's Making History, and writes and presents programmes for BBC television, including a three-part series based on her book She-Wolves. Her latest book, Joan of Arc: A History, is the subject of a BBC Two documentary to be broadcast in 2015.\n\nFrom the Inside Flap\n\nWe all know the story of Joan of Arc. A peasant girl who hears voices from God. A warrior leading an army to victory, in an age that believes women cannot fight. The Maid of Orléans, and the saviour of France. Burned at the stake as a heretic at the age of just nineteen. Five hundred years later, a saint. Her case was heard in court twice over. One trial, in 1431, condemned her; the other, twenty-five years after her death, cleared her name. In the transcripts, we hear first-hand testimony from Joan, her family and her friends: a rare survival from the medieval world. What could be more revealing? But all is not as simple as it seems, because this is a life told backwards, in hindsight - a story already shaped by the knowledge of what Joan would become.\n\nIn Joan of Arc: A History, Helen Castor tells this gripping story afresh: forwards, not backwards, setting this extraordinary girl within her extraordinary world where no one - not Joan herself, nor the people around her, princes, bishops, soldiers or peasants - knew what would happen next.\n\nFrom the Back Cover\n\nWe all know the story of Joan of Ar","brand":"Faber \u0026 Faber","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40597286453333,"sku":"9780571284634N","price":14.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/files\/3712196b-6f2d-4879-83ba-3a33de4a2b1a.jpg?v=1682500591","url":"https:\/\/smeikalbooks.co.uk\/en-us\/products\/joan-of-arc-a-history","provider":"smeikalbooks","version":"1.0","type":"link"}