Frenchmen had long believed in a prophecy attributed to King Arthur's magician, Merlin: one day France would be saved by a maiden, dressed in man's clothes, who would come from an oak forest in Lorraine.

In the early fifteenth century, a thousand years after Merlin, France desperately needed saving. It was divided and devastated by the Hundred Years' War. Much of it was ruled by an Anglo-Burgundian alliance that threatened to control the entire country, and the French crown was claimed by England.

On March 6, 1429, a sixteen-year-old peasant girl dressed in tunic and trousers appeared at Chinon before the French Dauphin. She came from Domremy, a village in Lorraine (near an oak forest), and said that God had commanded her to do three things: raise the English siege of Orleans, take the Dauphin to Reims to be crowned King Charles VII of France, and drive the English out of France.

The life of Joan of Arc is not easily separated from her legend. The focus of this biography is on what Joan actually did—her brief but crucial role in French history. It shows how her three tasks were accomplished (the last one 22 years after her execution). The reader sees how this illiterate adolescent girl was able to command the most seasoned warriors of France in a drive to the very gates of Paris, and how, when captured and tried as a heretic, she stood up to the questioning of the most learned and powerful churchmen of the day.

ILLUSTRATIONS—The book's narrative of about 25,000 words is divided into eight chapters. There are 142 illustrations, of which 50 are in color. They include numerous portraits of Joan (paintings, sculpture, tapestries), as well as scenes of fifteenth-century French life: battles, armor, siege weapons, chateaux, court life. A map drawn especially for this book shows the divided France of Joan's time and the sites of her battles.

From the dust jacket