Unearthing the truth behind Joan's bones

Joan of Arc has often been depicted as a masculine warrior maiden, but no one really knows what she looked like. Painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

PARIS - Half a millennium after the death of Joan of Arc, warrior maiden, saint, feminist icon and scourge of the English, she is to have a medical check-up.

Philippe Charlier, a celebrated French specialist in forensic medicine, intends to analyse fragments of bone and skin reputed to have survived Joan's burning at the stake in 1431.

The intention is to verify, first, whether the remains, held at Chinon in the Loire valley, are genuinely those of a young woman of the early 15th century who died by burning.

So little is known about the real Joan - or Jeanne - that almost anything revealed by Charlier's team would be valuable to historians.

Charlier said he hoped eventually to uncover enough information to attempt something close to a positive identification.

Carbon and pollen dating should be able to permit the researchers to identify the precise year and month of death, Charlier said.

In ideal circumstances, the scientific studies would match the historical record, showing the bones and skin came from a 19-year-old woman who died in May 1431 and whose body was burned three times on the same day.

"We would then have a bundle of arguments so close to the record that we would be able to say with almost complete certainty that they are the remains of Jeanne d'Arc," he said

Last year, Charlier and his team at the Hopital Raymond Poincare in Garches, west of Paris, studied the remains of Agnes Sorel (1422-50), the "official" mistress of King Charles VII, the French monarch who fought the English alongside Joan.

The studies confirmed the historical accounts that Madame Sorel had died of severe mercury poisoning.

Joan of Arc was reputedly a peasant girl from eastern France who was inspired by the "voices" of three saints to lead the French armies and defeat the invading English.

Legend has it that she lifted the siege of Orleans, created a sense of French nationhood and changed the course of the Hundred Years War.

She was burned by the English in Rouen as a heretic and a witch after being captured on the battlefield.

Several historians and biographers believe much of the legend of Joan is untrue or exaggerated.

They claim the "real" Jeanne never led the French armies and her enemies were French as much as English in a muddled, brutal and treacherous, three-way civil war.

Her trial and execution - though approved and paid for by the English - was mostly driven by extreme repressive forces in the Catholic church in France, led by the University of Paris. Her active career lasted just more than a year.

Joan was canonised in 1920. She is the only person burned as a heretic to have been made a Catholic saint.

New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art displays a helmet with a legendary attribution to Joan of Arc.

While it makes no claim the legend is true, it says the piece dates from the right period.

There is probably more contemporary, written material on Joan than any other medieval figure who has a peasant background.

Much of it comes from the records of her trial and the posthumous "appeal" and commission of inquiry 25 years after her execution, which described Joan as a "martyr" and her judges as "heretics" for having convicted an innocent woman.

The only record of her appearance is a sketch made in Paris from the time of the Orleans siege. Given that she had never been to Paris at that stage, the artist probably did not know what she looked like.

From the minutes of her trial, and her letters, Joan's personality and voice survive the centuries: calm, driven but not really the voice of a fanatic. We also learn, among other things, that she was a wonderful cook, a good-looking woman, and had prominent breasts.

Arc De Triumph

Reputedly a peasant girl from eastern France, who helped change the direction of the Hundred Years War for France.

Burned at the stake in Rouen in May 1431 aged 19 for being a heretic and a witch.

Canonised by the Catholic Church in the 1920s - the only person to die as a heretic to be made a saint.

Her trial records suggest she was a good-looking woman, and a good cook.

- INDEPENDENT