Late Middle Ages (15th century)
Feast: May 30
An illiterate farm girl who convinced a king to give her an army, broke a siege, and was burned alive at nineteen.
She was seventeen when she walked into the court of the uncrowned Charles VII and told him God had sent her to save France. She could not read. She had never held a sword. The court tested her for weeks — theologians, nobles, even a physical examination to verify her virginity — and somehow she passed every test. They gave her armor, a banner, and an army. In May 1429, she broke the English siege of Orleans in nine days, a feat professional commanders had failed at for months. She stood on the front lines, took an arrow through the shoulder, pulled it out, and kept fighting. Within weeks she had Charles crowned at Reims. Then things turned. She was captured by Burgundian forces at Compiegne, sold to the English, and put on trial for heresy in Rouen. The trial transcript survives, and it reveals a nineteen-year-old girl answering sophisticated theological traps with startling composure. Asked if she was in God's grace, she replied: 'If I am not, may God put me there; if I am, may God keep me there.' They burned her on May 30, 1431. Twenty-five years later, the Church reversed the verdict. In 1920, she was canonized.