Making a king : the political theology of Joan of Arc /
"Joan of Arc has been depicted in many ways by numerous authors but almost always as a victim or martyr. In contrast, Making a King views her as a figure of power, a commanding presence in French politics engaged in a series of complex strategies deploying a range of political theologies. She s...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
Columbia University Press,
[2026]
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| Summary: | "Joan of Arc has been depicted in many ways by numerous authors but almost always as a victim or martyr. In contrast, Making a King views her as a figure of power, a commanding presence in French politics engaged in a series of complex strategies deploying a range of political theologies. She sought to legitimate a king, channel God's word, convene a coronation, and evoke the law of states while at the same time speaking for the power of the people as an alternative legal order. Did she in fact also speak as a king herself, as she was accused? Opinions differ, but her intervention was constitutional in the broadest sense, collective and collaborative . In 1429 Joan responded to a call to interrupt the aristocratic politics of the Hundred Years War with England in service to Charles VII, one of the claimants to the French throne, and to mobilize human and material resources. After her capture and sale to the English, trial for heresy, execution in 1430, and sanctification in 1920, she has been popularly framed as both the anticlerical champion of the people and as the royalist saint. Winni Sullivan takes a different perspective, examining how religion and politics intersected in her life and actions. She assembled the practices of sacred kingship, mystical experience, and political and economic chaos to mobilize a vernacular political theology, an assemblage, called to realize peace. A thought experiment in dialogue with the historical record and its interpreters as well as those investigating religion and politics relations today, Making a King helps us understand Joan's extraordinary political intelligence, her life at the hinge point of modernity, and the consequences of not taking religion, unstable a concept as it is, into account in our political and social world today"-- Provided by publisher. |
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| Physical Description: | xxvi, 276 pages, 3 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (black and white), maps ; 22 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780231222815 0231222815 9780231222822 0231222823 |