Joan

In the Christian tradition

Saint Joan of Arc is the early-fifteenth-century French peasant girl whose visions and military leadership turned the Hundred Years' War; burned at the stake at age nineteen on charges of heresy, rehabilitated twenty-five years later, canonized in 1920. The Catholic calendar commemorates her on May 30. She is the patron saint of France and of soldiers.

Joan of Arc (1412-1431) is one of the most distinctive saints in the Catholic calendar: a peasant girl whose claimed visions of Saints Michael, Catherine, and Margaret led her to seek out the Dauphin Charles, take military leadership at the siege of Orléans, and turn the tide of the Hundred Years' War. Captured by the Burgundians and sold to the English, she was tried for heresy and witchcraft and burned at the stake at Rouen at age nineteen. Twenty-five years later, a posthumous rehabilitation trial reversed the verdict; she was beatified in 1909 and canonized by Pope Benedict XV in 1920. The Catholic Church honors her on May 30. The name Joan (and its many forms: Jeanne, Juana, Giovanna) has been in continuous Christian use; modern Christian families use it freely.