Joan of Arc As Political Actor

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Suny University at Buffalo Law School, has published Joan’s Two Bodies: A Study in Political Anthropology as Buffalo Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2011-017. Here is the abstract. The article is forthcoming in Social Research.

From all of the evidence, Joan of Arc was a conventionally pious Catholic and a patriotic Frenchman. Yet she was tried as a heretic and executed as a traitor. She unnerved both her friends and her enemies in the church and the state with her zeal. And she continues to fascinate. Almost six centuries after she was burned at the stake, her body still has life. This essay uses Kantorowicz’s reading of the historical development of the legal fiction of the king’s two bodies to re-focus our attention on what Joan of Arc accomplished as a political actor.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.