A young girl of peasant origin has visions and suddenly finds herself at the head of an army, defeating the English and Burgundians, and guiding the Dauphin to his coronation in Reims. However, shortly thereafter, she is captured and, after a show trial, burned at the stake at just 19 years old. Gerd Krumeich completes his decades-long research on the Maid of Orléans with this book, presenting a masterful biography that will stand the test of time.

Much has been written and poetized about the Maid of Orléans, yet Gerd Krumeich offers a surprisingly new perspective on the French national heroine. Based on extensive source studies, he demonstrates how a still pre-modern "self" asserts itself against powerful institutions like the Church and insists on an individual relationship with God. In this religiosity of free choice lies a key to understanding the Maid, another in her "proto-national" conviction that the English have no place in France. The book impressively traces the stages of a life so extraordinary that the suspicion repeatedly arose that Jeanne d’Arc was actually a man—a thesis that Krumeich convincingly refutes.