N the night of the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6th)2 at the end of the medieval Christmas season, in the year 1412 during the final waning period of relative peace secured by the Truce of Leulinghen, a baby was born to Jacques Darc and his wife Isabelle in the village of Domrmy. She was christened Jehanne ("Joan"), after her godmothers Jehanne Royer and Jehanne de Viteau.3 Perceval de Boulainvilliers later claimed that the roosters of the village, "like heralds of a new joy", hailed her birth by crowing long before dawn4, allegedly to announce (as some later believed) a different type of dawn. Her childhood was spent among the forests and strawberry-covered fields of the Meuse river valley, far from the northern regions where the political situation was becoming increasingly troubled. In May 1413 Paris was subjected to several weeks of violence during an anti-Royalist revolt which was engineered by the Duke of Burgundy, led by a butcher named Simon Caboche, and egged on by a young clergyman and Burgundian partisan named Pierre Cauchon, whom Jehanne would later meet during a less pleasant period of her life. War with England was renewed in August 1415 when Henry V invaded Normandy and defeated the French Royal army near the little village of Aginourt on October 25th. The losses suffered by the French aristocracy severely weakened the Royalist faction and stripped it of its most energetic leader, Duke Charles d'Orlans, the captive prince whom Jehanne would later refer to as "the sweet Duke". Against...
