Trial of a Trial

The Retrial of Joan of Arc, by Régine Pernoud. Translated by J. M. Cohen. Foreword by Katherine Anne Porter. 264 pp. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. $4.75

The whole world knows of the “trial” (comparable to those of Nuremberg or Moscow) by which Joan was sentenced to be burned in Rouen. Fewer people know of her retrial thirty years later, when, owing to the persistent loyalty of public opinion, an enquiry was held by which she was posthumously exonerated from the charges for which she was condemned, and by which the fraudulence and illegality of the former trial was exposed, along with the villainous coercive methods and threats of torture used by Bishop Cauchon, England’s “yes man,” not only on the witnesses, but on the clerks who took down the evidence and were forced even to misrepresent Joan’s own replies in her defense, as they afterwards complained.

The Retrial of Joan of Arc, by Régine Pernoud. Translated by J. M. Cohen. Foreword by Katherine Anne Porter. 264 pp. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. $4.75

The whole world knows of the “trial” (comparable to those of Nuremberg or Moscow) by which Joan was sentenced to be burned in Rouen. Fewer people know of her retrial thirty years later, when, owing to the persistent loyalty of public opinion, an enquiry was held by which she was posthumously exonerated from the charges for which she was condemned, and by which the fraudulence and illegality of the former trial was exposed, along with the villainous coercive methods and threats of torture used by Bishop Cauchon, England’s “yes man,” not only on the witnesses, but on the clerks who took down the evidence and were forced even to misrepresent Joan’s own replies in her defense, as they afterwards complained.