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Summary: History
Review: Ref: Reader from USA, 23 July 99: Sorry, haven't read all the books avail on Joan of Arc yet, but so far she put her clothes (male, if you so wish) back on in prison although they offered her a dress - maybe you wanna do a search on Joan of Arc at Amazon - just a suggestion...Back when I've read this book (three crowns to influence average rating as little as poss - sorry).
Rating: 
Summary: History
Review: Thanks to Amazon turning 3 crowns in 1 I'm sending this to countaract - hmmm...
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Summary: Here's to Feinberg's Transgendering History Quest
Review: The Stonewall frontliner offers an engaging expedition back through the past into the present through critical transgender-centering reinterpretations of familiar and unfamiliar stories. Hir re-reading of Joan of Arc from a transgender socialist feminist perspective is intriguing, motivating, and delightful. Feinberg is able to achieve visibility for heterosexistly obscured transgender moments and people across a lengthy span of time and geography. Braiding hir own narrative into the work provides a reflexive empassioned appeal to liberation workers that renews spirits to confront gender, desire, and sexed supremacy with a certain pride in transgender revolutionary work. The blend of freshly unearthed truths, experiential revelations, and proffers for theory work well for a feminist readership.
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Summary: Liberation Manifesto
Review: This is a manifesto of transgender liberation. It will be remembered and read for many years to come. As a LGBT person, it really touched me. Some societies have honored us and some have murdered us. It is time for us to rise up and say enough. I will re-read this book.
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Summary: Liberation Manifesto
Review: This is a manifesto of transgender liberation. It will be remembered and read for many years to come. As a LGBT person, it really touched me. Some societies have honored us and some have murdered us. It is time for us to rise up and say enough. I will re-read this book.
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Summary: Dishonesty
Review: This is a profoundly dishonest book, not only on the subject of Joan of Arc, as seems to have been covered in detail by another review, but also on other topics in which a similar lack of research - and therefore a lack of detailed knowledge - has produced speculation and outright invention. It is another case in which an author gathers a few convenient half-truths and spins them into a story that suits their purpose while ignoring the objective evidence. Unfortunately, such sloppy intellectual habits have become all too common.
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Summary: Feinberg Dusts Off Our Transgendered Past
Review: Those interested in transgenderism have long been teased by all-too-brief descriptions of its existence in times past. If mentioned at all in previous works, transgendered history has been soft-pedaled into vague meanderings on Native American "two-spirits". Leslie Feinberg not only provides comprehensive documentation of the roles of transgendered people in ancient societies, but also interprets these traditions and their decline by deconstructing our current views of gender as the result of patriarchy. Feinberg also weaves into the interpretation elements of socialist theory and class oppression. These theoretical passages are interspersed with personal vignettes from the Feinberg's life which flesh out the explanation. Even if one doesn't fully buy into Feinberg's views, the book takes you on a fabulous journey and forces you to re-examine your beliefs about gender. Although not scholarly,the book serves the important purpose of contributing one volume that consolidates documentation of many of the instances of transgenderism that previously were splintered throughout the literature. The book is a quick read, which is both refreshing and disappointing. Perhaps in the near future Feinberg or others will branch off this pioneering work and continue to re-discover the robbed tradition of transgenderism throughout the world.
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Summary: Where did Leslie Feinberg get her information?
Review: Where did the author of this book get her information about Joan of Arc?
Joan of Arc wasn't a feminist or pagan. She was a simple peasant girl who was so devoted to God that when she heard the voices of saints telling her to crown the Dauphin, she did it, even though she "knew nothing of how to mount a horse or command an army."
There have been so many misconceptions about Jehanne d'Arc that people are confused. With this misguiding book and the recent movie "The Messenger," people aren't being shown the true story of the French teenager that lived 500 years ago.
Joan could "match any woman with a needle and thread," and was good with the normal housewife duties that her mother Isabelle taught her. If by some twist of fate that Heavenly voices never came to her, Joan would likely have been just any country girl in the Middle Ages. She would likely have married and had children and never dreamed of wearing men's clothing, which she did for her own protection in the company of thousands of male soldiers. And the church at Poitiers had given her the permission to wear the clothing in the first place! It's not like Joan endorsed the idea of females wearing mens clothing. It was in the interest of her own safety.
If you want to read a "real" book about Jehanne, than read the accounts of her trials, where you can read her real words, and forget about the books like this that don't show her true life.
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Summary: More myths....
Review: While Dennis Rodman certainly qualifies as "transgendered", Joan of Arc certainly does not: her own statements (as listed in the record of the trial in 1431 and as quoted by several witnesses at the retrial from 1455-1456) make it clear that she only wore her boyish costume because she was being subjected to attempted rapes and other abuse while in prison, and was constantly in danger of the same while travelling through enemy territory. She wore a dress during the entire rest of her life, and at the trial she begged her judges to allow her to be buried in a dress in the event that she should die from illness while in prison, since she was afraid that they might decide to bury her in her male attire instead (hardly the position that would be taken by a transvestite). Similarly, her armor was not "masculine" in any sense (there's a surviving image of it at St. Denis, and it's quite feminine in appearance, as was the case with the many other suits of armor worn by women during this period: armor was never considered to be a purely masculine form of dress, no more than a bullet-proof vest is today, and noble women wore armor whenever circumstances forced them to take nominal command of their families' armies). None of this is in dispute, and it seems that the author needs to learn a bit more about the 15th century.
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Summary: Feinberg's "Transgender Warriors"
Review: While there certainly have been people throughout history who did engage in cross-dressing as a preference, this book has managed to ignore most of them while erroneously claiming such to be the case about numerous others who did not legitimately fit the description.
Perhaps the worst distortion occurs in the section on Joan of Arc, about which the following points should be made:
- On the issue of her decision to wear male clothing, and the book's claim that she allegedly "died for the right" to wear it: this subject is covered in a great many eyewitness accounts and other documents which clarify the "spin" which her accusers put on the issue when they wrote the trial transcript. Direct quotes from Joan in a number of accounts say that she wore soldiers' clothing (of a type which had "laces and points" which allowed her to firmly tie the pants and tunic together), partly as a defense against rape (which was especially a problem while in prison) as well as to discourage sexual advances while bedding down with her army in the field. This was the accepted way of doing it, and if it was thus being done out of necessity the Church itself granted permission (see medieval theological works such as "Summa Theologica", "Scito Vias Domini", and so on). Her accusers were distorting medieval theology when they said that it was "always" an act of heresy. A number of eyewitnesses said that in the end her guards maneuvered her into a "relapse" by leaving her nothing to wear but her old male clothing, and she had no choice but to put it back on after arguing with them "until noon", according to one eyewitness. The author of this book, on the other hand, adopts the dishonest tactic of repeating the claims made by Joan's enemies on this subject while ignoring everything else.
- Even English financial documents prove that it was the English who ran and paid for her trial, and the eyewitness accounts state that they convicted her out of revenge rather than from any genuine belief that she was a heretic. To see what her religious views actually were, you need to look at the eyewitness accounts as well as the letters which she dictated to scribes during her military campaigns, which bluntly declare her devotion to, quote, "King Jesus, the King of Heaven", "Saint Mary", and so forth. This is why there was a successful appeal of her case after the English were finally driven out of from Rouen near the end of the war, leading the Inquisition to overturn the verdict on July 7, 1456.
- Needless to say, the above evidence also refutes the author's claim that Joan was a pagan, which is based on misconceptions about the nature of her trial as well as confusion over other issues, such as her native region (the modern usage of the word "Lorraine" is confused with the Duchy of Lorraine (which was supposedly a hotbed of witchcraft in that era); Joan did not come from the _Duchy_ of Lorraine, which wasn't even a part of France at that time).
- She did not lead a "proletarian" army, but in fact the core of her army was composed of the usual aristocrats and mercenaries (such as Duke Jean II d'Alencon, whom Joan always called "my fair Duke" ("mon beau Duc"); the Count of Dunois, the Baron of Coulances, Lord Saint-Severe, Lord Etienne de Vignolles (aka "La Hire"), and so on). Feinberg's spin on this, as with so many other subjects, is merely an invention.
- There are other anachronisms, such as when the author interprets Joan as a "feminist" while ignoring certain of her recorded statements which sound like precisely the opposite (such as the comment: "I would rather stay home with my poor mother and spin wool [rather than lead an army]", or her statement to Catherine de la Rochelle to "go home to your husband and tend your household", etc). Feminism is a modern movement which really had no counterpart in the 15th century.
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