Record of the Trial of Condemnation of Joan of Arc
The official record of the trial of Joan of Arc for heresy at Rouen, from 21 February to 30 May 1431, drawn up by the court’s notaries. It gives the questions put to her and her answers, the abjuration, and both sentences.
Read the text at gutenberg.org ↗Latin text: J. Quicherat, Procès de condamnation et de réhabilitation de Jeanne d’Arc, vol. 1 (Paris, 1841) ↗Complete English translation by W. P. Barrett (1932), at the Internet Medieval Sourcebook ↗
The record speaks in the first person of the judges (“We, the Bishop”). It was made by the court that condemned her: the notary Guillaume Manchon testified at the second trial that he took the minutes in French and that, long after her death, he and Thomas de Courcelles put them into the Latin form that survives. The three notaries attest at the end that the copy agrees with the original minute.
It is therefore the prosecution’s document, and it is also where Joan of Arc’s own words are preserved, in the answers it reports. What it leaves out is known only from the witnesses of the second trial, some of whom said that notes favourable to her were not taken. The twelve articles sent to the University of Paris, on which the sentence rested, were declared in 1456 to misrepresent her answers. See Record of the Nullification Trial of Joan of Arc and the Trial of Joan of Arc.
Cited in
- 30 May 1431, firm date