“Joan of Arc continued to be a fortuitously malleable figure in English history, one whose story could be retold to suit its context” (141). Gail Orgelfinger makes this remark about three quarters of the way through her fascinating study, but this quotation sums up well what she has revealed in the book as a whole. The mention of context is key. Orgelfinger does not simply show what English authors wrote about Joan's career, but she also describes “the context in which they wrote and the genres they chose.” This avoids the common trap of asking simply whether writers were “for” or “against” Joan and confirms the complexity of response in England across the centuries. The study, well written and richly nuanced throughout, forms a new and exciting approach to what might otherwise seem a rather overworked area. The book is not intended as a comprehensive review of all English writings between 1429 and 1829 on Joan; it is a series of fully contextualized vignettes, all based on wide-ranging research and deep discussion and arranged in chronological order so that one chapter naturally follows from another, showing development across time as contemporary views and concerns changed. The historical and literary dimensions are interwoven very effectively: indeed, the book is a model of interdisciplinary scholarship, ranging across a wide array of texts, including French works known in England.

For Orgelfinger, the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries are significant as the point when historians began to integrate Joan's story into the larger narrative of English history. Here “humanist methodology, post-Reformation politics, and the influence of both the ‘woman question’ and fascination with witchcraft are reflected in English accounts of Joan of Arc” (51). A strength here is that to show similarities and differences, Orgelfinger juxtaposes contemporary views on other female warriors of the past. Joan became an exemplar, perhaps the main exemplar, of the virago. She was included in the first printed work on demonology produced in England (in 1561), placing references to her witchcraft within sixteenth-century concerns. Yet that negative portrayal needs to be set alongside the tradition of the female worthies, showing that her actions were not always judged negatively, especially in the early seventeenth century, in works such as Thomas Heywood's Gynaikeion of 1624. Thomas Fuller's The Holy State and the Profane of 1642 reveals the range of opinion in his comment “whether Saint, Witch, Man, Maid or Whore” (91).

The interconnections that Orgelfinger draws are all the more stimulating for being unusual. In chapter 4, for instance, Joan and Mary, Queen of Scots, are juxtaposed in discussion of a variety of genres, including drama. There follows a well-illustrated section on the costume chosen for portrayals of Joan in late eighteenth-century performances and drawings, with a slightly schizophrenic desire to emphasize femininity within military and magical context. This discussion then flows naturally into the “cursed breeches”—Joan's wearing of male clothing—introduced by the most striking illustration in the book, dating to the turn of the eighteenth/nineteenth century, of Joan in “impossibly skintight armor” (128). This reflects the increasing feminization and sexualization of Joan in contemporary historical writings, even a “domestication,” and is linked to changes in historical taste from the “recital of warlike transactions” to the “private situation of the individual,” and the rise of female biographies. In a play of 1798, Joan is made to fall in love with Lord Talbot, but he prefers another lady, and so Joan and the Duke of Alençon try to poison him.

My only reservation about an otherwise excellent book is the outline of Joan's actual career in chapter 1, which could make more of the early debate so magisterially studied by Deborah Fraioli. The bibliography also lacks mention of an important collection on Joan, De l'hérétique à la sainte: les procès de Jeanne d'Arc revisités (2016), edited by François Neveux, which contains my own discussion of contemporary English views of the trial of condemnation. But these are minor shortcomings in what is otherwise a vibrant, original, and important contribution to both the historical interpretation of Joan and the changing tastes and interests in historical and literary cultures in England from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries.