Books: That's all, folks.

[nebroadwe]

It's a bad month when I dump not one, but two books within the first chapter for annoying me. First out of the queue was Perpetua of Carthage: Portrait of a Third-Century Martyr by William Farina. I did hesitate when I read his bio and discovered he was the president of "a national real estate consulting firm" who'd previously written about Shakespeare and the American Civil War. Then I told myself not to be a snob: independent scholars exist. Unfortunately, Farina's idea of contextualizing Perpetua was to compare her to C.S. Lewis because they were both converts -- never mind the enormous temporal, geopolitical, sociological and even religious gaps between the two. No, thanks; I like my history historical.

Then I tried Larissa Taylor's Virgin Warrior: The Life and Death of Joan of Arc. Here I hesitated on general principles: it's really hard to write a biography of Joan that prescinds (wonderful word; thank you, John P. Meier!) from faith claims about her while dealing seriously with her self-presentation as someone called by God. (Do Florence Nightingale biographies have this problem? Must investigate ...) Still, I was willing to give Taylor a shot. She did have some interesting things to say initially on the subject of Joan's responses to hostile questioning about her voices and the possibility that such questioning had Joan both discovering new contexts for her experiences and/or responding sarcastically and enigmatically about them to an audience that had already made up its mind about her. On the other hand, Taylor seemed a little too eager to naturalize any hint of the supernatural in Joan's career, to reduce Joan's motivations to having her own will. That's fine, but "her own will" was presented by Joan and received by those with whom she came in contact in ways determined by their apprehension of the supernatural. The historian need not believe what they believed, but she should do a better job of analyzing and representing it than Taylor seemed willing (heh) to do. I gave up when she claimed that Joan left Domremy on her quest because her parents were too controlling (they tried to arrange a marriage for her and she demurred -- without any of the usual accompanying saintly Sturm und Drang, either) and she wanted to live out a prophecy. Good-bye.

I'm going to read some nice, purely political biographies now -- Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell. Argh.

Comments

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Lol.