My last medieval themed framework's (view it here) only female member - Jeanne d’Arc, whom is maybe the only female figure that have been told in lots of medieval myths and stories also. This beautiful French stamp issued in 1968, made me to write about her.
Jeanne d'Arc was born in the village of Domrémy, France, in 1412, as the middle daughter of a farmer family, in quite a chaotic scene. "The Hundred Years' War" has been helding between France and England, people were trying to survive in poverty and trouble.
Jeanne was brought up as a religious child; but beyond her upbringing, she also had been living in a deeply religious atmosphere in her inner world. When she was 12, she told her family that, she saw important saints in her dreams, whom was saying to herself that she must fight for her country. Her family found these crazy and tried to choke her off from this thoughts. But Jeanne d’Arc's mission outbalanced all, and she runaway from home. First she went to nearest military forces' area, and insistently told them that she was the choosen one from God, and want to fight for the country. She was refused repeatedly and thought to be nothing more than a crazy 16-year-old girl.
Jeanne d’Arc never gives up, and she managed to came into Charles, the King of France. Finally, she succeeded in convincing a group of religious officials and went to Orleans, which was under British siege, with the soldiers given her command. After an epic victory at the end of a series of battles, Jeanne d'Arc is now a savior for the people.
Her epic fame did not last long, when at the age of 19 she was captured by the pro-British Duke of Burgundy and handed over to the British for money. The Inquisition court judged Jeanne d'Arc as an infidel who fights "wearing men's clothes", disregarding the sacred existence of the Catholic church, and prophesies about the future of the country, and decided to kill her. On May 30, 1431, Jeanne d'Arc was burned to death in the Vieux-Marchè square, where 10,000 people gathered in the city of Rouen; but a brand new heroine figure was born from this scene.
In addition to seeing Jeanne d'Arc on so many postage stamps, we also see her as the face of the War savings stamp (WSS) campaign here. War savings stamps were issued by the United States Treasury Department to help fund participation in World War I and World War II. In this poster, published during the 1918 World War I, Jeanne d'Arc reminded American women of the heroic role of women with the slogan "Joan of Arc saved France, you can save America by buying war saving stamps".
Today, Jeanne d'Arc is considered one of the patroness saints in France, but she has been embraced as an iconic figure outside of France, as she shouted from ages ago that feminism, power and command authority belong not only to men, according to some views, and according to others, the matter of no gender.