SOURCE: Brown, Cynthia J. “Allegorical Design and Image-Making in Fifteenth-Century France: Alain Chartier's Joan of Arc.” French Studies 53, no. 4 (October 1999): 385-404.

In the following essay, Brown examines Chartier's allegorical depiction of Joan of Arc in the Latin prose letter De Puella epistola, and explores how this work draws upon the allegorical elements of some of Chartier's other writings.

In the summer of 1429, Alain Chartier penned a letter in which he detailed Joan of Arc's divinely inspired mission in France up to that date. Chartier's Epistola de puella shared many of the features of the more well-known Ditié de Jehanne d'Arc, written by his contemporary Christine de Pizan, in part because both works postdate Charles VII's coronation on 17 July 1429 and precede Joan's ill-fated march on Paris in September 1429.¹ However, whereas Christine directed her vernacular poem of 488 verses to a general public, referring to the more wide-reaching work by the...