Complete series of eight postcards portraying key moments in the history of Joan of Arc, with particularly high production values and tasteful, understated color tinting including judicious use of gold highlighting. Each card has a caption indicating Joan’s presence at a particular place, along with a date and, in two cases, a brief tagline (from “Jeanne d’Arc à Dorémy / Jeanne entend les voix en 1425” to “Jeanne d’Arc brulée vive à Rouen / 30 Mai 1431”). The series represents Joan’s shift in gender presentation as a crucial framing device for her extraordinary story: The first postcard shows her dressed as a simple shepherd girl hearing mystical voices; the next five show her as the savior of France dressed in full armor, with a sword and battle standard, but with the long hair of a woman; the seventh shows her “devant ses juges” wearing a simple man’s doublet; and the final card shows her forcibly returned to women’s clothing, wearing a white gown while tied to the stake and licked by flames.
Cite As:
Postcards of female and male impersonators and cross-dressing, #7778. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
This image is believed to be in the public domain in the United States by virtue of publication date, and is presented by Cornell University Library under the Guidelines for Using Text, Images, Audio, and Video from Cornell University Library Collections, http://hdl.handle.net/1813.001/CULCopyright. This collection was digitized by Cornell University Library in 2019 from materials held in the Rare and Manuscript Collections, with funding from a Digital Collections in Arts and Sciences Grant to Professor Durba Ghosh and Brenda Marston, Curator of the Human Sexuality Collection. For more information about this image, please contact the Rare and Manuscript Collections at rareref@cornell.edu. Responsibility for making an independent legal assessment of an item and securing any necessary permissions ultimately rests with persons desiring to use the item.
