On this day in 1431 Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. She first heard her voices at the age of twelve; she began fighting at seventeen; she was in prison most of her eighteenth year; her trial began in January of 1431, just about her nineteenth birthday; on the last, May day, the Maid of Orleans was put to death slowly and curiously -- kept back from the center of the fire, withdrawn from it once dead so that she could be examined for gender, put back in until ash, and thrown in the Seine. ... FULL STORY »
