Making a King - by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan (Hardcover)

About the Book

Focusing on her life rather than her death, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan offers an interpretation of Joan of Arc as a political thinker and actor.

Book Synopsis

There is an enduring fascination with Joan of Arc, yet she is almost always seen alone, as a victim or martyr. A strikingly different person is heard in her letters and the testimony of her companions. To the king of England, she wrote, "I am a commander of war, and in whatever place I come upon your men in France, I will make them leave . . . And if they do not wish to obey, I will have them all killed." She wrote to the people of the towns she defended, giving them news and seeking their support. Her companions spoke of her intelligence, bravery, and military competence. Hers was a collective mission to rescue the people from the depredations of war.

Focusing on her life rather than her death, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan offers an interpretation of Joan of Arc as a political thinker and actor who sought, during her meteoric presence in fifteenth-century France, to legitimate a king, channel God's word, convene a coronation, and speak for the people in an alternative legal order. She assembled sacred kingship, mystical experience, and the press of political and economic chaos into a vernacular political theology that still speaks to our moment. Making a King illuminates Joan's extraordinary life and vision--her conception of sovereignty from below, her form of female masculinity, and her power as kingmaker--and shows why she can help us find a deeper understanding of religion and politics today.

Review Quotes

Sullivan restores the fullness of Joan's complex personhood, an assemblage of her voices, friends, masculine clothes, banner, and a divine mandate to make a king. This book shows how Joan's unique vernacular religion and "horizontal politics," inextricably bound together, endowed her with a hybrid agency that transformed her world. Brimming with original interventions on law, political theology, and sovereignty, it's an intellectually dazzling and thrilling read.--Paul Christopher Johnson, Department of History and Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Making a King turns to the world inhabited and created by Joan of Arc and asks: What does it mean to make history? Through this amazing book and its equally amazing protagonist, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan shows how thinking about a historical figure in ways that are both creative and scholarly can provide new insight into worlds that once were and, thus, also into worlds that might be.--Janet Jakobsen, Claire Tow Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University

In Making a King, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan offers one of the most searching accounts of Joan of Arc yet produced--not Joan the nationalist martyr and icon, but the peasant mystic who pried open the ritual ideology of French dynastic sovereignty. Sullivan's great contribution is vernacular political theology: a constitutionalism from below, grounded in lay religious practice and the irreducible excess of the sacred over every institutional form. This is a learned, generous, and compelling book, arriving at just the right moment. I read it wanting more--wanting to ask what Joan's queer heresy, her voices, and her burning look like not just from 1429 but from 1492, from the Middle Passage, from the standpoint of those the Christian imperial order was learning to render outside even the vernacular body politic. Sullivan has given us a book that makes imagining that unwhitened Joan newly possible.--J. Kameron Carter, University of California, Irvine; author of The Afterlife of Christian Empire: Our Present Apocalypse

Making a King attends to how Joan of Arc pulls at and reties the conceptual knot of religion and politics, helping us to understand a familiar figure in a truly new light. Here we have a leading scholar not only advancing her earlier, pathbreaking research but experimenting with creative new directions, grappling with the complexity of primary source material and a range of cutting-edge theories. This book is political theology at its very best.--Vincent W. Lloyd, coauthor of What Is Political Theology?

About the Author

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan is Provost Professor Emeritus at Indiana University Bloomington, where she was the director of the Center for Religion and the Human. Her books include The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (2005) and Church State Corporation: Construing Religion in US Law (2020).