Joan of Arc was born around 1412 in Domrémy, a small village on the contested frontier between France and the Duchy of Bar, to a peasant family living through the grinding misery of the Hundred Years' War. Her extraordinary later career — hearing voices, leading armies, and dying at the stake in 1431 — began in this atmosphere of rural poverty, religious devotion, and national trauma. Her life compressed the largest themes of her age — faith, war, gender, and political legitimacy — into a single, mythically resonant story.

Joan of Arc became one of the most written-about figures in European literary history almost immediately after her death, inspiring elegies, polemical verse, and hagiographic prose. Christine de Pizan's Ditié de Jehanne d'Arc, composed in 1429, is the only contemporary poem in French to celebrate Joan during her lifetime, and it stands as a pinnacle of medieval political verse. From Voltaire's irreverent mock-epic to Schiller's romantic drama to Brecht's Saint Joan of the Stockyards, Joan's life has served as a mirror for poets' own political and spiritual preoccupations across centuries.