Before You Begin

Before you begin.

"If Heaven visibly sided with France and the Maid, no less did Hell most manifestly take part with our old enemy of England." So writes Norman Leslie of Pitcullo, a young Scots clerk turned soldier, who claims to have followed Jeanne d'Arc "from her beginning even till her end." His chronicle, set in the wars of 1429 to 1431, throws us straight into a broken-bridged, war-scorched France where a mad cordelier with a crossbow can be more dangerous than any English bowman.

Andrew Lang — Scottish poet, folklorist, and tireless man of letters, best remembered today for his Fairy Books — framed this novel as a "lost" first-person manuscript. Around the real figures of the Maid, her captains, and a painter's daughter named Elliot, he built a tale of love, faith, and feud that historians, he insisted, could corroborate wherever corroboration could be expected.

The book endures because it tells the largest story in medieval Europe from the smallest, most human angle: not a saint glimpsed from afar, but a comrade-in-arms seen close — at Orléans, on the road to Reims, and at the last. It is an adventure of drawbridge frays and banner-painting and a stolen heart, carried always toward one shining, doomed figure on a black horse.

This illustrated edition gathers the chronicle into six visual movements — recap plates you unlock as you read, each drawing together the cast, the places, and the turns of the story so far, with never a glimpse of what lies ahead. Turn the page and meet the company that follows the Maid's banner, from Fife across France to Rouen.