On this date in 1430, the Breton visionary La Pierronne was handed over to the secular authorities and burnt for blasphemy.
Not much is known of La Pierronne, save that she was a companion and follower of Joan of Arc — one of several women, who all shared Joan’s confessor, an itinerant monk known as Friar Richard. (Not much is known of him, either.)
La Pierronne was captured by the English at Corbeil in the spring of 1430, along with a younger companion whose name is not known. Rumor had it that she and Joan had both taken communion multiple times the previous Christmas, which was an irregular activity but not technically an outlawed one.
Still, cavalier behavior with the Host plus a surfeit of fealty to the Maid put our seer squarely in the sights of the Grand Inquisitor Jean Graverent. It was a preview of the sort of interrogation Joan herself would soon face.*
Like Joan of Arc, La Pierronne maintained that God spoke to her — and not only spiritually but in the shape of a physical apparition. This was clear heresy in the Church’s eyes — a direct ticket to the fire in the absence of speedy abjuration.
On the third of September, both women were presented with their options in the form of a sermon presented in the presence of the stakes that would otherwise receive them. Joan herself would face this test of faith, and would fail it on her first encounter. Here, the younger woman recanted — but La Pierronne held to her visions at the cost of her life.
Two women, who about half a year before had been captured at Corbeil and brought to Paris, had a sermon preached over them in the court before Notre Dame. The elder of these was Pierronne, and she was from Bretagne speaking Breton. She asserted and maintained that dame Joan (the Maid), who fought for the Armagnacs, was a good woman, and that what she did was well done and according to God.
Also she admitted having received the precious Body of our Lord twice in one day. Also she asserted and swore that God often appeared to her in human form, and spoke to her as one friend speaks to another, and that the last time she had seen Him, He was clad in a long white robe with a crimson doublet under it; which is nothing short of blasphemy. And she would never retract this statement that she often sees God clothed in this form, for the which, on this same day, she was sentenced to be burned, and so it was done and she died on the Sunday named persisting in this assertion, but the other woman was set at liberty at the same time.
* Joan had been captured by the Burgundians in May 1430. The Inquisitor Graverent was engaged by a different inquisition when Joan was prosecuted, so he didn’t take part in her trial.
On this day..
- 1803: John Hatfield, Beauty of Buttermere deceiver
- 1964: Mohamed Chabani
- 2016: Mir Quasem Ali
- 1653: Sakura Sogoro, righteous peasant
- 1806: John Docke Rouvelett, malicious prosecutor
- 2,500 days: Still hanging around
- 1944: Three Soviet infiltrators, the last in Finland
- 1924: Patrick Mahon, for the Crumbles Murder
- 1821: Timothy Bennett, duelist
- 1875: Six in Fort Smith under Hanging Judge Isaac Parker
- 1736: Both John Vernham and Joshua Harding survive a hanging
- 1918: Fanya Kaplan, Lenin's would-be assassin
- 2003: Paul Hill, anti-abortion martyr
There are a number of errors in this. Seeing God in visible form was not considered heresy (the central tenet of Christianity, after all, is the physical incarnation of God, and the Bible mentions Moses seeing the Trinity as three physical men). There isn’t any justification for claiming that Jean Graverent put Pierronne on trial either, since no document mentions that. She was put on trial by the pro-English clergy at the University of Paris, whose faculty had been replaced by English partisans beginning in 1419 when Paris was occupied by the English.
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