Does any medieval figure have more name recognition today than Joan of Arc? Already a celebrity at the age of seventeen, by her death two years later she had run the whole gamut of fifteenth-century society, from the peasant world to which she was born, through courts and nobility, through the bourgeoisie of France on her way to the sieges and captains and soldiers, at last to the lawyers and theologians who tried and convicted her of heresy in May 1431. More than one hundred clerics attended sessions at her trial. She inspired commentary from some of the most important authorities of the day, such as Christine de Pizan and Jean Gerson, neither of whom probably ever saw her in person. Her case was discussed widely all over Europe, in a remarkable example of celebrity before print.

Hence the problem that this reference guide seeks to address, which is the steep learning curve that confronts newcomers to this complex field of study. In 2012, Philippe Contamine, Olivier Bouzy, and Xavier Hélary assembled the first true reference guide for Joan with their Jeanne d'Arc: histoire et dictionnaire. Over the course of 1214 pages, the authors provide a lengthy history (over 400 pages), followed by a dictionary (over 500 pages), and concluding with a fine bibliography and filmography. In 2017 there appeared another reference guide, even more vast (2016 pages), the Dictionnaire encyclopédique de Jeanne d'Arc by Pascal-Raphaël Ambrogi and Dominique Le Tourneau. The aim of Scott Manning in the volume under consideration here is more modest: to provide a reference guide to Joan of Arc for an audience that can read only sources in English.

The multitudes who crossed Joan's path represent only the first problem that any student of Joan must confront. Perhaps a greater challenge is the fact that her story moves between different social or historical "registers." Joan's story belongs at once to military history, the nuts and bolts of sieges and battles, now including gunpowder artillery (which Joan seems to have mastered). It likewise belongs to political history, the grand but shifting alliances between France, England, Burgundy, and other minor players. It belongs to legal history, as an illustration of the canon law that shaped the course of her heresy trial. Closely connected to that, it belongs also to the history of theology, which itself has multiple registers, from the world of lay religious practice put in place by the Fourth Lateran Council, up to the rarefied discussions among theologians regarding the discernment of spirits.

Perhaps one limitation of the volume is that it skews toward Manning's expertise, which is military history. He provides excellent coverage not just of the battles in which Joan participated, but of the most important engagements and treaties from the Battle of Agincourt through the siege of Orléans, and of the siege engines and other weapons that were used in these engagements. It is partly because of the tremendous range of knowledge required in an undertaking such as this that the two earlier dictionaries were multi-authored productions.

Nonetheless, Manning has read widely in the secondary literature, and his articles on topics outside of his core expertise, for example on theological topics such as "Voices, Visions, and Revelations," reflect informed, current understanding. On that specific topic, one might quibble with one or two small matters. In the trial, Joan initially described her revelation not as "voices" but as her "voice," before eventually breaking down and equating the voice with her saints. This may be an important point but it is also a relatively nuanced one, and I would feel comfortable assigning this article to my own undergraduate students. Such hesitations are very few. His entry for Jean Gerson's tract on Joan of Arc, for example, about which there is still confusion in the scholarly literature, is excellent.

Some entries are intended for an audience with no knowledge at all of the medieval world. Manning includes entries for "Abbot," "Archbishop," and "Friar," and even "Battle" and "Ladder." The intended audience may find such entries helpful; but how would they know that they are there in the first place? Readers might have found it useful at the outset of the volume to see a complete list of entries, as one sometimes finds in historical dictionaries (as in Contamine, Bouzy, and Hélary).

This is not a book that one would cite in a scholarly article. The target audience is American undergraduates, or the lay historian with little background in the field of late medieval history. Yet the book would also be helpful for specialists who wish to get a quick sense of current understanding of a topic outside of their expertise. Manning can be trusted; he judiciously avoids the fringe positions that one sometimes finds in the scholarly literature. In short, he is a helpful and reliable guide to the fascinating, fractured world of Joan of Arc.

Daniel Hobbins