This lecture will feature Dr. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan. Provost Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana U - Bloomington.

Who was this young woman who speaks so boldly from the dock across almost six centuries, defying her judges—and us—to reduce her to a heretic or a saint or a cross-dressing action hero? Who was this young woman who demanded her right to a fair trial and continued to assert until the end her fidelity to her voices and her mission—in the face of the intractability of dynastic logic, a relentless and dualistic scholasticism, and almost certain death? I argue that her continuing power beyond the 15^th century and beyond France is explained by her having solved the most significant political theological problem of her time—maybe of all time. In modern terms, she solved the church/state problem—the problem of the separation of religion and politics—on her own lay terms. Acting for the people, she made a king, forcing church and state to live with her decision.   Her power, I believe, lay in a self-occultation akin to what Michael Bérubé has called an autistic aesthetics. As Daniel Bensaïd’s Maid said: "I sowed a message of disorder. I created confusion in the armies, I upset the borders, I inverted the hierarchies, I mixed the sexes. I jumped into view. My judges were not wrong."