Making a King

Making a King turns to the world inhabited and created by Joan of Arc and asks: What does it mean to make history? Through this amazing book and its equally amazing protagonist, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan shows how thinking about a historical figure in ways that are both creative and scholarly can provide new insight into worlds that once were and, thus, also into worlds that might be. -- Janet Jakobsen, Claire Tow Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University Sullivan restores the fullness of Joan’s complex personhood, an assemblage of her voices, friends, masculine clothes, banner, and a divine mandate to make a king. This book shows how Joan’s unique vernacular religion and “horizontal politics,” inextricably bound together, endowed her with a hybrid agency that transformed her world. Brimming with original interventions on law, political theology, and sovereignty, it's an intellectually dazzling and thrilling read. -- Paul Christopher Johnson, Department of History and Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor In Making a King, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan offers one of the most searching accounts of Joan of Arc yet produced—not Joan the nationalist martyr and icon, but the peasant mystic who pried open the ritual ideology of French dynastic sovereignty. Sullivan's great contribution is vernacular political theology: a constitutionalism from below, grounded in lay religious practice and the irreducible excess of the sacred over every institutional form. This is a learned, generous, and compelling book, arriving at just the right moment. I read it wanting more—wanting to ask what Joan's queer heresy, her voices, and her burning look like not just from 1429 but from 1492, from the Middle Passage, from the standpoint of those the Christian imperial order was learning to render outside even the vernacular body politic. Sullivan has given us a book that makes imagining that unwhitened Joan newly possible. -- J. Kameron Carter, University of California, Irvine; author of <i>The Afterlife of Christian Empire: Our Present Apocalypse</i> Making a King attends to how Joan of Arc pulls at and reties the conceptual knot of religion and politics, helping us to understand a familiar figure in a truly new light. Here we have a leading scholar not only advancing her earlier, pathbreaking research but experimenting with creative new directions, grappling with the complexity of primary source material and a range of cutting-edge theories. This book is political theology at its very best. -- Vincent W. Lloyd, coauthor of <i>What Is Political Theology?</i>