Description:
She was a servant with no voice. He was a predator with powerful friends. She refused to stay silent--and changed history.
Normandy, 1429. The Hundred Years' War rages, Joan of Arc is leading the resistance, and the English occupy the land. In the midst of this chaos, a young, lowborn servant named Jeanne Corvière attends a hiring fair, hoping for a fresh start. Instead, she meets a sergeant of the law who lures her away with a lie about a wife in labor. What follows is a brutal assault in a dense forest and a shocking act of corruption. When Corvière seeks justice, she discovers the investigation has been mysteriously rigged. But she refuses to accept defeat. She launches a decade-long legal battle that takes her to the high courts of Rouen. Her quest for justice will shake the very foundations of the French legal system. It is a pattern we know all too well: predatory behavior by men of elite classes whose victims are women of a lower status, whose bodies they believe they can appropriate. Many women in Corvière's place would have given up. But she did not.Jeanne Corvière's riveting true story has never been told, until now.
Review Quotes:
"J'Accuse is a lyrical, illuminating book that brings us into a lost world of dowries and dragon-slayers that seems at once strange and all too familiar--a world in which, sometimes, the most vulnerable succeeded in holding the most powerful to account."
--John Wood Sweet, author of The Sewing Girl's Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America
"Jennifer D. Thibodeaux's skill as a medieval historian and a storyteller shines. Jeanne Corvière's story, never told before, is as terrible as it is empowering. It will haunt you, both for the familiarity of the crime against Jeanne and the grit she shows in changing her world for the better. Read this book to learn an incredible true story that will embolden you, too." -- Beth Allison Barr, author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood "In this gripping, extraordinary book, Jennifer D. Thibodeaux uses a single horrific crime to pull us into a whole world of violence, corruption, faith, war, and ultimately, the quest for any sort of justice. Her storytelling is as astounding as her mastery of the historical record and the archives." --David M. Perry, author of The Public Scholar