THE MAID AND THE QUEEN

Popular historian Nancy Goldstone's The Maid and the Queen follows up her previous medieval histories (Four Queens, The Lady Queen) with an original and groundbreaking biography of Joan of Arc, the illiterate peasant girl who restored the hereditary monarchy of France and saved her kingdom from English domination.

Intertwined with the story of Yolande of Aragon, Duchess of Anjou and Countess of Provence (known as the Queen of the Four Kingdoms), Goldstone's narrative connects the two women for the first time, revealing a new history of Europe's most fascinating heroine. The Maid and the Queen will show how Joan of Arc was destined to lead an army against the English and relieve the siege of Orléans, after which she took the disinherited dauphin to the cathedral of Reims for an official coronation. All by the age of seventeen. With the dauphin restored to his original birthright and universally recognized as the legitimate king of France, English was defeated and France made whole to resume its former glory. Riveting old fashioned history. Nancy Goldstone is the author of THE LADY QUEEN and FOUR QUEENS: The Provençal Sisters Who Ruled Europe and coauthor (with her husband Lawrence Goldstone) of five books earlier books.