“Saint Joan” by Bernard Shaw [Nobel Prize winner]: Shaw’s Preface shows he didn’t realize that Joan of Arc had multiple personality

“Joan’s voices and visions have played many tricks with her reputation. They have been held to prove that she was mad, that she was a liar and impostor, that she was a sorceress (she was burned for this), and finally that she was a saint. They do not prove any of these things; but the variety of the conclusions reached shew how little our matter-of-fact historians know about other people’s minds, or even about their own. There are people in the world whose imagination is so vivid that when they have an idea it comes to them as an audible voice, sometimes uttered by a visual figure…Joan must be judged a sane woman in spite of her voices because they never gave her any advice that might not have come to her from her mother wit…”(1, Preface, pp. 11-12).

“Joan was what Francis Galton and other modern investigators of human faculty call a visualizer…and…the street is full of normally sane people who have hallucinations of all sorts which they believe to be part of the normal permanent equipment of all human beings” (1, Preface, p. 18).

Comment: If Joan had only one personality, she would have remembered imagining and visualizing her voices, and so would not have thought these were persons independent of her, with minds of their own.

Shaw’s Saint Joan—who wore men's clothing to lead soldiers in battle, etc.—was probably one of Joan of Arc's alternate personalities.

1. Bernard Shaw. Saint Joan [1924]. London, Penguin Classics, 2003.