Forensics

Joan of Arc’s Visions Could Have Been More Medical than Mystical

The mysterious voices and visions Joan of Arc claimed to have heard and seen during the Hundred Years’ War, may actually have been due to a form of epilepsy, according to neurologist Dr. Guiseppe d’Orsi with the University of Foggia (Italy), and associate professor Paola Tinuper with the University of Bologna (Italy), who have described their theory in a letter published in the journal Epilepsy & Behavior.

The type of epilepsy the pair attribute to Joan affects the area of the brain that’s responsible for hearing, and is known as idiopathic partial epilepsy with auditory features (IPEAF). The term idiopathic means the epilepsy is likely to have a genetic cause, and the term partial indicates that it affects just one area of the brain.