She began hearing the voices in her head when she was 13 or so. The girl, a product of rural peasant stock in Domremy, France, seemed to be a most unlikely person to receive messages from the beyond. She had no education. She wasn’t a religious novice. No, all the girl did was help keep the cows her family farmed. Barefoot, she’d take the animals to pasture during the day and bring them home at night, milking them early and late. Oh, and the voices didn’t speak to her all the time. Bright lights often triggered the voices, she said. And bells. When the church bells in the nearby village would ring, announcing church services, she’d experience the voices more clearly than ever.

As the girl began to tell other people in the area about the voices and their messages of heavenly instruction, those people began to listen. The time period was back when people were much more superstitious, and those superstitions were tied to religion. When someone came along professing to have supernatural, other-worldly insight, the people of that day took notice. She gained somewhat of a following, with other peasant folk starting to seek her out to learn what other messages the divine was sending through the young girl.

Her parents, Jacques and Isabelle, told people that their daughter had been odd for some time. She didn’t always have this gift of hearing the voices, they said. No, she also had visions, but she didn’t talk about those much. She would seem to go into a trance and then reveal what she had seen and heard. Oh, and the family reported that she had a terrible temper; her short fuse often resulted in some mild violence if she felt something displeased her sensibilities, especially when her brothers, Jean and Pierre, would offend her somehow.

Based on these details, modern scientists have made some broad guesses as to what possibly could have triggered the girl to have those visions and to hear those voices. Some have suggested that she had a neurological issue or a psychiatric disorder. Some postulate that she was bipolar or had been the victim of a brain injury sometime in her younger life. Others, usually medical historians, point to some disease that could have given her dementia. The truth will probably never be discovered.

At any rate, by the time the girl was 16, she was noticed by higher authorities in the Catholic Church. And those authorities, in a time when France was locked in war with England, saw in this odd, seemingly god-sent young maiden, someone they could use to rally the people to their cause. The war had gone on so long that people began losing hope, and the powers that were decided the girl could be useful. So, incredibly, the authorities used this possibly mentally challenged young girl to their own ends; they capitalized on her notoriety, gave her a symbolic role in the war, and used her until, well, they couldn’t anymore. Eventually, she was captured by the English and killed for being a heretic.

You might think you know her name, but you’d probably not get it right. She called herself Jehanne la Pucelle–Joanne the Maid–at a time when most people still didn’t have last names as we know them today.

Of course the name you know her best by is the one that was never really used by anyone at the time.

Joan of Arc.