Myth Hunters: Joan's Relics

I tuned into a little Netflix on Saturday night after a long day of studying and editing. In my search to find something to watch, I came across a show called Myth Hunters. The summary of the show is in the title; the story of people who hunt for answers about famous myths like Noah's Arc, The City of Gold, and Nazi treasures. After watching one episode, and I was less than impressed, I scrolled through the two seasons of episodes trying to find one that I may find interesting. In the second season, I found an episode by the name of, "Relics of Joan of Arc".

The pace of this show is pretty slow. Each episode runs for about 47 minutes and it repeats a lot of the information they told you several times. There are even crude reenactments of the people's actions who are hunting the myths. Each episode starts with the introduction of the myth. In this case the myth was; were the relics authentically Joan's. This is the part that caught my attention. The relics were suspected cloth from Joan's clothes and even bones from Joan herself. I was doubtful from the beginning of this episode on the relic's authenticity since I'm pretty sure we would have mentioned this in class.

The relics were found when workers were clearing out an old building in France. In the attic were jars with the cloth and bones. The bones looked to be of a rib and there were other pieces that were hard to pin point where they belonged in the body. In the jars was an old parchment that read these were of Joan. Word got out pretty quickly and of course, the Catholic Church was interested to know the authenticity of the relics. There was a variety of methods they went through to prove their authenticity. A forensic examiner was brought in to start things up. He in fact was an expert with remains dating back centuries. His first attempt was to extract DNA from the bones and compare it to DNA from Joan's known ancestors. However, their was no DNA within the bones. The conclusion for that was, even though DNA could survive all these years, it can be lost through being exposed to extreme heat or tampering. For lack of better terms, this did add fire to the argument that this was Joan's.

Then the argument of how these relics survived the fire when Joan was burned. That was countered with the argument that bodies can explode with the gases inside the body being exposed to extreme heat. It was a possibility. They even brought in a perfumer with a trained nose to smell. In his analysis he detected hints of vanilla. This was extremely important information because ancient forms of embalming and body preservation used a material that left a scent of vanilla.What was really the kicker, was with closer examination of the specimen and with more experts, the relic that was thought to be one of Joan's ribs, turned out to be a thigh bone for a cat.

Finally, what really took away from the argument that these were authentic Joan relics was the examination of the cloth.  Under close examination, the stitching pattern did not match the common method used in Medieval Europe. Though the cloth was centuries old, it did match the stitching patterns used in the Middle East. Through all the information gathered on the relics, the relics were in fact not Joan's, but from a mummified cat. Something that still is interesting, but not from a Saint of France.

If you want to watch the full episode, I said at the top, it is on Netflix. Just search Myth Hunters. From what I researched on the show, the third season is actually supposed to show actually this week on the History Channel.