Saint Joan of Valois

Jeanne de France was born on April 23, 1464, at Nogent-le-Roi, the daughter of King Louis XI and Queen Charlotte of Savoy. She had a physical deformity from birth, and her father entrusted her as a child to Baron François de Linières and his wife, Anne de Culan, at Lignières in Berry. On September 8, 1476, at Montrichard, she was married at twelve to her cousin Louis, Duke of Orléans, in a match arranged by her father.

When Louis became king as Louis XII in April 1498, he sought an annulment so that he could marry Anne of Brittany. A commission appointed by Pope Alexander VI declared the marriage null in December 1498, for lack of consent and non-consummation. Joan accepted the sentence, and the king gave her the duchy of Berry. She withdrew to Bourges, where she gave herself to prayer and charity and was called the good duchess.

With her Franciscan director, Gilbert Nicolas, whom a papal brief renamed Gabriel-Maria, she planned an order of nuns devoted to imitating the ten virtues of the Virgin Mary found in the Gospel. Pope Alexander VI approved its rule on February 12, 1502; the first five sisters received the veil on October 8, 1502, and the building of the monastery began in 1503. Joan made her private profession at Pentecost 1504 and her public profession on November 21, 1504.

She died at Bourges on February 4, 1505, at the age of forty, and was buried in the chapel of her monastery.

Pope Leo X allowed the Annonciades to honor her with a special office in 1514, and her cause was introduced in the seventeenth century. In May 1562, when Huguenot troops took Bourges, soldiers opened her tomb and, according to witnesses, burned her body in the nave of the church; the nuns returned in October of that year and restored the empty tomb. Pope Benedict XIV beatified her in 1742, and Pope Pius XII canonized her on May 28, 1950.

The sisters of Bourges were dispersed in 1793. The city acquired the site in 1834, the State took it over in 1857, and it passed to the army; its chapel reopened for worship in May 1961 and serves the military chaplaincy of Bourges. Annonciade nuns live today in a few monasteries in France and abroad, among them Saint-Doulchard, at the edge of Bourges, where six sisters keep her veil, a shoe said to be hers and her sixteenth-century death mask, and showed them to pilgrims in June 2026.

In the chapel of her monastery at Bourges, a painted stone recumbent effigy made in the early seventeenth century, replacing an earlier terracotta figure, lies on her tomb. After the Revolution it was kept for nearly two centuries in the church of Notre-Dame, and in 1980 it returned to the chapel with the copper plate that bears her epitaph. The chapel’s timber roof, with carved heads on its tie beams, is painted in blue, red and white, the colors of the sisters’ habits.

• Bourges, chapel of Sainte-JeanneThe chapel of her first monastery, at 6 avenue du 95e de Ligne in the barracks, with her effigy over the tomb from which her body was taken in 1562.
• Saint-DoulchardThe monastery of the Annonciade at 115 route de Vouzeron, where a community of her daughters keeps her veil and other relics.
• LignièresThe town in Berry where she spent her childhood; the Romanesque church of Notre-Dame, a collegiate church in her time, has an oratory dedicated to her.