Joan of Arc has often been depicted as a masculine warrior maiden, but no one really knows what she looked like. Painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Joan of Arc has often been depicted as a masculine warrior maiden, but no one really knows what she looked like. Painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

PARIS - Half a millennium after the death of Joan of Arc, warrior maiden, saint, feminist icon and scourge of the English, she is to have a medical check-up.

Philippe Charlier, a celebrated French specialist in forensic medicine, intends to analyse fragments of bone and skin reputed to have survived Joan's burning at the stake in 1431.

The intention is to verify, first, whether the remains, held at Chinon in the Loire valley, are genuinely those of a young woman of the early 15th century who died by burning.

So little is known about the real Joan - or Jeanne - that almost anything revealed by Charlier's team would be valuable to historians.

Charlier said he hoped eventually to uncover enough information to attempt something close to a positive identification.

Carbon and pollen dating should be able to permit the researchers to identify the precise year and month of death, Charlier said.

In ideal circumstances, the scientific studies would match the historical record, showing the bones and skin came from a 19-year-old woman who died in May 1431 and whose body was burned three times on the same day.

"We would then have a bundle of arguments so close to the record that we would be able to say with almost complete certainty that they are the remains of Jeanne d'Arc," he said

Last year, Charlier and his team at the Hopital Raymond Poincare in Garches, west of Paris, studied the remains of Agnes Sorel (1422-50), the "official" mistress of King Charles VII, the French monarch who fought the English alongside Joan.

The studies confirmed the historical accounts that Madame Sorel had died of severe mercury poisoning.

Joan of Arc was reputedly a peasant girl from eastern France who was inspired by the "voices" of three saints to lead the French armies and defeat the invading English.

Legend has it that she lifted the siege of Orleans, created a sense of French nationhood and changed the course of the Hundred Years War.

She was burned by the English in Rouen as a heretic and a witch after being captured on the battlefield.

Several historians and biographers believe much of the legend of Joan is untrue or exaggerated.

They claim the "real" Jeanne never led the French armies and her enemies were French as much as English in a muddled, brutal and treacherous, three-way civil war.