Pope Joan

Donna Cross's idea of "historical" strains credulity. Joan/John Anglius has an unbelievable array of talents for any pope, let alone a female one in the Dark Ages of the ninth century. Barbara Rosenblat brings the ignorance, poverty, and superstition of the period to life, but she can't overcome the fantasy of twentieth-century insights and sensibilities in a ninth-century woman. Joan uses medicine to heal an earlier pope's gout, slows the spread of the plague by inventing communion by intinction, saves Rome with the use of hydraulic engineering, and establishes schools to educate girls, all before dying in childbirth while in a papal procession. A fun listen if one accepts it as an interesting fantasy with a strong female character. N.E.M. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

September 2, 1996
Cross makes an excellent, entertaining case in her work of historical fiction that, in the Dark Ages, a woman sat on the papal throne for two years. Born in Ingelheim in A.D. 814 to a tyrannical English canon and the once-heathen Saxon he made his wife, Joan shows intelligence and persistence from an early age. One of her two older brothers teaches her to read and write, and her education is furthered by a Greek scholar who instructs her in languages and the classics. Her mother, however, sings her the songs of her pagan gods, creating a dichotomy within her daughter that will last throughout her life. The Greek scholar arranges for the continuation of her education at the palace school of the Lord Bishop of Dorstadt, where she meets the red-haired knight Gerold, who is to become the love of her life. After a savage attack by Norsemen destroys the village, Joan adopts the identity of her older brother, slain in the raid, and makes her way to Fulda, to become the learned scholar and healer Brother John Anglicus. After surviving the plague, Joan goes to Rome, where her wisdom and medical skills gain her entrance into papal circles. Lavishly plotted, the book brims with fairs, weddings and stupendous banquets, famine, plague and brutal battles. Joan is always central to the vivid action as she wars with the two sides of herself, "mind and heart, faith and doubt, will and desire." Ultimately, though she leads a man's life, Joan dies a woman's death, losing her life in childbirth. In this colorful, richly imagined novel, Cross ably inspires a suspension of disbelief, pulling off the improbable feat of writing a romance starring a pregnant pope.