Pope Joan

In the late summer of 1998 just prior to beginning my final semester of library school, I read/heard a novel, Pope Joan, RC 43715, that I found rather startling. (I needed to read novels during library school--got through about 190 of them--in order to destress and keep my sanity, but that's another story.)

Pope Joan is the story of a girl born during the time of Charlamagne who is in love with learning and how she becomes a monk and later pope. The story tantalizes, but I thought little more about it until tonight when I happened to tune in the second hour of Prime Time. They were doing a special hour on this same Pope Joan.

Was she more than a symbol on a Tarot card? Did over 500 historical accounts by Medieval writers mention her? What was the strange purple marble coronation chair now housed in the Vatican Museum with a seat containing an opening rather like a toilet really used for? Did Bernini sculpt images of a female Pope? Could Bocaccio really have believed the account he gives in a book about famous women of a female pope disguised as a man who gives birth during a procession and is stoned to death?

We may never know unless we take a page out of Crichton's book and can one day send chrononauts back to the 9th century.

Click the link to hear an interesting snippet. Read the novel. You'll be intrigued or perhaps, repelled! Imagine that! Truth may indeed be stranger than fiction.