Nevertheless, readers who argued this point are probably right. Most experts believe that horned helmets were used for ceremonial, not martial, purposes. The most persuasive argument I read was that of one scholar who pointed out that a horned helmet would be a serious disadvantage in battle, for it provided a foe with a convenient handhold to steady you as he slit your throat!
I admit I had trouble letting go of this one, for horned Viking helmets are ingrained in popular imagination. Hagar the Horrible will never be the same for me! But I decided to come down on the side of historical realism, so in this edition the Viking attackers of Dorstadt do not wear horned helmets.
3. Change in Gerold’s age. Some astute readers did the math and realized that Gerold must have fathered Gisla when he was only twelve years old—and naturally they found this puzzling. Boys of that age today are considered children.
Certainly twelve was very young for fathering, even in the ninth century. But back then twelve-year-old boys were considered young adults. They could marry, have children, ride to war, and die in battle alongside their elders. And many did.
However, in consideration of reader sensibilities, Gerold is three years older in this new edition. This was an easy change to effect, for Gerold is an entirely fictional character, born of the need to account for Joan’s death in childbirth, attested to in hundreds of chronicle records.
4. Excision of boiled corn in the meal Joan’s family serves to Aesculapius. Many readers have been troubled by the use of corn in a novel about ninth-century Europe, believing that it is a New World food. But I took the description of this particular meal right off the pages of a ninth-century manuscript. Here’s where the problem arises: Corn is an ancient word, used generically to mean grain or seed. What we call corn is actually maize—a New World crop. Over time, the two words have become confused.
Though not a historical error, the use of the word corn was a poor writer’s choice. Why create doubt in the minds of readers? So in this edition, the family sits down to a meal of boiled barley-corn.
I did make some adjustments in the interest of telling a good story. I needed a Viking raid on Dorstadt in the year 828, although it didn’t actually take place until 834. Similarly, I had Emperor Lothar descend twice upon Rome to chastise the Pope, though in fact he actually dispatched his son Louis, King of Italy, to do the job for him the first time. The bodies of Ss. Marcellinus and Peter were stolen from their graves in 827, not 855; John the Antipope, Sergius’s predecessor, was not killed after his deposition but merely imprisoned and then banished. Anastasius died in 878, not 897. These deliberate errata are, I trust, exceptions; on the whole I tried to be historically accurate.
Some things described in Pope Joan may seem shocking from our perspective, but they did not seem so to the people of the day. The collapse of the Roman Empire and the resulting breakdown of law and order led to an era of almost unprecedented barbarism and violence. As one contemporary chronicler lamented, it was “a sword age, a wind age, a wolf age.” The population of Europe had been almost halved by a disastrous series of famines, plagues, civil wars, and “barbarian” invasions. The average life expectancy was very short: less than a quarter of the population ever reached their fifties. There were no longer any real cities; the largest towns had no more than two to three thousand inhabitants. The Roman roads had fallen into decay, the bridges on which they depended disappeared.
The social and economic order which we now call feudalism had not yet begun. Europe was as yet one country: Germany did not exist as a separate nation, nor did France, or Spain, or Italy. The Romance languages had not yet evolved from their parent Latin; there were no French or Spanish or Italian languages, only a variety of forms of degenerating Latin and a host of local patois. The ninth century marked, in short, a society in transition from one form of civilization, long dead, to another not yet born—with all the ferment and unrest that this implies.
Life in these troubled times was especially difficult for women. It was a misogynistic age, informed by the antifemale diatribes of church fathers such as St. Paul and Tertullian:
And do you not know that you are Eve? … You are the gate of the devil, the traitor of the tree, the first deserter of Divine Law; you are she who enticed the one whom the devil dare not approach … on account of the death you deserved even the Son of God had to die.
Menstrual blood was believed to turn wine sour, make crops barren, take the edge off steel, make iron rust, and infect dog bites with an incurable poison. With few exceptions, women were treated as perpetual minors, with no legal or property rights. By law, they could be beaten by their husbands. Rape was treated as a form of minor theft. The education of women was discouraged, for a learned woman was considered not only unnatural but dangerous.
Small wonder, then, if a woman chose to disguise herself as a man in order to escape such an existence. Apart from Joan, there are other women who successfully managed the imposture. In the third century, Eugenia, daughter of the Prefect of Alexandria, entered a monastery disguised as a man and eventually rose to the office of abbot. Her disguise went undetected until she was forced to reveal her sex as a last resort to refute the accusation of having deflowered a virgin. In the twelfth century, St. Hildegund, using the name Joseph, became a brother of Schönau Abbey and lived undiscovered among the brethen until her death many years later.*2
The light of hope kindled by such women shone only flickeringly in a great darkness, but it was never entirely to go out. Opportunities were available for women strong enough to dream. Pope Joan is the story of one of those dreamers.
*1Two of the strongest material proofs against Joan’s papacy are predicated on the assumption that Leo IV died in 855. (1) A coin bearing the name of Pope Benedict on one side and Emperor Lothar on the other. Since Lothar died on September z8, 855, and the coin shows Benedict and Lothar alive together, Benedict could obviously not have assumed the throne later than 855. (2) A decretal written on October 7, 855, by Pope Benedict confirming the privileges of the monastery of Corbie, again indicating that he was at that time in possession of the throne. But these “proofs” are rendered meaningless if Leo died in 853 (or even 854), for then there was time for Joan’s reign before Benedict assumed the throne in 855.
*2There are other, more modern examples of women who have successfully passed themselves off as men, including Mary Reade, who lived as a pirate in the early eighteenth century; Hannah Snell, a soldier and sailor in the British navy; a nineteenth-century woman whose real name is unknown to us but who, under the name of James Barry, rose to the rank of full inspector-general of British hospitals; and Loreta Janeta Velaquez, who fought for the Confederate side at the Battle of Bull Run under the name Harry Buford. Teresinha Gomes of Lisbon spent eighteen years pretending to be a man; a highly decorated soldier, she rose to the rank of general in the Portuguese army and was discovered only in 1994, when she was arrested on charges of financial fraud and forced by the police to undergo a physical exam. In 2006, Norah Vincent published her book Self-Made Man, in which she describes the year she spent in male disguise, during which time she spent three months in a monastery with her true identity completely undetected.
A Reader’s Guide
FOR many years, I’ve been joining the conversation with reading groups by speakerphone.*1 Some questions come up very frequently. To these FAQs, I provide answers below. Afterward, I include a list of questions to which even I don’t know the answer, but which lead to lively and productive book group discussion—the “best of the best” based on my years of experience chatting with reading groups.
Q: Why did you write this novel?
A: Having written four nonfiction books, I wanted to switch to historical fiction—my favorite form of leisure reading. When I stumbled across Joan’s story in a piece of chance reading, I knew I had found my subject. What an extraordinary lost mystery-legend of history, documented even better than King Arthur’s! How was it possible that I had never even heard of her?
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The more I learned about Joan, the more I liked her. To me, she’s an inspiring example of female empowerment through learning—an issue deeply relevant in today’s world, where women in many countries are still discouraged, or even prevented, from going to school. I had my own daughter very much in mind as I wrote this novel. I hope that Joan’s story inspires young women to pursue their education so they can have full exercise of mind, heart, and spirit.
Q: Are you Catholic?
A: No. Oddly, this turned out to have an unexpected advantage. Were I Catholic, raised in the traditions, rituals, and theology of today’s Church, I would have approached ninth-century Christian faith with a lot of very wrong preconceptions. In my novel I have tried to show the many ways in which the worship of a thousand years ago differed from our own. If there’s one thing that the study of history teaches us, it is that yesterday’s heresies are often today’s truths—and vice versa.
Q: What response has the book had from the Vatican?
A: None. And that’s only to be expected. In today’s world, controversy sells things. If the Vatican denounced my novel, the very next day it would probably be on the New York Times bestseller list.
The best way to bury any story is to ignore it—as Joan’s millennium-old story proves.
Q: Why did you choose that ending for Pope Joan?
A: I didn’t. The historical records on Joan are nearly unanimous in saying that she died in childbirth while in papal procession on the Via Sacra. This ending is also supported by the centuries-old tradition of the “shunned street” (described in the author’s note).
If Joan had died behind the walls of the papal palace, no one would ever have known that she was a female. For that to become known, her death had to be public.
Q: Why is there such brutality in the novel—for example, the rape of Gisla during the Viking attack on Dorstadt?
A: The question implies that I intensified the savagery of life in the ninth century in the interest of sensational storytelling. The truth is that I took it easy on readers; life in the ninth century was far more brutal and unjust than anything depicted in my novel.
Recent and continuing world events reveal that crimes against humanity are not relegated only to history. Upsetting as reading about such things can be, my feeling is this: if people, past and present, can endure such terrible things, then the least we can do is bear witness. I see no advantage whatsoever to “cleaning up” history. As George Santayana said, “Those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it.”
“Best of the Best” Reading Group Questions
How important is it to this story to believe in its historicity? Are there lessons to be learned from Joan’s story whether it’s legend or fact? What are they?
Francis Bacon, the seventeenth-century philosopher, said, “People believe what they prefer to be true.” How does this relate to Joan’s story compared to, say, that of King Arthur? What is it about Joan’s story that people might not “prefer to be true”?
Are reason and faith incompatible? What do you make of Aesculapius’s argument that lack of faith leads people to fear reason? What about Joan? Does her study of reason in the work of classical authors such as Lucretius diminish her faith?
Joan sacrificed much because she loved Gerold. Do you know women who have sacrificed opportunities to exercise mind, heart, and spirit for love of a man? For love of a child? Are such sacrifices justified?
What implications does Joan’s story have with regard to the role of women in the Catholic Church? Should nuns play a greater—or different—role? If so, what should that role be? Should women be priests? What effect would women priests have on the Church and its liturgy? What effect have they had on the Episcopal Church?
One reviewer wrote: “Pope Joan … is a reminder that some things never change, only the stage and the players do.” Are there any similarities between the way women live in some places of the world today and the way they lived back then?
What causes any society to oppress womankind? What are the root causes of misogyny? Are they based in religion or in society? Both? Neither?
Why might medieval society have believed so strongly that education hampered a woman’s ability to bear children? What purpose might such a belief serve?
What similarities or differences do you see between Pope Joan and Saint Joan of Arc? Why was one Joan expunged from history books and the other made a saint?
If Joan had agreed to leave with Gerold when he first came to Rome, what would her life have been like? Did she make the right choice or not?
What causes Joan’s inner conflict between faith and doubt? How do these conflicts affect the decisions she makes? Does she ever resolve these conflicts?
*1Reading groups interested in setting up a “Chat with the Author” should go to popejoan.com for information or to make a request.
About the Author
A New York City native, DONNA WOOLFOLK CROSS graduated cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Pennsylvania in 1969 with a B.A. in English. She moved to London, England, after graduation and worked in a small publishing house on Fleet Street, W. H. Allen and Company. Upon her return to the United States, Cross worked at Young and Rubicam, a Madison Avenue advertising firm, before going on to graduate school at UCLA where she earned a master’s degree in literature and writing in 1972.
In 1973, Cross moved to Upstate New York and began teaching writing at an upstate New York college. She is the author of two books on language, Word Abuse and Mediaspeak, and coauthor of the college textbook Speaking of Words. The product of seven years of research and writing, Pope Joan is her first novel. Cross is at work on a new novel set in seventeenth-century France.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1996, 2009 by Donna Woolfolk Cross
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cross, Donna Woolfolk.
Pope Joan/Donna Cross.—1st Three Rivers Press ed.
Originally published: New York: Crown, © 1996.
1. Joan (Legendary Pope)—Fiction. 2. Popes—Legends—
Fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.R572P66 2009
813’.6—dc22 2008051919
eISBN: 978-0-307-45319-8
v3.0
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Epilogue
Author’s Note
A Reader’s Guide
About the Author
Copyright
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