Pope Joan - Donna Woolfolk Cross

Written by Donna Woolfolk Cross
Read by Barbara Rosenbat
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
Release date: February 22, 2010
Duration: 19:23:52

Set in the brutal Dark Ages, a time when women were viewed as the root of sin, this novel tells the remarkable tale of one of history’s greatest controversies.

Denied the priesthood by society’s rules, young Joan seizes her opportunity to join a monastery when she assumes her murdered brother’s identity and takes the name John Anglicus. Putting her brilliant mind to good use, she excels as a scholar and healer. Joan eventually finds her way to Rome, where the lures of passion and politics threaten to expose her secret. But Joan rises above even these obstacles to achieve the pinnacle of Catholic power-the Papacy.

Publishers Weekly—
“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…. 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.”

“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.”– AudioFile