Review of Pope Joan by Donna Woolfolk Cross

This book is regarded as the most important feminist manifesto. We are speaking about Pope Joan, the best seller (buy here) written by the famous American novelist Donna Woolfolk Cross. Pope Joan is a fiction, but also an historical novel. In this book there is all that readers want: intrigue, love, sex and above all, the overwhelming life of a woman, Joanne, who fought for all her life to have the same rights of men. Joanna, indeed, was born in the Middle Age, namely in 814, an epoch where women were considered less than nothing or needless things and not worthy to be educated. Joan, instead, is a smart girl hungry for knowledge.   This smart woman decides to disguise herself like a man and use the name of his brother Joan killed by Vikings. Thanks to this disguising, Johanna may study art and science, even though she always studies secretly thanks to help of another man, a priest, or rather, a monk. Torn between the love for a man and the passion for books, Johanna chooses the latter, leaves her poor country and always disguised like a monk, she lives inside a Benedictine abbey. Later, Joanna, disguised as a monk, arrives in Rome, where no-one knows and suspects she is a woman. Years of reading and study have enriched knowledge of Joanna so much that the woman gets a career in the Vatican and is appointed pope with the name of Pope Joan. The woman has served as Pope for two years. Meanwhile, she meets back her old boyfriend and lives an intense and secret love story with him up to getting pregnant. Her pregnancy and real identity are discovered during the last procession of Easter. Her loved partner is killed, while Joanna is abandoned dying on the ground. Ever since, her name, her history and the one of Pope Joan have been erased by Vatican libraries and other Christian records. The novel of Pope Joan embraces history and legend, by developing a touching plot made of social denounce against the violence and injustice women endured during the centuries. Pope Joan is an ancient and modern book at the same time, because its meaning is eternal and sounds like a warning against the temptation to treat women without respect. In Pope Joan, the emotional strain is so high that the German director and producer Sönke Wortmann made a filmin 2009 just titled Pope Joan. The book was instead released in 1996 by Random House and in 1997 by Ballantine Books.  Today, the author, Donna Woolfolk Cross is working on another compelling novel set in XVII century. It is important to say that this skilled novelist also teaches creative writing at a college in New York. To write Pope Joan, Donna Woolfolk Cross has also deepened many sources and took seven years before to write the book. Indeed, it seems Pope Joan is a really existed person, but since the story was deleted by the religious authorities in the Middle Age, today there are no reliable sources confirming the life of a female Pope. This news is much important for aspiring authors who love to write historical novels: never writing before knowing the facts!