Pope Joan

About “Pope Joan”

Pope Joan is a 1996 novel by Donna Woolfolk Cross. It animates the legend of a woman who, for a thousand years, men have denied existed, disguising herself as a man and rising to rule Christianity for two years. When her older brother dies in a Viking attack, young Joan assumes his identity and enters a Benedictine monastery as Brother John Anglicus, later becoming enmeshed in powerful passion and politics in Rome.