The Afterlife of Pope Joan - Deploying the Popess Legend in Early Modern England

Craig M. Rustici

University of Michigan Press

2006

209 páginas

6h 58m

ISBN-10: 0472115448

Amid the religious tumult of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English scholars, preacher, and dramatists examined, debated, and refashioned tales concerning Pope Joan, a ninth-century woman who, as legend has it, cross-dressed her way to the papacy only to have her imposture exposed when she gave birth during a solemn procession. The Afterlife of Pope Joan draws upon the discourses of religion, politics, natural philosophy, and imaginative literature, demonstrating how the popess functioned as a powerful rhetorical instrument and revealing anxieties and ambivalences about gender roles that persist even today.