Short Fantasy Story Review – David V Barrett – The Tale Of Pope Joan

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Robinson’s Press – 2015 The abiding legend of Pope Joan is often reinvented though it has no basis in facts or history. It claims that in the mid-9th century a Catholic Pope proved to be a woman disguised as a man when her waters broke and she ended up delivering her baby in St. Peter’s Square before she and her infant were torn apart by angry outraged onlookers. The tragedy was turned into a play by George Bernard Shaw. Barrett’s variation on the theme makes Joan a benign shape-shifter, though her origin is unstated. She is naturally a female but adapting a male persona to access literary texts in the Vatican that would be denied to women. Will her unique nature and her own people save her or her baby from the fate normally described? What of her male lover? It is an intriguing slice of alternate history but many questions are left unanswered. Arthur Chappell