Sarah Maitland is one of a group of feminist writers that many were challenged and changed by from the 1970s onwards. There were many like her, and it is painful to omit from this selection Michèle Roberts, Michelene Wandor, Kathy Acker and others.

In this story a thirteenth century legend about a female pope who gets pregnant is rendered as a dream book and infused with contemporary disquiet about rape and gender injustice. Papess Joan’s longlasting subterfuge is about to come to an end.

“People are so blind about the improbable. His holiness is sick every morning, faints sometimes in the council, has started to put on weight, weeps when he blesses children, gives charity to poor mothers suddenly, although he never did until a few months ago; But they don’t seem to guess. What will I do with the child? What will I do? What will I do?”

In her fourth dream she resolves to return to England with the child and live communally with women, in a convent. In her last she gives birth and is stoned to death.

Jolas may have accepted it as paramyth. It’s a work that I think Walter Benjamin would have applauded, a flash of recognition across seven hundred years, as if the past and present are being illuminated and connected by the flashbulb of a camera, creating what he called a dialectical image.

But there’s a problem. Does it also forward us a warning about negative identification, one that is contentious today?  Possibly. Consider this from the first dream:

“I said to Meggie ‘I don’t want a husband. I want to be a man.’ And Meggie said, ‘Why Joan? They don’t know ANYTHING. They can’t do anything.’ But I thought I wanted it just the same. I wanted to be anything I wasn’t and I still do; now I am not Joan anymore and cannot find myself, I want, O how I want, to be Joan.”

This happens a lot when you return to stories that in their time were transformative.

First published in Hecate: A Women’s Interdisciplinary Journal, 9, 1983. Collected in Telling Tales, The Journeyman Press, 1983