THE legend of Pope Joan — the woman said to have held the papacy from 855 to 857 — began circulating in the 13th century, and gained widespread currency throughout Europe. Most (though not all) modern scholars now regard it as fiction. But it is a story that has inspired retellings in novels, plays, and films.
The latest of these is Rapture, by the Australian novelist Emily Maguire (Books, 28 March). It is her seventh book in a career scattered with awards (her 2016 novel An Isolated Incident was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and her 2022 book Love Objects was shortlisted for the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year).
“I came across the story that there had been a female pope at least a decade ago, and I immediately thought, I really want to write this. And I started playing around with how I would do that,” she says now.
“But I got so intimidated. It just seemed very, very difficult. I’m not a historical novelist. I’m not a medievalist. And so I put it aside.”
Instead, she wrote other books. When her last book — Love Objects, a thoroughly contemporary novel — was with her editor, Covid struck. “We went into lockdown here in Sydney, and I was due to start writing something else. I have this big file of ideas on my computer, and I just didn’t want to write anything set in the here-and-now because [the pandemic] was the worst kind of terrible.
“And then I saw these notes that I made all those years ago, and I thought, I think I can tackle this now. As soon as I started, it just felt right.”
The book came out in Australia in October, and was published in the UK last month. It has been enthusiastically received: reviewers have described it as “brilliant”, “astonishing”, and “spectacular”. How did she set about the project?
“I read some really general histories of the era in Western Europe, just to get my head around the big-picture stuff, and then I would start writing a scene and realise what I needed to know as I wrote it,” she says. “Sometimes, it would be really big, complicated things about how the monastery worked, and sometimes it would be, what is a cup? what is a chair? I made a list, as I wrote, and I would then start the next writing session doing a bit of that research.”
Covid restrictions meant there was no chance of travel to Europe. Fortunately, most of the research could be done online; and, in the later stages of writing, Maguire was awarded a fellowship to the Australian National University in Canberra, “where they had a much better library than I’d been able to access, particularly in terms of medieval texts, and also a few academics that I could check some things with”.
Why does she think the legend of St Joan inspires so much retelling? “I read as many of the versions as I could access, and it’s so interesting that it’s almost always being told with a very specific [misogynistic] agenda. Even when you take that away, there is something about the story itself that is just compelling, that’s just a really good story. For me, that was my attraction to it, without any thoughts in those early stages of what it meant about anything, about the Church, or whatever.
“It’s a trickster narrative, right? Someone getting away with something, over people who are more powerful. For me, personally, my whole career, I’ve been writing about identity and patriarchy and sex and all of these things.”
When she has spoken about Pope Joan to Australian audiences, she has found a 50-50 split in those who are aware of the legend. “I find that most of [those who have] are ’70s and ’80s feminists, because there was this feminist rediscovery, and Caryl Churchill’s [1982] play, and some other texts at the time: a sort of reclaiming of the figure of Pope Joan. Most of the representations before that have been so frankly misogynist, even if their main purpose was to attack the Church in one way or the other.”
The people who hadn’t previously heard of Pope Joan want it be true, she says. “A lot of the conversations have been around this idea of knowing your calling, or having a sense of confidence and conviction about it . . . This is something that was so appealing to me, writing it, and so I’m not surprised it’s been appealing to a lot of readers.”
Does she have a view whether Pope Joan existed? “I’m agnostic,” she says. “I think, on the balance of probabilities, no; but I would really like to believe it, and I do think that a lot of the texts that I drew on for inspiration were stories of, for example, female saints who had gone in disguise into monasteries, and only as they died was it discovered.”
These stories, though unprovable, suggest that such a possibility is plausible, she argues.
Maguire’s Joan — called Agnes at birth — is a richly drawn character, with a fervent faith in God and a thirst for learning. She draws inspiration in the natural world, and enjoys a brilliant teaching ministry. She is only reluctantly drawn to Rome. “That was important to me,” Maguire says. “Once I got into the writing of it, it was all about the character. I had the big, broad strokes of the story that I wanted to stick to, in terms of the legend, but I had to create the character from the ground up, really. The set of questions were all about: if this were true, what kind of woman would she have to be?”
She could have created an “incredibly ambitious” Agnes, she says. Instead, she asked herself how it would feel for anyone to be the first woman to take a particular route. “How do you filter out all those messages about whether someone who looks like you, or is in this body, can’t do this? And the obvious answer, in this case, is actual conviction that God wants this, and is drawing her on.”
WHILE Rapture is certainly a departure in genre, she says that she tried to see it as “like any other novel” while writing it. Her job was to “sink deep into my main character, and describe the world as she experiences it”.
And the themes that she tackles in the novel are same themes — about the lives of girls and women — that she has always explored. “It’s pretty basic stuff, but it is that kind of ‘how to live’ question. This particular story, with the creation of Agnes, is something that took me right back to myself as a kind of baby feminist when I first started engaging in that in my twenties.” She was raised with the idea that the battle for equality had been won.
“It was genuinely surprising to me when I first started confronting sexism,” she goes on. “Unlike some of those saints, in those saints’ lives that she reads, Agnes doesn’t reject her body or her femaleness. It’s something that she is forced to cover so that she can do what she feels called to do in the world. And that does bring me back to the really early sort of embracing of feminism. I wish I didn’t have to speak on the panels that are about women’s experience. I wish I didn’t have to say I’m a female writer, not because there’s anything bad about being female or a woman, but because I just want to do the work that I’m called to do.”
Rapture is not, however, the first book she has written which portrays religious faith. Her 2019 novel The Gospel According to Luke explores the fraught relationship between Aggie, a sexual-health counsellor, and Luke, a charismatic and idealistic pastor, when a clash of deep-held convictions flares up into something more dangerous.
She comes from a Uniting Church background. “I grew up in in what I understand now is an intensely religious family — not in any fundamentalist or separatist way, but just in that everyone we knew was Christian. Both my parents worked for the church or in church-affiliated roles, and all our social circle were church friends. Outside of Sunday school and church, I went to Bible camp.”
In her twenties (she is now 48), Maguire lost her faith. “It’s a two-part story. I became what I now think of as an intellectual atheist in my twenties, when I started really reading history and religious history, and I was pretty strident about that. And then I had a stroke, a medical thing, in my late twenties. And, after that, I fully felt that there was nothing there, because I prayed and I prayed, and nothing happened . . . It was very frightening.”
More recently, though, things have changed. “Not just through writing this book — although it’s had an influence — I have moved towards a position of, ‘Actually, I really don’t know, and that’s OK.’ I feel pretty good about that now. I know so many really smart, thoughtful people who are people of faith, and I don’t have the arrogance of my twenties to think, well, they just don’t understand, and I know.”
“Agnostic” feels too harsh a description, she says, for the openness that she feels. She also has a great deal of respect for the values of her upbringing, and particularly in looking out for the underdog. “These really were the values of my family and our community. It was very Jesus-based.” This is not something that she sees reflected everywhere — in the United States, for example — and she remains “really thankful for those values that I was raised with”.
Has her move away been difficult within her family? “Not as much as I feared that it would have been. All my family, my parents and my siblings, they have all had their own journey with this stuff. So, none of us are where we were 30 or 40 years ago. It is something that we can talk about fairly openly.”
Her appreciation of belief is part of what makes the character of Agnes compelling. Maguire talks of her ongoing experience of wonder and awe. “That’s something in my forties that I’ve really found that I’ve opened up to the natural world. . . Growing up, that all would have been thanks to God. And now I can find scientific explanations for a sunset, for example, but there’s still something there that is inexplicable. Part of that is the feeling that we almost universally have around these things.
“To be able to write Agnes, who had a more straightforward answer, which I once did, too, was lovely. But what I hope, and it has seemed true with the reception that [the book] has had, is that people of faith and people of no faith can relate to how that feels.”
Will she continue exploring questions of faith in her work? “I’m a bit reluctant to talk about what I’m working on now. It’s just very early. But no, I’m not done with this religious question. The question of faith is very much intertwined with the question of what is the right way to live. And that’s talking about ethics and morality, but also things like power . . . all of those big things I have written about for a long time.”
Rapture by Emily Maguire is published by Sceptre at £16.99 (Church Times Bookshop £15.29); 978-1-3997-3106-5.