You may have heard about this story of a woman who, disguised as a man, rose to the rank of Pope in the 800s. Then died or was killed after giving birth during a procession to a church in Rome. Of course the story was suppressed & Joan (or John as she was known) was removed from the list of Popes.
A bit of background here; it was very crappy to be a woman in this time period (in a lot of them actually) but during this era known by many as the Dark Ages (some prefer Early Middle Ages) women were treated worse than animals. Their husbands or fathers could beat them & rape was considered a minor theft. The belief was that the size of a woman's brain & uterus were directly proportional, the more that a woman learned & the bigger her brain got, the smaller her uterus got and then she couldn't have any children. The use of medicines was viewed as witchcraft, especially if administered by women. Any knowledge from the Greeks was dismissed because it came from "heathens." bathing was almost unheard of, bloodletting was a popular cure & prayer the answer to almost anything. To quote Daniel in the SG-1 episode Demons; well, they didn't call them the Dark Ages because it was dark.
Some would argue that there were some bright spots during this time. It's like the night sky, there's some stars & sometime the moon shines, but let's face it, it's dark.

Anyway, this is an interesting take on the whole, most likely, fictional tale of "Pope Joan."

BTW Netflix has a documentary called The Dark Ages, which I recommend.

Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed With Time by Simon Garfield was one of those serandipitous library finds where you've seen and resisted a recently published in paperback book in the bookshop and then spot it on the library shelf the following week. Like a reward for good behaviour. I try to avoid buying pop science books because, as much as I enjoy them, I tend to only read them once. It's an interesting and highly engaging read if you're at all interested in time and the history of the human interest/obsession with it. Given the subtitle, you'd be forgiven for expecting the book to be an inditement of modern time fixation, but while there is a little of that, it's more about time obsession as much more enduring element of the human condition. Providing historical context and looking at the whole situation from a wider, more nuanced and less rigidly condemnatory perspective. As an anxious person obsessed with lists and fascinated by mechanics, I am pretty much the book's target market and as such I enjoyed it greatly. Few things are more reassuring than the perspective provided by other people's obsessions.

My review for Nebula finalist Autonomous, by Annalee Newitz, can be found here.