Word: obscurest
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...dawn of the papacy, Kelly repeatedly confesses, is too shadowy for even the most intrepid scholar. Of St. Evaristus (c.100-c.109), for example, he says, "Nothing is in fact reliably known about him." St. Felix I (269-74) "is one of the obscurest Popes, even his dates being conjectural." Then there was Pope Joan, whose entire existence is conjectural. Kelly dutifully traces the oftretold legend of a disguised woman Pope (who was found out when she gave birth while trying to mount a horse) to a 13th century work called the Universal Chronicle of Metz. The only Pope who never existed...
...fable, is a South African of unspecified color. A gardener in a Cape Town public park, he has a harelip and a reputation for feeblemindedness that mask his true nature: he is a man as meek and lowly in heart as a latter-day Messiah. Coetzee calls him "the obscurest of the obscure, so obscure as to be a prodigy." As his life and times unfold, it becomes clear that his prodigiousness lies in his ability to continue to celebrate life in the midst of the most malignant chaos...