Hadrian the Seventh (Summarized Edition)

First published in 1904, Hadrian the Seventh imagines the thwarted Englishman George Arthur Rose unexpectedly elected pope and, as Hadrian VII, reforming Church and world with dazzling audacity. Rolfe's baroque, liturgy-saturated prose fuses satire, revenge fantasy, and punctilious canon-law detail. The novel stands between fin-de-siècle decadence and early modernism, anticipating autofiction and ...