Joan was the beautiful wife of Felix de Guzman. Together, they had four children. When she was pregnant with the youngest, she had a dream that she was carrying a dog in her womb, and that the dog would carry a torch in its mouth and set fire to the whole world. Not in the picture on the left, the Poky Little Pyro Puppy has his paw on the globe.
That's a pretty disturbing dream, but she handled it. The boy, named Dominic, was not thrown down a well or sold to gypsies. (Oh, don't pretend that you wouldn't dump a kid like toxic waste after a dream like that.) Instead, he was raised in the same loving, religiously imbued home that led his oldest brother to be a priest. He himself became an Augustinian friar, but then went on to found the Order of Friars Preachers, which is commonly known by his name -- the Dominicans.
Joan died in AD 1190 and her cult sprang up immediately, but it was not until 1828 that she was formally beatified.
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