According to popular legend, there was once a female Pope – Pope Joan, who reigned for two years between 855 and 857 before coming to a very sticky end. If you’ve never heard of her, it’s hardly surprising as her existence has been questioned for centuries and her name wiped from official history. It seems however, that Pope Joan couldn’t be so easily buried and her legacy is still as ripe for the imagination as it was a millennia ago, inspiring novelists, historians and movie-makers. So is this story of a woman, clever and talented enough to infiltrate, deceive and rise to the top of the exclusively masculine club that is the Papacy, true? Or was it a fable created with the intention to ridicule and discredit the Catholic church by its enemies? Alternatively, could it merely have been a moral tale, warning all ambitious Medieval women to ‘know their place’?
There are various versions of Pope Joan’s life but most present her as a precocious and educated woman who disguised herself as a man (often at the behest of a lover) and rose through the ranks due to her astounding abilities to ultimately be elected Pope. Her sex was irrefutably revealed in a way that even the best spin doctors couldn’t deny, when she gave birth to her lover’s child on the street during a procession, dying shortly afterwards.
Many accounts agree that later church processions avoided the spot where Joan gave birth (and died) and that ensuing popes had to undergo an examination of their manhood to prevent history from repeating itself (more on this later).
Jean de Mailly, a Dominican chronicler, was the first to write of a female Pope circa 1250. He places her at the very end of the twelfth century and despite the woman in question being unnamed, his story is not lacking in detail:
‘Concerning a Pope or rather female Pope, who is not set down in the list of Popes or Bishops of Rome, because she was a woman who disguised herself as a man and became, by her character and talents, a curial secretary, a Cardinal and finally Pope. One day, while mounting a horse, she gave birth to a child. Immediately, by Roman justice she was bound by the feet to a horse’s tail and dragged and stoned by the people for half a league, and where she died, there she was buried, and at the place is written: “Petre, Pater Patrum, Papisse Prodito Partum” [Oh Peter, Father of Fathers, Betray the childbearing of the woman Pope].’
(Jean de Mailly, Chronica Universalis Mettensis)
He also claims that a four-day fast called the “fast of the female Pope” was established at this time.
The story seems to have knocked about for a few years after this, but it gained gravitas when included in the third edition of Martin of Opava’s Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatorum later in the thirteenth century. Opava attaches the name John Anglicus or John of Mainz to the Pope and rewinds from the eleventh to the ninth century, indicating that Joan reigned between Pope Leo IV and Pope Benedict III in the 850s:
‘John Anglicus, born at Mainz, was Pope for two years seven months and four days and died in Rome, after which there was a vacancy in the Papacy of one month. It is claimed that this John was a woman, who as a girl had been led to Athens dressed in the clothes of a man by a certain lover of hers. There she became proficient in a diversity of branches of knowledge, until she had no equal, and, afterward in Rome, she taught the liberal arts and had great masters among her students and audience. A high opinion of her life and learning arose in the city; and she was chosen for Pope. While Pope, however, she became pregnant by her companion. Through ignorance of the exact time when the birth was expected, she was delivered of a child while in procession from St. Peter’s to the Lateran, in a lane once named Via Sacra (the sacred way) but now known as the “shunned street” between the Colosseum and St Clement’s church. After her death, it is said she was buried in that same place. The Lord Pope always turns aside from the street, and it is believed by many that this is done because of abhorrence of the event. Nor is she placed on the list of the Holy Pontiffs, both because of her female sex and on account of the foulness of the matter.’
— Martin of Opava, Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatorum (Wikipedia)
One version of the story is marginally kinder to Pope Joan, leaving her not dead, but confined, removed from the papacy and spending years in penance, her child eventually becoming Bishop of Ostia.
The shock of discovering the Pope to be female, according to multiple narrators, meant that future Popes had to tackle the “problem” and prevent a recurrence. This reportedly resulted in a ritual subsequent Popes had to endure, proving their manhood, by literally having their tackle examined. It is said that prospective Popes sat on a sedia stercoraria, a chair with a hole in the middle rather like a toilet, or more appropriately considering Joan’s story, a birthing stool, while a Cardinal had the job of reaching up to establish a new Pope had testicles. Upon success, the Cardinal declared “Duas habet et bene pendentes” (He has them and they dangle nicely). If this has aroused your curiosity, sedia stercoraria seats can be found today in both the Vatican Museum and The Louvre.
It seems that from the thirteenth century onwards, the legend of Joan abounded and was widely believed in ecclesiastic circles. Her tale was used as a warning in Dominican preaching and in 1479, Bartolomeo Platina, scholar and prefect of the Vatican Library, included her in a history he wrote for Pope Sixtus IV. By the fifteenth century, her story had been translated into German, a statue, said to be of her (now called Agnes) stood in Rome and her remains, reportedly buried in St Peters, were listed as an essential point of interest in a travel guide for pilgrims to Rome. During the same century, a series of busts were sculpted for the Duomo of Sienna included Joan (Johannes VIII) between Leo IV and Benedict III.
Her fame probably reached its zenith in the 1415 trial of Jan Hus, a popular protestant preacher, who argued that the church no longer needed a Pope because during the pontificate of “Pope Agnes”, it got on just fine. The jury may have disagreed with him in principle, but notably none argued against her existence.
Sadly, the Reformation successfully demolished all evidence for our Joan’s existence. Scholars noted that there were no authentic references to her prior to the thirteenth century; any earlier mentions were inserted into previously written manuscripts as footnotes and by different hands. They questioned why chroniclers waited two hundred years to pen her story and her legend quickly unravelled. In 1601, Pope Clement VIII declared the story untrue and references to her bust disappear around the same time, indicating it was destroyed, relabelled or replaced. Another sixteenth century historian, Onofrio Panvinio suggested that the legend may have evolved from the historical figure Pope John XII who had a mistress in Rome called -you guessed it- Joan; a woman said to have perhaps become too influential and in need of taking down a peg or two.
Protestant writers really went to town with Pope Joan throughout the Reformation, her story proving a useful tool in their anti-Catholic rhetoric. At the same time, the English writer Alexander Cooke wrote Pope Joane: A Dialogue Between a Protestant and a Papist which, in case the reader was left with any doubt as to the author’s opinion, was reprinted in 1675 with the catchy title: A Present for a Papist: Or the Life and Death of Pope Joan, Plainly Proving Out of the Printed Copies, and Manscriptes of Popish Writers and Others, That a Woman called Joan, Was Really Pope of Rome, and Was There Deliver’d of a Bastard Son in the Open Street as She Went in Solemn Procession. Still unsure? The detailed engravings, in which the baby looks more surprised than anyone to find itself on the street, explained everything. As an aside, many of these images from the middle ages show alarming inaccuracies around anatomy and childbirth.
Today, the majority of scholars dismiss Pope Joan as a medieval legend. The Oxford Dictionary of Popes states ‘there is no contemporary evidence for a female Pope at any of the dates suggested for her reign’ and the 1910 Catholic Encyclopaedia agrees:
‘Between Leo IV and Benedict III […] she cannot be inserted, because Leo IV died 17 July 855, and immediately after his death Benedict III was elected by the clergy and people of Rome […] All these witnesses prove the correctness of the dates given […] and there was no interregnum between these two Popes.’
Perhaps most damning to the authenticity of her story is that enemies of the papacy during the ninth century fail to mention her, when the audacity of a female Pope in situ would have been priceless media fodder. Even though historical evidence proves that Popes from the thirteenth century did indeed avoid the place in which Joan is said to have delivered her child, none can be found to support this practice occurring any earlier, indicating that it might simply have happened as a result of the widespread belief of the legend at that time. Philip Jenkins, professor of history at Baylor University, US, suggests this “anti-papal legend” as he calls it, tells us more about ‘feminist and anti-Catholic wishful thinking than historical accuracy’.
The fact remains however, that the love affair with Pope Joan and her legacy continues. The nineteenth century saw a run of plays and a novel depicting her story, which continued into the twentieth with Lawrence Durrell’s translation of it. Movies called Pope Joan were released in 1972 and 2009, and as recently as 2016 she was referenced in the video game Persona 5 while in 2019 a theatrical show was staged in Malta. Fact or fiction? Either way, her tale tells a sad story of a woman who was intelligent and determined yet, in the opinion of her contemporaries, climbed too high; unfortunately, a situation that too many women can still relate to.
