Pope Joan (; 855–857) was a woman who purportedly reigned as popess (female pope) for two years during the Middle Ages.The span is given as 855–857; see also quotes from "The Register of Bishop Trefnan" in The Trial of Walter Brut of 1391 in Blamires, p. 259. Her story first appeared in chronicles in the 13th century and subsequently spread throughout Europe. The story was widely believed for centuries, but most modern scholars regard it as fictional.
Most versions of her story describe her as a talented and learned woman who disguised herself as a man, often at the behest of a lover. In the most common accounts, owing to her abilities she rose through the church hierarchy and was eventually elected pope. Her sex was revealed when she gave birth during a procession and she died shortly after, either through murder or natural causes. The accounts state that later church processions avoided this spot and that the Vatican removed the female pope from its official lists and crafted a ritual to ensure that future popes were male.
Pope Joan's existence was generally accepted as true until the 16th century, when several religious groups called the story into question. Until then, Joan was used as an exemplum in Dominican preaching and figured in books published in the Papal States. The Siena Cathedral, finished in 1263, featured a bust of Joan among other popes until 1600, when her depiction was repurposed into that of a male pope.
Jean de Mailly's chronicle, written around 1250, contains the first known mention of an unnamed female pope and inspired several more accounts over the next several years. The most popular and influential version is that interpolated into Martin of Opava's Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatorum later in the 13th century. Martin introduced details that the female pope's birth name was John Anglicus of Mainz, that she reigned in the 9th century and that she entered the church to follow her lover. The existence of Pope Joan was used in the defence of Walter Brut in his trial of 1391.Blamires, 250–260. Her existence was generally accepted as true until the 16th century, when a widespread debate among Catholic and Protestant writers called the story into question: various writers noted the implausibly long gap between Joan's supposed lifetime and her first appearance in texts. Protestant scholar David Blondel ultimately demonstrated the impossibility of the story in his 1647 treatise on the issue.Blondel, David, Familier esclaircissement de la question si une femme a este assise au siege papal de Rome entre Leon IV et Benoit III (Amsterdam: Blaeu, 1647); discussed in Valerie R. Hotchkiss, "The Female Pope and the Sin of Male Disguise", in Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Medieval Europe (London: Routledge, 2012), 69. . Pope Joan is now widely considered fictional, though the legend remains influential in cultural depictions.
Early mentions The earliest mention of a female pope appears in the Dominican Jean de Mailly's chronicle of Metz, Chronica Universalis Mettensis, written in the early 13th century. In his telling the female pope is not named and the events are set in 1099. According to Jean:
Jean de Mailly's story was picked up by his fellow Dominican Stephen of Bourbon, who adapted it for his work on the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost. However the legend gained its greatest prominence when it appeared in the third recension (edited revision) of Martin of Opava's Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatorum later in the 13th century. This version, which may have been by Martin himself, is the first to attach a name to the figure, indicating that she was known as John Anglicus or John of Mainz. It also changes the date from the 11th to the 9th century, indicating that Joan reigned between Leo IV and Benedict III in the 850s. According to the Chronicon:
One version of the Chronicon gives an alternative fate for the female pope: she did not die immediately after her exposure but was confined and deposed, after which she did many years of penance. Her son from the affair eventually became Bishop of Ostia and ordered her entombment in his cathedral when she died.
Other references to the female pope are attributed to earlier writers, though none appears in manuscripts that predate the Chronica. The one most commonly cited is Anastasius Bibliothecarius (d. 886), a compiler of Liber Pontificalis, who was a contemporary of the female Pope by the Chronicon'''s dating. However the story is found in only one unreliable manuscript of Anastasius. This manuscript, in the Vatican Library, bears the relevant passage inserted as a footnote at the bottom of a page. It is out of sequence and in a different hand, one that dates from after the time of Martin of Opava. This 'witness' to the female pope is likely to be based on Martin's account and not a possible source for it. The same is true of Marianus Scotus's Chronicle of the Popes, a text written in the 11th century. Some of its manuscripts contain a brief mention of a female pope named Johanna (the earliest source to attach to her the female form of the name), but all these manuscripts are later than Martin's work. Earlier manuscripts do not contain the legend.
Some versions of the legend suggest that subsequent popes were subjected to an examination whereby, having sat on a so-called sedia stercoraria or 'dung chair' containing a hole, a cardinal had to reach up and establish that the new pope had testicles before announcing "Duos habet et bene pendentes" ("He has two and they dangle nicely"), or "habet" ("he has them") for short.
There were associated legends as well. In the 1290s, the Dominican Robert of Uzès recounted a vision in which he saw the seat "where, it is said, the pope is proved to be a man". Pope Joan has been associated with marvelous happenings. Petrarch (1304–1374) wrote in his Chronica de le Vite de Pontefici et Imperadori Romani that after Pope Joan had been revealed as a woman:
However the attribution of this work to Petrarch may be incorrect.
Later development
From the mid-13th century onward the story of the female pope was widely disseminated and believed. Joan was used as an exemplum in Dominican preaching. Bartolomeo Platina, the scholar who was prefect of the Vatican Library, wrote his Vitæ Pontificum Platinæ historici liber de vita Christi ac omnium pontificum qui hactenus ducenti fuere et XX in 1479 at the behest of his patron, Pope Sixtus IV. The book contains the following account of the female Pope:
Pope John VIII: John, of English extraction, was born at Mentz (Mainz) and is said to have arrived at popedom by evil art; for disguising herself like a man, whereas she was a woman, she went when young with her paramour, a learned man, to Athens, and made such progress in learning under the professors there that, coming to Rome, she met with few that could equal, much less go beyond her, even in the knowledge of the scriptures; and by her learned and ingenious readings and disputations, she acquired so great respect and authority that upon the death of Pope Leo IV (as Martin says) by common consent she was chosen pope in his room. As she was going to the Lateran Church between the Colossean Theatre (so called from Nero's Colossus) and St. Clement's her travail came upon her, and she died upon the place, having sat two years, one month, and four days, and was buried there without any pomp. This story is vulgarly told, but by very uncertain and obscure authors, and therefore I have related it barely and in short, lest I should seem obstinate and pertinacious if I had admitted what is so generally talked. I had better mistake with the rest of the world, though it be certain, that what I have related may be thought not altogether incredible.
References to the female Pope abound in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance. Jans der Enikel (1270s) was the first to tell the story in German. Giovanni Boccaccio wrote about her in De Mulieribus Claris (1353).Ch. 99: "De Ioannae Anglica Papa", begins succinctly: "Ioannes esto Vir nomine videbature, sexu tamen fœmina fuit." The Chronicon of Adam of Usk (1404) gives her a name, Agnes, and furthermore mentions a statue in Rome that is said to be of her. This statue had never been mentioned by any earlier writer anywhere; presumably it was an actual statue that came to be taken to be of the female pope. A late-14th-century edition of the Mirabilia Urbis Romae, a guidebook for pilgrims to Rome, tells readers that the female Pope's remains are buried at St. Peter's. It was around this time that a long series of busts of past Popes was made for the Duomo of Siena, which included one of the female pope, named as "Johannes VIII, Foemina de Anglia" and included between Leo IV and Benedict III.
At his trial in 1415 Jan Hus argued that the Church did not necessarily need a pope because, during the pontificate of "Pope Agnes" (as he also called her), it got on quite well. Hus's opponents at the trial insisted that his argument proved no such thing about the independence of the Church but they did not dispute that there had been a female pope at all.
During the Reformation In 1587 Florimond de Raemond, a magistrate in the parlement de Bordeaux and an antiquary, published his first attempt to deconstruct the legend, Erreur Populaire de la Papesse Jeanne (also subsequently published under the title L'Anti-Papesse). The tract applied humanist techniques of textual criticism to the Pope Joan legend, with the broader intent of supplying sound historical principles to ecclesiastical history, and the legend began to come apart, detail by detail. Raemond's Erreur Populaire went through successive editions, reaching a fifteenth as late as 1691.
In 1601, Pope Clement VIII declared the legend of the female pope to be untrue. The famous bust of her, inscribed Johannes VIII, Femina ex Anglia, which had been carved for the series of papal figures in the Duomo di Siena about 1400 and was noted by travelers, was either destroyed or recarved and relabeled, replaced by a male figure, that of Pope Zachary.
The legend of Pope Joan was "effectively demolished" by David Blondel, a mid-17th-century Protestant historian, who suggested that Pope Joan's tale may have originated in a satire against Pope John XI, who died in his early 20s. Blondel, through detailed analysis of the claims and suggested timings, argued that no such events could have happened.
The 16th-century Italian historian Onofrio Panvinio, commenting on one of Bartolomeo Platina's works that refer to Pope Joan, theorized that the story of Pope Joan may have originated from tales of Pope John XII; John reportedly had many mistresses, including one called Joan, who was very influential in Rome during his pontificate.
At the time of the Reformation, various Protestant writers took up the Pope Joan legend in their anti-Catholic writings, and the Catholics responded with their own polemic. According to Pierre Gustave Brunet, Various authors, in the 16th and 17th centuries, occupied themselves with Pope Joan, but it was from the point of view of the polemic engaged in between the partisans of Lutheran or Calvinist reform and the apologists of Catholicism.