Perils of the Popess

Pope Joan is one of the most tenacious myths of the Middle Ages, told and retold by Catholics and anti-Catholics alike since the 13th century. It is said that beautiful young Joan, an Englishwoman born in Mainz, Germany, disguised herself as a man to gain higher education beside her scholarly lover. Her brilliance won her election as pope under the name John in 855 (some say 1100). After reigning less than three years, she bore a child during a papal procession and died immediately, either from childbirth or stoning. Subsequent popes are supposed to have avoided this shameful place and had their maleness verified during their coronation ceremonies, during which an inscription was read as a commemoration of Joan: "Peter, Father of Fathers, Publish the Parturition of the Popess."

Though long disproved by historians, this scandalous legend still requires an occasional rebuttal by Catholic apologists. But its relevance has been renewed by the clamor for women's ordination and contemporary enthusiasm for gender-bending.

So "La Papesse Jeanne," a 1988 book by the French historian Alain Boureau has earned a timely English edition as "The Myth of Pope Joan," published by the University of Chicago Press in 2001.

Although readily admitting that Joan never existed, Boureau does not attempt to demolish the tale or provide new ammunition for apologetics. He analyzes Joan as a "symbolic object" and a device to gain access to past systems of belief. The imaginary works as well as the real for his investigations of sexuality, ecclesiology, and anticlericalism.

Boureau opens with a survey of papal coronation rituals and ribald spoofs of them, demonstrating the fallibility of eyewitnesses along the way. We learn how medieval popes were perched on potty chairs during installation and despoiled by the Roman mob after both election and death. This slow and discursive section establishes a growing fear of female pollution during the Middle Ages. Clerical reform, the investiture struggle, and tighter rules for marriage provided a context for Joan.

Boureau's pace quickens when Joan finally comes on stage. He quotes essential texts from the first mention of Joan in a Metz chronicle of 1255. He traces how the story spread in histories and sermon exempla, initially by way of the Dominican Order. Boureau asks how medieval Catholics "believed" in Joan and shows how energetically they used her story in their controversies. Joan served apocalyptic Joachimites expecting a new age of the Holy Spirit, Spiritual Franciscans denouncing pseudo-popes, rival claimants to the Holy See during the Great Western Schism, and proto-Protestants Ockham and Wycliffe impugning papal authority and the efficacy of the sacraments.

Joan even found her way into the Tarot as the Popess trump, thanks to the example of the Gugliemites, an Italian sect suppressed in 1300 that worshiped a female incarnation of the Holy Spirit led by a popess and cardinalettes.

Is Pope Joan as mythic as Joan of Arc?
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