Perils of the Popess

Continued from page 1

Boureau compares Joan with seeress and witch views of Joan of Arc and with prophetic women including the mythical sibyls of antiquity and medieval Hildegard of Bingen. He notes Joan's entrance into literature with Boccaccio's "De Mulieribus Claris" (1362) and "Fraw Jutta" (1480), the first tragic drama in German (Joan was supposed to have been called Jutta before she assumed the papacy).

But the Protestant Reformation made Joan intolerable among Catholics. The Great Whore of Babylon wearing a papal tiara was one of the milder references to Joan in Lutheran propaganda, where she was used to depict Rome as a place of corruption and deviance. Early Calvinists were apparently too high-minded to bother with Joan.

Catholics countered in 1562 with the first systematic historical attack on the myth, written by the Augustinian Onoforio Panvinio. Panvinio argued that there was no trace of Joan in contemporary records and no interval to allow her reign. An even more magisterial refutation by the excommunicated Catholic scholar Ignaz von Döllinger in 1863 should have put the matter beyond dispute for any reasonable person, although of course this has not been the case.

Boureau gleefully describes the shift from Protestant to Enlightenment polemics about Joan. Revolutionary and liberal writers in France, Italy, and Germany used her to mock Catholicism without even trying to claim historicity. Nevertheless, the great German Romantic Achim von Arnim made Joan sympathetic and heroic in his fantasy novel "Die Päpstin Johanna," published posthumously in 1846. Twentieth-century treatments of the story included plays by Alfred Jarry and Bertholt Brecht, as well as the wretched film "Pope Joan" (1972).

By shifting from religion to literature after the 16th century, Boureau cuts off the debate too soon (although later disputes over Pope Joan are included in his chronological checklist). It is disappointing not to hear how Pope Joan reached Anglo-American opponents of the Church, who still trot her out on occasion.

Boureau suspects that Joan's story existed orally before its first written appearance in 1255, but he carefully refrains from speculating how the myth came together. While emphatically denying anonymous "popular" authorship, he does point out some possible contributing factors: mockery of the papacy by the Roman populace, misunderstood ancient monuments, resentment of the Hildebrandine reforms, suspicion of females, jealousy toward Hildegard of Bingen, or hostility against the English pope Adrian IV, who feuded with Barbarossa.

Writing with Gallic eyebrow firmly raised, Boureau pays close postmodernist attention to nuances of discourse and plainly enjoys the sinuous interplay of his disparate data.

Readers with a taste for sophisticated history will find "The Myth of Pope Joan" a fine diversion.

_Related Features

'Pope Joan': More Than a Legend? The Evidence for Pope Joan Why Women Shouldn't Be Catholic Priests