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?
Read more >>

_Related Features

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

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