One of the most persistent myths of the Middle Ages is that of Pope John VIII, better known as Pope Joan. According to some sources, a woman named Agnes went with her lover to Greece and posed as a man to become a student. Once educated, she moved to Rome and after three years of teaching drew such a following that she was unanimously elected Pope in 853 AD. After reigning for “two years, five months and four days” she was riding a horse on the road to the Lateran church, fell off and died in childbirth, much to the horror of the surrounding public.[1] While this story is a myth, it has been used in a variety of ways through the ages.
Caution against Women
Pope Joan first appears in a Dominican chronicle by Jean de Mailly in Metz around the 1250’s. A series of reform minded Popes had, starting in the late 12th century, struggled with the Holy Roman Emperor and by the middle of the 13th century, Papal power had reached its zenith. The debate about the powers of the Pope was still at the forefront, and the Dominican Order had recently been formed to counter heretics. As a Dominican, Jean de Mailly would have been anxious to defend the church and show the importance of a proper Pope.[2]
Another Dominican, Etienne de Bourbon, called Joan’s success “an astonishing stroke of audacity, or, rather, insanity” and ascribes her success to the devil. Fortunately, according to de Bourbon, when she gave birth “Roman justice” was invoked and tied her to a horse, which dragged her half a league while the citizens of Rome stoned her.[3] The moral de Bourbon drew is that women can not be allowed into the Priesthood and only sinful audacity would even suggest it.
Proof of Catholic Failings
The story of Pope Joan was one of the Protestant’s favorite arguments against the infallibility of the Catholic church. John Wycliff and Jan Huss both used her as examples of the failings of the College of Cardinals. After Huss’s execution in 1415, the Catholic church began to deny that Joan had ever existed. The Protestants accused the church of hiding the truth. Over forty pamphlets were dedicated to the subject of Pope Joan during the Reformation. [4] Over time this literature increased in hysteria as Protestants accused Catholics of endeavoring to “nullifie” the memory of the “Woman-Pope.” [5] Joan was also the subject of plays such as The Female Prelate and books such as The History of Pope Joan and the Whores of Rome.
Pope Joan has served as both Catholic and Protestant moral tales, as well as the subject of the detective novel Un Crime, articles in Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, as well as novels such as Donna Cross’s Pope Joan. The myth of the Female Pope shows how a story can be created, controlled and reinvented as times and motivations change.
[1] Sabine Baring-Gould, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, (New York: University Books, 1967), 172-173.
[2] Alain Boureau, The Myth of Pope Joan, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 116-118.
[3] Ibid, 118.
[4]Laura McGough, “Review of The Myth of Pope Joan,” Sixteenth Century Journal 34 (Summer 2003): 590.
[5] Robert Ware, Pope Joan: Or an Account Collected out of the Romish Authors, Proved to of the Clergy and Members of that Church, Before Luther left her Doctrine; as also of Romish Authors, since Luther departed from Rome; testifying that there was a She-Pope who sat in the See, and Ruled the Same (London: The Gilded Acorn, 1689), ii. Spelling has not been modernized.
