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| Pope Joan giving birth in the street and being executed, along with her lover and child (below): from an illustrated account of her life, published in 1600, by the Protestant writer Johannes Wolf as part of his popular history of the shortcomings of the papacy, "Lectiones memorabiles et reconditae". |
There are three major obstacles to endorsing Pope Joan as an historical reality. The first and least important concerns the extraordinary nature of her demise. The story as told by the chroniclers has, I had felt from the start of my investigation, the instinctive feel of pure invention, the ninth-century equivalent of a 1980s urban myth.
There can be no doubt that even the most august clerics down the ages have suffered from what the Catholic church to this day likes to call ‘broken celibacy’, so the idea of a pope having a lover need not detain us. And while her giving birth in the street gives her story an air of freakishness, otherwise intelligent women have, particularly as they approach their menopause, mistaken pregnancy for the onset of the change of life and turned up at hospital with stomach pains to be delivered of a baby hours later. (And vice versa in the case of Mary Tudor and the series of tragic delusional pregnancies of her later years.)
Professor David Canter had fitted such total denial into the pattern of Joan’s ‘outsider’ mentality, but Dr Rosalind Miles was for me a particularly effective witness in challenging this crucial part of the prosecution case. ‘Joan’s story – or at least the ending – could well be a fiction by men, proving the point that for every culture there is a counter-culture. The stronger the culture, the stronger the counterculture. And in as much as the Church loves and needs the pope, it must also hate and resent the pope because that is the way it works. A strong papacy is bound to throw up a strong counter-culture – in this case Joan.’1 The very power of the papacy, then, encourages characters like Joan to rebel, but the enduring strength of the institution means that such rebellions get ‘normalised’ in the end. Joan is, from the institution’s point of view, satisfyingly punished, while the men take back their lost control.
If every culture produces an equally strong counter-culture, then the facts of Joan’s success could have made those most indicted and threatened by it invent a tale of her fall to negate all that had gone before. A flesh-and-blood example to inspire and liberate women could with a deft turn of the hand be transformed into one that subjugated them and made them prisoners of their bodies and biology. Joan’s deception may well have been discovered, and she may have been sent off to a nunnery or even imprisoned, but by making her with child and then depicting her giving birth in the street, she was twisted to fit into the pattern of admonitory literature used to keep its mainly women readers from overreaching themselves.
If the anti-feminist ending was added to a pro-feminist life story, it was a stroke of genius. Catholicism, despite all its traditionalism and exclusion of women from public positions of authority, is after all a women’s religion. The nineteenth-century historian W. E. H. Lecky wrote: ‘It can hardly, I think, be questioned that in the great religious convulsions of the sixteenth century the feminine type followed Catholicism while Protestantism inclined more to the masculine type.’2 By balancing out Joan’s example, the authors gave women within the Church the chance secretly to rejoice in her initial success, but also the comfort that the status quo was restored and justified by her demise. They were not, after all, missing out on anything.
The second and more significant obstacle to belief in the She-Pope concerns the theories of such distinguished historians as Edward Gibbon that mention of an imaginary Pope Joan as some sort of code for damning other disreputable but real popes. The notorious mother and daughter, Theodora and Marozia Theophylact, and their attempts in the tenth century to turn the papacy into a family sinecure, are often mentioned in this context. Yet the accounts of their misdeeds and lustful appetites were seldom suppressed and certainly not at the time when the story of Pope Joan was most widespread. This explanation, and other variations on the same theme concerning effeminate pontiffs and eunuch patriarchs, does not make any sense.
The third and most serious objection raised by those who would deny Joan a life is the gap of 400 years between her pontificate and Martin Polonus’s landmark account. Less sophisticated sceptics say that this silence arose because Joan was not spoken of until her story was made up by Protestants after the Reformation and then inserted into pre-Reformation texts by skilled forgers. Such talk of a conspiracy is nonsense as my trip to the Bodleian Library in Oxford had confirmed. Undoctored accounts of her exist from pre-Reformation days.
Joan Morris, the scholarly Catholic feminist whose own incomplete research was privately published in 1985, offered a glimmer of light on the hiatus between Joan’s pontificate and Martin Polonus’s account with her work on the Paris version of the Book of Popes. Ultimately, though, she could do no more than suggest a possible halving of the period of silence. Definitive proof eluded her.
Despite many hours spent in libraries with catalogues and ancient manuscripts following up the clues Morris had left in her papers, I could not make any further progress in turning back the clock. The gap, I am forced to conclude, has to be seen in the context of a strong oral tradition, of visiting preachers, of widespread illiteracy, of very few books and of the unsavoury activities of the librarian Anastasius who was perfectly capable of deleting all mention of Joan, should it suit him for the purposes of his own advancement. The loss of Martin Polonus’s source leaves an unfathomable mystery, but his reputation would suggest that he was not the sort of Church writer simply to make something up. He would have had a source, but as with Frederick Spanheim, in his exhaustive seventeenth-century catalogue of mentions of Joan, too many original documents have been lost. The destruction of the library at Fulda where, I discovered on my visit, not a single ancient manuscript now resides, brought home this point.
With these persuasive but inconclusive arguments, failure to bridge the gap between 855 and the latter half of the thirteenth century cannot deliver the prosecution victory. Many of history’s most crucial and most accepted events are known of only because of much later writings – the gospels immediately spring to mind. And that 400-year gap is just one part in the puzzle.
It is worth recalling in this context that evidence of many of the officially recognised popes of the Dark Ages on the Church’s roll of honour is at best fragmentary and certainly not contemporary. In the case of Pope Lando at the start of the tenth century, for instance, only one fragment of proof survives that he even existed – a record of a benefaction to the cathedral in Siena. Pope John VI at the start of the eighth is a completely unknown quantity. Taken on the merits of the evidence, both deserve to be consigned to limbo. But they are men and so survive. Joan represents more of a challenge to the authorised version of Church history.
Set against what had increasingly over the course of my investigation been exposed as a weak prosecution case are many positive reasons for believing that the She-Pope was more than a made-up story. The evidence of some 500 medieval writers cannot but impress. Senior papal servants, writing in books dedicated to their masters, endorse Joan unambiguously. Academics and inquisitors accept her as fact. Such widespread belief, filtering up to the pinnacle of power in the Catholic church, cannot lightly be dismissed as a Protestant plot, a fable, or a cipher for some other story of papal skullduggery. Why, for example, did Sienese pope after Sienese pope allow Joan’s statue to stand in their home cathedral? The logical answer is that they regarded her, however grudgingly, as a predecessor.
These substantial testaments to Joan’s life are, of course, circumstantial. They do not prove her existence, only that of her cult. Yet, at the very least, a story can exist because people go on believing it. It endures because people want to listen to it time and again. And it transmutes according to their tastes and needs. In that sense Pope Joan is again undeniably true. She was believed in, and people remain fascinated by her and attracted to her, be they directors, artists, playwrights or novelists. One anonymous sender of floral tributes in Rome would still appear to have faith in her to this day. (Despite my efforts, I never did discover his or her identity, though in the course of my investigation I had my suspicions about correspondents from Europe, the States and Canada, all of them Pope Joan devotees of admirably sane but slightly quirky credentials.)
Despite all attempts to kill her off, Pope Joan keeps cropping up in our own times. People believe in her and go on believing in her because they want her to have happened. They like the inversion at the heart of her story. It’s like the boy bishops and the Lord of Misrule of the Elizabethan period, where the most unlikely person becomes king or bishop for the day.
Yet this appeal can distract from the fact that Pope Joan is much more than a wonderful story. She was taken as read not only by chroniclers but by generation after generation from the thirteenth century to at least the seventeenth. The Vicus Papissa, ‘the street of the woman pope’ where Joan gave birth and met her end, exists with its shrine, although her statue has been lost. The street was avoided because of Joan by papal processions as the Master of Ceremonies, Bishop Burchard, testified in the fifteenth century. Likewise the strange chair for checking the pope’s manhood exists and, travellers record, was used. The bust of Joan in Siena existed. And a playful illustration of her labour remains in Saint Peter’s at the foot on the baldacchino over the main altar to this day.
And there are more immediate historical reasons for suggesting hat Joan be restored to her rightful place among the popes. The details told by the chroniclers fit neatly with the middle of the ninth century. There was, for instance, a celebrated colony of English missionaries in Germany then – hence the name ‘Joan the English’, though she was born in Mainz. And it is undeniably true that Greek-educated figures, as Joan was alleged to be, were prominent and revered in Rome at this time. Some, indeed, went on to be elected to the throne of Saint Peter thanks to the system which then prevailed – an unpredictable popular vote which favoured the deacons collected around the dead pope, and which occasionally threw up a saintly and scholarly outsider.
All these essential details may have been mangled and exaggerated as the history of Joan was passed across medieval dining-rooms and library desks down the ages but, once ironed out and reassembled, make perfect sense in the context of their time. Nothing is out of place.
Moreover, when I had moved beyond verifying the details told in the chronicles, I had discovered that the all-male atmosphere of the Church in the ninth century was of very recent vintage. Women like Cuthburga of Wimborne and Hilda of Whitby had ruled over double monasteries of men and women with quasi-episcopal powers. Some scholars, like the American historian Vern Bullough, hold that the official Church was at pains to promote stories of cross-dressing women saints as role models for clever young girls like Joan. Even if you are cursed with a woman’s body, the subliminal message went, for curse it was certainly regarded by the all-male hierarchy, if you take on every masculine attribute, you may just gain admittance to the inner sanctum as an honorary man.
Turning to the basic mechanics of Joan’s disguise, I had established a convincing case that her physical sleight of hand was possible. The ninth century was a time when priests were told to shave off their beards. With her fair chin and upper lip, Joan would in previous centuries have been damned. In the ninth she could have thrived. Moreover, history shows that women have successfully passed themselves off as men to achieve positions of great power. Their bodies, especially in a frugal time like the Dark Ages, have been relatively easy to transform.
The mental leap of imagining herself a man and one entitled to run the Church had caused me to pause. Jan Morris demonstrated that Joan could have made mental sense out of such a change of gender even in her own Dark Age world, but it was Professor David Canter, pioneer of psychological profiling in Britain, who convinced me on her state of mind. Psychology, his distinctly late-twentieth-century discipline, enabled me to move beyond all others who over the centuries had considered the claims of Joan. The professor lent his professional good name to the case for the defence. Stripped of the embellishments of over-eager admirers and exploiters, Pope Joan, he believed, adds up to a real person with recognisable and consistent traits, a character, moreover, with antecedents and descendants down to our own times.
Weighing all this evidence, I am convinced that Pope Joan was an historical figure, though perhaps not all the details about her that have been passed on down the centuries are true.
For a century, since the work of the German anti-Joanite Professor Dollinger, those historians, scholars and believers who have stumbled across Pope Joan in ancient manuscripts or dusty corners of the Vatican Museum have dismissed her as a colourful legend. Talk of her has been deemed anti-Church. Writers who in other circumstances expend considerable energy investigating anything from the Turin Shroud to bleeding statues are content to toe the official line. Yet looking back into this episode in the history of the Church, however troubled and inglorious, is not anti-Church per se. In my own case knowledge has not put any distance between me, my church and my faith. Quite the opposite, whatever the omens of all those hearses. If I had relied on the official explanations I would long ago have given up on the Church in frustration.
With such an uncomfortable slice of history as Joan – comprising equal measures of fact, distorted fact and the subsequent embroidery of well-natured but unsatisfactory fiction – chronology cannot be all. A dancer to different tunes down the ages, Joan has fitted the mood of many periods, be they anti-clerical, anti-Catholic, feminist, romantic or erotic. She has even, I was told by one who should know, become something of an icon for religiously minded transvestites.
I accept, of course, that some who have reached this stage of the investigation may pull up short of my qualified conclusion. I would ask them at least to admire Pope Joan’s extraordinary tenacity down the centuries. Her story has survived all attempts to bury it because it has proved greater and longer lasting than any of the ways in which it has been communicated, the causes to which it has been annexed, or the groups who have chanced upon it. That has been its ultimate danger, and one specially relevant at a time when Catholic women, like Ludmilla Javorova, are determined to have their claims to the priesthood recognised.
Having accepted that Pope Joan is based in part on fact and a real person, the final question is where to draw the line between taking on every detail and discounting most. A starting point at this lower end of the scale is the prophetess of Moguntia – another name for Mainz – who succeeded, according to a sixteenth-century edition of the chronicle of Sigebert, in persuading her archbishop to ordain her to the priesthood. That story may have been overblown and fictionalised into Joan.
My own inclination, having lived and breathed Joan for six months, is to go for a medium point – that she achieved the papacy at a time when the office was hopelessly debased and corrupt, was moderately successful but that her triumph was short-lived. She was uncovered, not in dramatic fashion in the Vicus Papissa, but when her ‘outsider’ mentality, as outlined by Professor Canter, made her careless. The drawbacks of her secret achievement may even have outweighed the benefits and she could have voluntarily given herself up to life in a convent, a vow of silence and the rewriting of history to exclude her.
Such a scenario is speculation, based on the facts with undeniable historical validity that I have laid out. Speculating, though, is one of the rewards of surviving a long investigation and is part of the pull the She-Pope continues to exert.
In a more general sense, if this search serves any purpose at all, it will be, in ascending order of priority, to see Joan’s name mentioned at sites like Fulda, Siena and Wimborne; for her example to be treated with a little more seriousness by historians and all sides in the gender debates that continue to divide the Catholic church; and for the ‘official’ Church to show a little more humility when dictating from on high which episodes of history – usually those that reflect well on it – are worthy of respect and which can be swept under an already lumpy carpet.
Significant Dates: An Overview
715 Boniface sails from England for Germany
750 Rome breaks its links with Constantinople
755 Boniface buried at Fulda
800 Pope Leo III crowns Charlemagne Emperor
846 Saracen raid on Rome wrecks Saint Peter’s
847 Pope Leo IV elected
853 Pope Leo dies. Joan elected
855 Pope Joan discovered and deposed. Benedict III elected
858 Pope Benedict dies. Nicholas I elected
1225 Jean de Mailly’s Chronica universalis appears with unequivocal endorsement of Joan
1265 Martin Polonus’s chronicle, principal source on Joan, first appears
1484 Papal Master of Ceremonies confirms that popes avoid the Vicus Papissa
1565 Last sighting of Pope Joan statue in Rome
1691 Frederick Spanheim’s survey of 500 sources on Pope Joan published late 1600s
Joan removed from papal busts in Siena Cathedral
NOTES
1 Author interview
2 W. E. H. Lecky, History of European Morals (London, 1869)
By Peter Stanford in "The She-Pope", Arrow Books, (part of the Penguin Random House group), London, 1999. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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