Pope Joan: A Female Pope?

Today, the possibility that there had once been a female pope, or papess, is known to many people only from reading Lawrence Durrell’s light-hearted novel, Pope Joan. For centuries, however, the erstwhile existence of such a person was believed to be an indisputable fact.

The story went that in about AD 818 a girl called Joan was born to English missionaries at Ingelheim, near the German city of Mainz. As she grew older, it became clear that Joan was extremely intelligent and eventually she disguised herself as a man, called herself John Anglicus and gained entry into a local monastery where she studied assiduously. Later, she travelled to Rome, still dressed as a man, and became so celebrated for her intellect that when in 855 Pope Leo IV died, she was enthusiastically elected as Pope John VIII.

Her papal reign proved a great success, except for one catastrophic mistake. She fell in love with her valet – a mistake made in private, but whose outcome would soon become only too public. One day, two years after becoming pope, she was leading a procession through Rome, from St Peter’s basilica to the Lateran palace, surrounded by throngs of excited people. The route between the Colosseum and St Clement’s church led down a narrow alley and it was here that suddenly, to the spectators’ dismay, the pope collapsed on the ground, evidently in great pain. To their even greater horror, however, when attendants rushed to the pope’s aid, ‘he’ was revealed to be a ‘she’: the pope was a woman! More than that, she was in the act of giving birth! Aghast at the sight of such cumulative heresy, the frenzied crowd dragged Joan and her new-born child away and stoned them to death.

For centuries afterwards, the alley where this dreadful expose had occurred was avoided by papal processions and the ceremonial enthronement of new popes gained a bizarre and novel custom. Before the pope was throned, he had to sit upon a special marble chair with a hole in its seat, the sella stercoraria, and be examined by physicians to ensure that he was truly a man. When they had confirmed that he was, a deacon would shout to the crowd, ‘Habet!’ (‘He has!’), and all the crowd would rejoice, exclaiming ‘Deo gratias!’.

As for John VIII, or Pope Joan, all trace to his/her brief pontificate were erased from Church records by moving forward the enthronement date of the replacement, Benedict III, to 855. And when another pope called John was enthroned several year later, he took Joan’s title of John VIII. Even a bust entitled ‘John VIII, a woman from England’, housed in Siena cathedral, was renamed ‘Pope Zachary’ by Pope Clement VIII (1592-1605).

Her scandalous history does occur in the medieval chronicles of Anastasius the Librarian, Marianus Scotus and Sigebert de Gemblours, among others. Many Protestant writers also publicized it during the 16th century, in a bid to malign the papacy. Ironically, it was the extensive treatise of Calvinist historian David Blondel in 1647 which finally confirmed that the entire history of Pope Joan was without foundation. Indeed, even its presence within the above-noted medieval works appears to have been a perfidious insertion by later writers.

In The Female Pope, Rosemary and Darroll Pardoe speculate that the Pope Joan myth was inspired by a real but equally unusual person – Nicetas, a eunuch Patriarch in Constantinople. His story may have been willfully modified by papal opposition in the mendicant orders, to draw attention to the intense corruption in the papacy at that time and in the process spawned a persistent if fallacious female pretender.