Joan

Joan, POPE, a fabulous personage long said to have filled the papal chair as John VIII. for about three years after the death of Leo IV. in 855. According to the latest and accepted form of the story, she was daughter of an English missionary, and was born at Mainz or Ingelheim. Forming an illicit connection with a monk at Fulda, she put on male attire and fled with him to Athens, where her lover soon died. She then came to Rome, where, from her remarkable learning, she became in quick succession notary to the curia, cardinal, and pope, until her sex was discovered by the premature and public birth of a child during a solemn procession. This startling story was universally believed and appealed to in Italy from 1400 to about 1600; it appears in all the chronicles within this period, and even so late as 1550 is found in the popular guide for strangers known as the Mirabilia Urbis Romæ. Felix Hemmerlin, Trithemius, Coccius Sabellicus, Raphael of Volterra, Pico di Mirandola, and Adrian of Utrecht (afterwards Pope Adrian IV.) are all unanimous in maintaining it, and indeed Aventine in Germany and Onufrio Panvinio in Italy were the first to shake the general belief in its truth. One of the severest blows delivered to the story was given later by the hand of the learned Calvinist David Blondel, in his Familiæ Eclaircissement (Amst. 1649). So unquestioned was the story that about the beginning of the 15th century the bust of the female pope was placed in the cathedral of Siena, along with those of the other popes, and there it remained undisturbed till 1600, when, at the request of Clement VIII., Joan was metamorphosed into Pope Zacharias.

Baronius thought it a satire on John VIII.; Aventine, Heumann, and Schröck, a satire on the Pornocracy; the Jesuit Secchi, a calumny originating with the Greeks, just as Pagi and Eckhart thought it did with the Waldenses; Leo Allatius believed it to be based on the story of Thiota, a false prophetess of the 9th century; Leibnitz thought it based on a similar story that might have happened in the case of some foreign bishop; while Blasco and Henke believed it a satirical allegory on the origin and circulation of the false decretals of Isidore—an absurd theory developed still further by Gfrörer. Mosheim, Luden, and Hase were unable to believe that so definite a story could have arisen without some foundation; Kurtz, while saying that the historical evidence is valueless, regards it as an unsolved riddle. At length Dr Döllinger disproved all preceding theories at once by showing that the myth originated not in the 9th or 10th century, as hitherto believed, but was first put into writing in the middle of the 13th; and advanced the theory that the story was deliberately originated by the Dominicans and Minorites in the time of Benedict VIII., a deadly foe to the two orders.

The story was long supposed to be mentioned by Marianus Scotus (1028-86), but it does not occur in his most ancient MSS., nor yet in those of Sigebert of Gemblours (1030-1112) or of Otto de Freysingen (died 1158). The first to give it currency is the Dominican Stephen de Bourbon (died 1261), on the authority of the lost or as yet undiscovered MS. of his contemporary, the Dominican Jean de Mailly. Thus the earliest account in writing is discovered to be about the years 1240-50, from which source it was transferred to works of history, like the popular but worthless chronicle of the Dominican Martinus Polonus (died 1278). Yet Pope Joan does not appear in his oldest MSS., and the interpolation must have been made between 1278 and 1312. The main vehicle for circulating the myth in Germany was the chronicle Flores Temporum, which, connected with various names, comes down to 1290, and is mainly a compilation from Martinus Polonus. Again, the story was inserted in the so-called Anastasius, the most ancient collection known of biographies of the popes, but here again it is a later addition. Soon after we find it in Van Maerlant's Historical Mirror, a metrical Dutch chronicle, and in the Dominican Tolomeo of Lucca, and later, in the 14th century, in the Dominicans Bernard Guidonis, Leo of Orvieto, John of Paris, and Jacobo de Acqui, as well as in Occam the Minorite, the Greek Barlaam, the English Benedictine Ranulph Higden, the Augustinian Amalrich Augerii, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. About the close of the 13th century the story spread with great rapidity, and in the 15th hardly any doubt shows itself at all. John Huss, at the Council of Constance, naturally enough employed the pontificate of Joan as an argument without contradiction from either side; and the Chancellor Gerson, in a speech before Benedict XIII. at Tarascon in 1403, uses the circumstance as a proof that the church could err in matters of fact. The scholastic theologians accepted the fact, and we find so redoubtable a defender of papal despotism as Cardinal Torrecemata maintaining it, so that the gibes of some busy compilers at early Protestant writers for making much of so unsavoury a story are but idle and ill informed. The Dominicans, from their numerous libraries, might easily have exposed the fable, but, as we have seen, they were actively instrumental in its diffusion instead. The story reached the Greeks in the second half of the 15th century, and it is to them we owe the revolting detail that the child was born just as the woman was celebrating High Mass. A Greek scholar, Emmanuel Rhoidis, in a clever study (Eng. trans. by C. H. Collette, 1886) finds it impossible to believe that so well authenticated a story could be without historical basis; and indeed the chain of authoritative evidence is exceedingly awkward for those disposed to attach high credit to tradition in matters of belief.

Originally the woman is nameless, and there are many discrepancies about her name (Agnes, Gilberta, Joan), about the date, her place of birth and previous abode, and the mode of the catastrophe. Four circumstances, according to Dr Döllinger, contributed especially to the production and elaboration of the fable: (1) the former use of a pierced seat, popularly supposed to be a precautionary means of verifying the sex of a newly-elected pope, but really a practice symbolic of taking possession, the seats being merely bright red sedes porphyretice, from an ancient Roman bath; (2) a stone, with an unintelligible but ingeniously misread inscription, popularly supposed to be a tombstone of the unhappy Joan; (3) a statue found at the same spot, its long robes being gratuitously taken for the dress of a woman; and (4) the custom of making a circuit in papal processions, whereby a street which was directly in the way was avoided. The woman may have been made of English blood from the odium attaching to England because of the struggle between Innocent III. and King John; and besides, many Englishwomen made the pilgrimage to Rome, while St Boniface, even in his day, complains not only of their number, but their dubious character. Her birth at the German city of Mainz might be due to the inveterate German hostility to Roman claims, together with the fact that Mainz was the leading city of Germany.

See Wensing, Over de Pausin Johanna (Hague, 1845), a destructive answer to another Dutch book maintaining the truth of the story, by Professor Kist (1843; 2d ed. 1866), who thinks Pope Joan was probably the widow of Leo IV.; Bianchi-Giovini, Esame Critico degli Atti relativi alla Papessa Giovanna (Milan, 1845); and especially Döllinger, Die Papstfabeln des Mittelalters (Munich, 1863; Eng. trans. by A. Plummer, 1871), where the historical evidence is examined and conclusively demolished.