The outrageous heretical legend of Pope Joan, history’s only female pope

Technically, any baptised Catholic man can become pope; that is already an obstacle to any woman from getting chosen, but their task gets even harder. The process of electing a pope comes with a lot of tradition and custom, and the last man to be voted in without being a cardinal first was Urban VI. That was in 1378.

That means anyone who becomes the pontiff has climbed the ranks of the hierarchy to the College of Cardinals. Women, meanwhile, are unable to be ordained in the Catholic Church at all.

So, how do you explain Pope Joan?

Who was Pope Joan?

For hundreds of years, and persisting to this day, a medieval tale has been told time and time again of a woman who sat on the papal throne disguised as a man – Pope Joan.

For a while, the Church officially accepted her tenure – from AD 855 to 858, under the name John VIII – as historical fact.

Was Pope Joan real?

That is no evidence that Pope Joan ever existed, and no space in the papal timeline for her to fit into. Saint Leo IV died on 17 July 855 AD and his successor, Benedict III, had been elected by late September.

There was a real Pope John VIII, but he (and he was certainly a he) came later, reigning from AD 872 to 882.

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What evidence is there for Pope Joan?

The largest hole in Joan’s story is the 400-year gap between the time she supposedly sat as pope to her first known mention in written record.

The earliest sources of a female pontiff came from two Dominicans in the 13th century: Chronica universalis Mettensis (a chronicle of the Diocese of Metz, France) by Jean de Mailly and De septem donis Spiritu Sancti (‘On the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit’) by Stephen of Bourbon. These introduced the first details of what would become the Pope Joan myth.

They said that around 1100, an unnamed woman was elected by posing as a man, and that truth of her identity came out when she became pregnant and gave birth while in public during a procession. In Jean de Mailly’s account, she was then stoned to death while a horse dragged her through the streets of Rome.

The chief resource on Pope Joan, which would be cited throughout the medieval period, followed later in the 13th century. The Chronicle of the Popes and Emperors by another Dominican, Martin of Troppau, augmented her life, claiming that she was English and had travelled to Athens with her lover, before heading to Rome.

Elected unanimously, Joan served in the Vatican for exactly two years, seven months and four days – not, according to Martin, around 1100 as previously suggested, but in the mid-ninth century. He also added that the spot where she had given birth was from that point on avoided by papal processions.

In the 14th century, different versions of the Pope Joan story started to spread and were widely believed, despite the glaring inconsistencies. Was she English or born in the German city of Mainz? Was her name Joan (as Martin claimed) or Agnes or Gilberta?

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Joan featured in the Italian humanist Giovanni Boccaccio’s work, Concerning Famous Women. A collection of biographies of women from history, it included mythological figures, such as Egyptian and Roman goddesses, and legendary queens of Greece. Not all real women, in other words.

Yet increasingly, the existence of Pope Joan was unchallenged. Her bust was placed alongside those of other pontiffs at Siena Cathedral and during the Reformation, as Protestants looked to undermine Catholic authority, her name was cited several times.

Most notably, the reformer Jan Hus referred to Joan during his trial at the Council of Constance in 1415 to refute the supposed infallibility of the Catholic Church and the papacy.

When was the myth of Pope Joan debunked?

It would not be until the 16th century that questions began to be asked regarding the veracity of Pope Joan, including from French jurist Florimond de Raemond and Italian friar Onofrio Panvinio. The latter suggested that she may have been based on one of the mistresses of the 10th-century pope John XII.

The Calvinist David Blondel is credited with the most comprehensive debunking of the story with his 1647 work, Familiar Enlightenment of the Question: Whether a Woman has been Seated on the Papal Throne in Rome. By then, Pope Clement VIII had removed her from official lists of pontiffs.

Far from being the end of the myth, however, new life continued to be breathed into Pope Joan over the centuries.

There are still those who believe that a clandestine female pope existed in the ninth century, heralding Joan as something of a feminist symbol.