Pope Joan - Analysis and Critique

Analysis and Critique

Most modern scholars dismiss Pope Joan as a Medieval legend. The Oxford Dictionary of Popes acknowledges that this legend was widely believed for centuries, even among Catholic circles, but declares that there is "no contemporary evidence for a female Pope at any of the dates suggested for her reign," and goes on to say that "the known facts of the respective periods make it impossible to fit in".

In 1587, Florimond de Raemond, a magistrate in the parlement de Bordeaux and an antiquary, published his first attempt to deconstruct the legend, Erreur Populaire de la Papesse Jeanne (also subsequently published under the title L'Anti-Papesse). The tract applied humanist techniques of textual criticism to the Pope Joan legend, with the broader intent of supplying sound historical principles to ecclesiastical history, and the legend began to come apart, detail by detail. Raemond's Erreur Populaire went through fifteen editions, as late as 1691.

In 1601, Pope Clement VIII declared the legend of the female Pope to be untrue. The famous bust of her, inscribed Johannes VIII, Femina ex Anglia, which had been carved for the series of Papal figures in the Duomo di Siena about 1400 and was noted by travelers, was either destroyed or recarved and relabeled, replaced by a male figure, of Pope Zachary.

The legend of Pope Joan was "effectively demolished" by David Blondel, a mid-17th century Protestant historian, who suggested that Pope Joan's tale may have originated in a satire against Pope John XI, who died in his early 20s. Blondel, through detailed analysis of the claims and suggested timings, argued that no such events could have happened.

The 16th-century Italian historian Onofrio Panvinio, commenting on one of Bartolomeo Platina's works that refer to Pope Joan, theorized that the story of Pope Joan may have originated from tales of Pope John XII; John reportedly had many mistresses, including one called Joan, who was very influential in Rome during his pontificate.

The Catholic Encyclopedia elaborates on the historical timeline problem:

Between Leo IV and Benedict III, where Martinus Polonus places her, she cannot be inserted, because Leo IV died 17 July 855, and immediately after his death Benedict III was elected by the clergy and people of Rome; but, owing to the setting up of an Antipope, in the person of the deposed Cardinal Anastasius, he was not consecrated until 29 September. Coins exist which bear both the image of Benedict III and of Emperor Lothair, who died 28 September, 855; therefore Benedict must have been recognized as pope before the last-mentioned date. On 7 October 855, Benedict III issued a charter for the Abbey of Corvey. Hincmar, Archbishop of Reims, informed Nicholas I that a messenger whom he had sent to Leo IV learned on his way of the death of this Pope, and therefore handed his petition to Benedict III, who decided it (Hincmar, ep. xl in P.L., CXXXVI, 85). All these witnesses prove the correctness of the dates given in the lives of Leo IV and Benedict III, and there was no interregnum between these two Popes, so that at this place there is no room for the alleged Popess.

It is also notable that enemies of the Papacy in the 9th century make no mention of a female Pope. For example, Photius I of Constantinople, who became Patriarch in 858 and was deposed by Pope Nicholas I in 863, was an enemy of the Pope. He vehemently asserted his own authority as Patriarch over that of the Pope in Rome, and would have made the most of any scandal of that time regarding the Papacy; but he never mentions the story once in any of his voluminous writings. Indeed, at one point he mentions "Leo and Benedict, successively great priests of the Roman Church".

Rosemary and Darroll Pardoe, authors of The Female Pope: The Mystery of Pope Joan, theorize that if a female pope did exist, a more plausible time frame is 1086 and 1108, when there were several Antipopes; during this time the reign of the legitimate Popes Victor III, Urban II, and Paschal II was not always established in Rome, since the city was occupied by Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor, and later sacked by the Normans. This also agrees with the earliest known version of the legend, by Jean de Mailly, as he places the story in the year 1099. De Mailly's 'account' was acknowledged by his companion Stephen of Bourbon.

Against the weight of historical evidence to the contrary, the question remains as to why the Pope Joan story has been popular and widely believed. Philip Jenkins in The New Anti-Catholicism suggests that the periodic revival of what he calls this "anti-papal legend" has more to do with feminist and anti-Catholic wishful thinking than historical accuracy.

The sede stercoraria, the throne with a hole in the seat, now at St. John Lateran (the formal residence of the popes and center of Catholicism), is to be considered. This and other toilet-like chairs were used in the consecration of Pope Pascal II in 1099 (Boureau 1988). In fact, one is still in the Vatican Museums, another at the Musée du Louvre. The reason for the configuration of the chair is disputed. It has been speculated that they originally were Roman bidets or imperial birthing stools, which because of their age and imperial links were used in ceremonies by Popes intent on highlighting their own imperial claims (as they did also with their Latin title, Pontifex Maximus).

Alain Boureau (Boureau 1988:23) quotes the humanist Jacopo d'Angelo de Scarparia, who visited Rome in 1406 for the enthronement of Gregory XII. The pope sat briefly on two "pierced chairs" at the Lateran: "...the vulgar tell the insane fable that he is touched to verify that he is indeed a man" a sign that this corollary of the Pope Joan legend was still current in the Roman street.

Medieval Popes, from the 13th century onward, did indeed avoid the direct route between the Lateran and St Peter's, as Martin of Opava claimed. However, there is no evidence that this practice dated back any earlier. The origin of the practice is uncertain, but it is quite likely that it was maintained because of widespread belief in the Joan legend, and it was thought genuinely to date back to that period.

Although some Medieval writers referred to the female Pope as "John VIII," a genuine Pope John VIII reigned between 872 and 882. Due to the Dark Ages lack of records, confusion often reigns in the evaluation of events.

A problem sometimes connected to the Pope Joan legend is the fact that there is no Pope John XX in any list. It is said this reflects a renumbering of the Popes to exclude Joan from history. Historians have known since Louis Duchesne's critical edition of the Liber Pontificalis that the 'renumbering' was actually due to a misunderstanding in the textual transmission of the official Papal lists. In the course of the 11th century, in the time after John XIX, the entry for John XIV had been misread as referring to two different popes of this name. These two popes then came to be distinguished as Iohannes XIV and Iohannes XIV bis ("John XIV the second").

The existence of a second Pope John XIV was widely accepted in the 13th century, hence the numbering of Popes John XV through XIX was regarded as being erroneous. When Petrus Hispanus was elected pope in 1276 and chose the papal name John, he decided to correct this error by skipping the number XX. He numbered himself John XXI, thus acknowledging the presumed existence of John XIV "bis" in the 10th century.