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In Search of Pope Joan

By Peter Stanford


(According to legend and learned sources alike, Pope John VIII was an Englishwoman-but for more than a thousand years the Catholic church has dismissed the idea. Peter Stanford, author of a new book on the subject, sets out to investigate the case for Pope Joan)

In overcrowded cities like London, you get used to living without a view. Save for a favoured few whose homes overlook the great parks, the historic churches, or the river, there is seldom anything of interest outside your window —unless you are a curtain twitcher or a Neighbourhood Watcher. In the centre of Rome, by contrast, almost every window is a picture-frame. You can linger for hours over the array of architectural gems that faces you, even in neglected piazzas, run-down palazzos, and apparently humdrum back-alleys. And it's not just the buildings. Romans live their lives on the street in a beguiling and marvellous drama.

The little square that links the via dei Querceti and the via dei Santissimi Quattro Coronati was both the canvas, and the stage, where I stumbled over an enduring, but little-known Catholic legend—the tale of the female pope. The floor-to-ceiling window of the flat I had borrowed for a late-spring break allowed me to peer down on the square without being spotted. Since it was too warm for trudging around sightseeing, I settled back into the big, deep, pink armchair next to the window and watched a play in a thousand acts unfold in the daily life of this backwater, tucked away off the main tourist routes between the Colosseum and the cathedral of St John Lateran.

One day my attention settled by chance on the little shrine—or edicola —directly opposite my window. With so much human theatre in the square; the flower seller, the greengrocer, and the newspaper vendor caught up in a soap opera of shared intimacies, significant looks, cold shoulders, heated exchanges, wounded exits stage right to the slightly seedy coffee bar—it would have been easy to ignore the backdrop altogether. Yet this edicola , which looked more like a sentry box, bolted to the wall, eventually drew me out of my armchair, down the stairs and across the square to take a closer look. Despite the flaking ochre-coloured walls its interior was dark. A faded fresco of the "Madonna and Child" could just be made out beyond the greenish grille.

There was something in the neglect and irreverence with which it had been treated—its sides plastered by bills advertising 30 Giorni (a church-run magazine)—that appealed to the melancholy romantic in me. It recalled those overgrown angels and crosses you find in unkempt countryside cemeteries, once loved and tended but today forgotten by all but a handful of devoted souls. The bunch of garish funereal carnations attached to the grille only added to the tragic air of ageing gracelessly.

It never occurred to me, however, that the shrine might have a story—such monuments are, after all, ubiquitous in Rome—or that it might recall less the perfect mother and her immaculately conceived child, and more a notorious fraudster and her unholy offspring. Yet flicking through a guidebook I discovered a glancing reference to a forgotten shrine in "my" square—commonly known as the Vicus Papissa , or street of the woman pope— and the extraordinary legend that was attached to it. A statue of a woman with her child had once stood here, possibly on the site of the edicola , I read. The statue had commemorated "Pope Joan", an Englishwoman who in the ninth century had tricked her way, disguised as a man, into the papacy as John VIII, only to be revealed as an impostor some years later, when she gave birth on this spot, in the midst of a papal procession. The crowd reacted with anger, and stoned her and her child to death.

The writer stressed that it was only a story, one of the multitude that are interwoven round every nook and cranny of Rome. I'm not sure what it was that made me spend any of my holiday time checking this out. Perhaps it was an attempt to rescue the neglected shrine from oblivion and carnation garnishes. Or to provide myself with some incentive to explore Rome. Or even, with a gentle mischief learnt in my Catholic schooldays, to ask questions that I knew the establishment would find embarrassing.

For there was potentially a sensational story here. A woman pope in an organisation that prides itself, in its upper clerical reaches at least, on being an all-male club would have profound implications for the ongoing debate on women priests. The church's objection to female ordination is based not on scripture, but on tradition: there never have been women priests, so there never can be. That argument might be harder to sustain if a woman had once sat on St Peter's throne, for, although she might have fooled the chaps around her, she wouldn't have fooled God. She would have been part of His plan.

The she-pope's story is recorded, in remarkably similar terms to my Roman guidebook version, by some 500 chroniclers of the papacy, writing from early medieval times until the end of the 17th century. Among the phalanx of authors who turn up in this ecclesiastical detective trail as testifying unambiguously to her existence are papal servants, several bishops, and some of the most distinguished and respected medieval chroniclers: writers whose accounts are the bedrock of current historical and church orthodoxy about their period.

Joan's greatest champion was the Dominican, Martin of Poland, a scholar, a papal chaplain, an archbishop, and a man of unblemished reputation. His Chronicle of Popes and Emperors, completed in 1277 (published would be an inappropriate word in an age when books were handwritten and each subsequent version laboriously copied out), locates Joan's papacy between 855 to 857 —separating Leo IV and Benedict III. He explains her roots— she was born of English missionary parents in Germany; tracks the origin of her deception to her desire to acquire an education, and finally highlights how Joan's learning, demonstrated to the people of Rome, won her the papacy: "For as much as she was in great esteem in the city, both for her life and her learning, she was unanimously elected pope."

Because her disguise was discovered as she gave birth in the street, she was, Martin of Poland goes on, excluded from "the catalogue of holy popes, as well on account of her female sex as on account of the foul nature of the transaction." Hence, he implies, the official silence between her reign and the first mention of it by the Irish theologian and chronicler Marianus Scotus in his Historiographi of 1082.

The standard Catholic response to this tale, as I discovered when I tried out Joan's story on several well-placed clerics, is to dismiss it as a post-Reformation Protestant plot to disgrace the papacy. In the wake of the division of Christendom, this explanation goes, scheming dissenters broke into Catholic libraries and emended the papal records to include references to Joan. How can we respect the authority of the papacy, they then protested, when the office has been held by a woman fraudster?

While this theory may have some credence in the case of Scotus (the earliest surviving manuscript of his work is dated 1559), it is a nonsense with regard to Martin of Poland. In Oxford's Bodleian Library is a 14th-century (that is, pre-Reformation) copy of his text where, on folio 31 in a small, scrawling hand, amid a list of other ninth-century popes, is a record of Pope Joan. It reveals little about her achievements, but notes that, as pope, she composed a number of Mass settings.

The reformers were clearly absolved of guilt, but how then to judge the rest of Martin of Poland's account of Joan? By modern papal standards she would have had to be young when elected, when successful candidates are invariably OAPs, if she was still of child-bearing age two years later. But in the ninth century, young or youngish popes were common: Nicholas I took office at 38, while John XII, a hundred years later, was elected at just 18.

According to most official rolls of honour in the Vatican, Benedict III followed straight after Leo IV. There is, then, no space for Joan. Yet, says ex-Jesuit Michael Walsh, one of Britain's leading lights on the history of the papacy, "The ninth century is so utterly confused that the odd pope may possibly have dropped out here and there. The whole system [for appointing and recording] was so corrupt."

It was around the alleged time of Joan that Anastasius, later a papal librarian, attempted to seize Saint Peter's throne by force, making him one of the first "anti-popes." One of Joan's immediate predecessors, Paschal I was so unpopular that when he died, his body was left rotting in the street while a crowd ransacked the papal apartments, and Stephen VI had the remains of his predecessor Formosus exhumed and tried for corruption. The corpse, dressed in papal vestments, was found guilty, mutilated and tossed into the Tiber.

Reliable records of this epoch are few. That is why it is called the Dark Ages. At least with Stephen something is known of his actions. Of Pope Lando (913-14) absolutely nothing is recorded, the Oxford Dictionary of Popes candidly admits, save that he once gave money to the cathedral of Sabina. You could write his history on the back of a raffle ticket, where Joan's would fill several volumes. And yet, he is given official recognition in the family tree of popes while she remains illegitimate. As with much evidence of women's participation in the leadership of the church in its first millennium, she may simply have been written out. The powers that be would certainly prefer that she hadn't existed.

Another puzzling point in Martin of Poland's account is mention of Joan having been elected by popular acclaim. Today the decision as to who leads the Catholic church is made by an exclusive club of cardinals gathered in the Sistine Chapel. In the ninth century, in an admirable if often chaotic and manipulated show of democracy, it would have been a public show of hands. Cardinals did not take over until after the 11th century.

The manner of her election gives another ring of authenticity to the tale. For if Joan were a woman in disguise, she would have struck her listeners as in some way different, though they would not, of course, have known why. There is no suggestion in the chronicles that, until her dying day, anyone suspected the adult Joan was anything other than a man. This seems incredible in our world, obsessed as it is by gender. Yet the historian and sociologist Dr. Rosalind Miles is convinced that Joan could have got away with it. "If you think of the conditions in the ninth century, of often extreme physical deprivation, shortage of food, shortage of medical care, with many people living on the verge of inanition through the absence of basic supplies, that then reduces the difference between the sexes. It is only in a very ample culture that men can become tall, manly and well-defined and women are voluptuous. Most of the female curves are fat. The gender distinctions would be much less clear."

A thin and emaciated Joan could have bound her small breasts— following the example of such crossdressing saints as Pelagia and Marina in the fourth century, and Apollinaris and Euphrosyne in the fifth—and covered her narrow wrists and wide hips in the simple but voluminous garments that men of the cloth sported in the ninth century as day-wear, and which, in a more elaborate form, they continue to don today on the altar. And she would have been helped immeasurably by a contemporary edict from Rome, reported by the Athenian writer Chalcocondylas, that priests were henceforth allowed to shave their beards. Before that time Joan's virgin chin and upper neck would have attracted suspicion.

What interests Miles more in Joan's case is the link between the psychological and the physical. She is convinced that women can think themselves and their hormones into the part of a man. "For women the hormones and the psyche are very closely related and we are slowly beginning to understand that. It's frequently been suggested that women in power have higher testosterone and androgens, while Joan's menstrual cycle may have been irregular or even stopped."

But there are bigger questions about Joan's mental jump into a male world, and into what all took to be a male body. Key to the credibility of the story is to determine whether what facts we know about her come together into a convincing psychological whole. Why, for example, would she have risked all that she had achieved by taking a lover—quite possibly Anastasius, the first anti-pope—and becoming pregnant, when she was the pope?

"Joan was a classic fraudster," believes Professor David Canter of Liverpool University, whose skills in psychological profiling have been used by police in building up accurate pictures of criminals. "Classic fraudsters enjoy risk-taking. And there comes a point when getting away with it, pulling the trick off, isn't enough. You want to show people that you've got away with it." Joan was, then, a victim of her success, disillusioned at how easy it had become.

With their knack for organisation and compartmentalising every aspect of human existence, the Vatican authorities offer four well-signposted routes around their vast exhibition-hall of a museum. Even those who opt for the most arduous option see only a fraction of what is on display. Tucked away in antechambers and dusty corners are exhibits that have been left in a kind of limbo, technically within the fold of the museum, but outside the boundaries of the authorised version. Hooked by now on the quest for the She-Pope and rarely in my holiday flat, it was for just such a musty corner that I was heading with an attendant watching my every move. The Gabinetto delle Maschere ("Mask Room") had been chained off, and it had taken all my powers of persuasion, plus the mention that I used to edit the Catholic Herald newspaper in London, to get myself admitted to its hallowed precincts. It was currently being used as an informal storeroom, bits of lighting equipment, scaffolding and scraps of black paper everywhere, covering what is its principal attraction, a mosaic floor, taken from Hadrian's Villa at nearby Tivoli. It includes masks in its design. Hence the name of the room.

With eyes downcast to take in this marvel of antiquity, you could easily miss the huge commode-like chair in aubergine marble which sits in the window recess. It carries no explanatory note, only a thick coat of dust. It's a strange object. There is something curious about its proportions. The seat is very high and has cut into it a keyhole shape, the stem open to the front. On closer examination it could be an elderly, rather grand commode, once used by popes perhaps, but now an embarrassing reminder of their humanity.

But the chair's back is at a curious reclining angle, far too relaxed, it would seem, for any practical bodily movement. And the legs, too, are unusual—two slabs of marble down either side, ending in a flourish in the shape of a lion's claws, but leaving the centre, under the keyhole, open and uncluttered. Variously known as the sedia stercoraria — which translates as the "dung chair"—or, rather more understandably, as the "pierced chair," this was the object used to test the sex of newly installed popes before they were handed the keys of St Peter. It's written that in their anxiety to ensure that there would be no more Pope Joans, the church authorities insisted that any candidate chosen by his peers to occupy the papal throne, before his election could be verified, had to sit on this elaborate seat while a young cardinal took advantage of its design to touch his testicles.

Bartolomeo Platina, keeper of the Vatican Library under Pope Sixtus IV (1471-1484), is a first-hand source on this practice. In his Lives of the Popes, this venerable and well-placed scholar links it explicitly with Pope Joan, including his description at the end of an entry on her life as part of a list of preventative measures taken to rule out such gaffes in the future.

There was only one way of testing the theory against the object before my eyes. My guardian angel had wandered off temporarily, leaving me all alone in the Mask Room. The chair wasn't behind railings and had, from the patterns in the dust, recently been used as an impromptu cupboard. It was almost inviting weary passers-by to sit down. With a glance behind me, I plonked myself down.

It instantly felt like a desecration. The Vatican Museum has the aura of a church, and all my childhood training revolved around not touching anything in God's house. Pulse racing, white-faced, I leant back and back and back. As I'd thought, this could not be a commode. The angle of the back was more like a deck chair, designed to put the sitter at his ease and take his mind off the ritual going on below. The keyhole shape, I noticed as I brought my spine vertical, was in precisely the right place for the test. I slid off with a nervous jolt, and tried to rake and rearrange the dust patterns with the pages of my notebook, to cover my sacrilege before the attendant returned. When he did, I smiled and hurried off, tripping over the disengaged chain as I made for the exit before a thunderbolt struck.

The "dung chair" is just one manifestation of the medieval legend of Pope Joan that survives to this day. The edicola that started my search for the She-Pope, and drove me to turn my investigation into a book, is another. The shrine serves as a reminder that travellers, including the Protestant Martin Luther in 1510, visited the spot where Joan gave birth. Her legend, and the cult of commemoration that has grown up around it, has shown great staying power. She has been a dancer to different tunes throughout history. At various times, the tale of Joan has been used for anticlerical purposes—as for example, when in 1793 revolutionary Paris saw not one but four celebratory stage plays based on her deception. It also appealed to anti-Catholic prejudices in Victorian England, when Pope Joan was a polite card game based on treachery and disguise. Spiritual explorers have found a soulmate in Joan—she appears on the tarot cards—and in more recent times she has become something of a feminist icon, cropping up in Caryl Churchill's 1982 play Top Girls. She has even had her more erotic moments—the subject both of a pornographic novel in the 1930s by Rene Dunan, designed to offend prevailing Christian moral judgements, and of a fanciful film in the Seventies starring Liv Ullman as a damsel in distress who gets her own back on the men that use and abuse her.

But the cult is only part of the mystery. It cannot answer the central question, to whit, did she or didn't she? Could a German woman of English parentage have pulled off one of the greatest deceptions of all time and risen, disguised as a man, to the pinnacle of the Catholic church? My attempts to play ecclesiastical detective show that she cannot be dismissed, as she has been by Catholicism, as the creation of a Protestant plot. The evidence that I unearthed in favour of Joan—historical, written, mental, physical, psychological—demands thoughtful perusal, reflection, and weighing before coming to a final verdict.

In Saint Peter's itself, around the base of the canopy that Bernini designed over the main altar, is an intriguing series of eight motifs of a woman wearing a papal crown, who goes through labour and in the final motif produces a baby. When I asked one aging curator about this he shifted uncomfortably and mumbled something about it probably representing Mother Church. For anyone who knows the story of Joan (and the subversive purpose of Bernini, who had by all accounts, a wicked sense of humour) the subtext is obvious—particularly given the presence amid the papal crown in the motifs of a demon. All other explanations simply don't stand up. And the same is true of Joan— the alternatives just don't make sense.

The She-Pope: A Quest for the Truth Behind the Mystery of Pope Joan (Heinemann) by Peter Stanford can be ordered for 16.99£ post-free from:
Telegraph Books Direct
24 Seward Street
London EC1V 3GB
Telephone 0541 557225
Fax 0541 557225.
Please quote ref PA213 when ordering.

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