Have you heard the one about the Pope who was a lady? They say that in 858 Pope John Anglicus was in a procession trying to climb onto a horse when suddenly he..went into labor. Experts were forced to conclude that the person who had been Pontiff for the past two years, seven months and four days was in fact a woman.
Wait! I actually hadn't heard that story. Where does it come from?
Like many extraordinary Christian stories, it wasn't written down until a few generations after the events depicted. In this case, the first telling of the story was a light-hearted mention in some 13th Century Dominican texts, most famously in the Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatorum by Friar Martin of Troppau.
But enough Dominican jokes. Europeans loved this tale. For hundreds of years, everyone accepted that there had been a Pope Joan. Although her real name may have Gilberta. Or Agnes. Or Jutta.
Giovanni Bocaccio wrote about her. The Cathedral of Siena placed her bust between the busts of other Popes on display, for a few hundred years. It's gone now. And supposedly, Popes-to-be had to have their genitals examined prior to taking office.
Then, some began to question the story. Some said that Pope Joan was only a fiction created to explain the John XX problem. That is, somewhere along the way they skipped a number when counting the different Pope Johns, and thus one could deduce the existence of the hidden, forgotten Pope Joan.
Allow me to make a point here:
Hatshepsut the Egyptian Woman-Pharoah ardently tried to win the approval of the establishment and even wore a ceremonial strap-on beard. After her death her enemies scratched her name off the King Lists on selected monuments.
And again, the disbelievers in Pope Joan made their case. In the time of John XIX it was decided that there were actually two Popes counted as John XIV and so they could then go directly to John XXI without stopping at John XX. So how could there have been a Pope Joan?
Allow me to make two points here:
1) The Pope is supposed to be infallible but can't count?
2) "The King....has had a long journey here and miscounted....He is Louis XVII." - Monty Python, The Golden Age of Ballooning
"Pope Joan" by Donna Woolfolk Cross was a recent best-selling novel and was made into a movie. In Germany, anyway.
-E.M.
John was the name of 21 popes, an antipope who called himself John XVI and an antipope who called himself John XXIII five hundred years before the legitimate John XXIII from the early sixties. 21 plus 2 is 23, so it all works out. :-D
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