Speaker 1: Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm
Speaker 1: and Mild from Aaron Mankie listener discretion advised. In twelve
Speaker 1: fifty five, a pope in northeast France hand wrote a
Speaker 1: strange tale hoax in Rome, a woman becomes pope. According
Speaker 1: to the Chronicle, in around eleven hundred, a woman disguised
Speaker 1: herself as a man in order to rise through the
Speaker 1: ranks of the Catholic hierarchy, from notary to cardinal and all.
Speaker 2: The way to pope. This woman pulled off her scheme
Speaker 2: for a while, until one day she the pope, was
Speaker 2: riding on horseback and went into labor, revealing her deception
Speaker 2: to the Romans. The citizens of Rome dragged her by
Speaker 2: horseback and stoned her as punishment for breaking the rules.
Speaker 2: This short, scandalous story raised a number of questions. Who
Speaker 2: was this woman, where was she from? And how did
Speaker 2: she make it through the gauntlet of Catholic politics without
Speaker 2: getting caught? How did she get pregnant? If this happened
Speaker 2: in eleven hundred, then why is this a female pope?
Speaker 2: Objectively a massive deal only being reported for the first
Speaker 2: time one hundred and fifty years later. Why is the
Speaker 2: one detail we get about her time as pope that
Speaker 2: she gave birth on horseback, which, while impressive and interesting,
Speaker 2: doesn't seem to be the main headline of the story,
Speaker 2: which again is that a woman was pope for the
Speaker 2: first and only time in recorded history. This handwritten chronicle
Speaker 2: from the monastery is even more ambiguous about the pope's
Speaker 2: gender than you might imagine. While the headline explicitly calls
Speaker 2: the pope in the story a woman, the text itself
Speaker 2: never refers to the pope with any female pronouns, instead
Speaker 2: opting for gender neutral pronouns like it and the neuter animated,
Speaker 2: which is a Latin tense that defaults to male. The
Speaker 2: publication notes that the story is quote to be verified,
Speaker 2: seeming to hedge the scandalous nature of the story. In
Speaker 2: spite of these inconsistencies, the story of the alleged popess
Speaker 2: spread among the medieval Catholic world, with various authors filling
Speaker 2: in their own details about the legend. The popees became
Speaker 2: an english woman from Maines. As a young woman, she
Speaker 2: fell in love with a scholar and accompanied him to Athens.
Speaker 2: While she was intellectually voracious, the Athenian professors wouldn't let
Speaker 2: her into their classrooms, and so she disguised herself as
Speaker 2: a man and moved to Rome. Admired for her vast
Speaker 2: knowledge of scripture, she so successfully embedded herself in the
Speaker 2: Catholic Church that she was unanimously elected Pope. She served
Speaker 2: in the position for two years until she suddenly gave birth,
Speaker 2: traveling from Saint Peter's Basilica to Saint John Lantern, which
Speaker 2: uncovered her deception. Carved busts reveal her name Johannes the Eighth,
Speaker 2: or Pope Joan, but there is still one massive problem
Speaker 2: with that more detailed history. There is no actual evidence
Speaker 2: to prove that Pope Joan ever existed. The story I
Speaker 2: just told about the englishwoman from Maines. It became the
Speaker 2: most popular version of the legend, but that story was
Speaker 2: cobbled together from hundreds of different accounts with wildly desparate details.
Speaker 2: Some versions of the Pope Joan story take place in
Speaker 2: the year nine hundred, others in eight hundred and fifty,
Speaker 2: others in eleven hundred. In some accounts, Joan is named
Speaker 2: agnes Anna or Gilberta, and the length of her papacy
Speaker 2: varies from two months to two years. One would think
Speaker 2: that such a scandal would have produced some documentary evidence.
Speaker 2: She might have been depicted in paintings or sculptures, or
Speaker 2: mentioned in articles or letters, But there were no references
Speaker 2: to her to be found. So I have to be
Speaker 2: the unfortunate bearer of bad news on this story and
Speaker 2: make it very clear to you, the listener, that it
Speaker 2: is incredibly unlikely that a female pope ever existed. One
Speaker 2: would think that this lack of evidence would deter people
Speaker 2: from spreading the story, but the opposite happened. There wouldn't
Speaker 2: be a single source questioning the validity of the Pope
Speaker 2: Jone story until three hundred years after the initial chronicle
Speaker 2: was published in twelve fifty, and Jon's legend would continue
Speaker 2: to spread for centuries after that, surviving debunking after debunking.
Speaker 2: In fact, Pope Joan became a kind of Catholic forest gump,
Speaker 2: popping up throughout pivotal moments in the history of the
Speaker 2: Catholic Church and playing central roles in religious conflicts. She
Speaker 2: even spread far beyond the church into secular life, popping
Speaker 2: up in plays, novels, and even card games. How did
Speaker 2: the almost certainly false myth of Pope Joan manage to
Speaker 2: survive for almost a millennium in spite of shoddy evidence
Speaker 2: and multiple debunkings. In this episode, we'll try to solve
Speaker 2: the mystery, tracing the story of a woman who, as
Speaker 2: Catholic scholar Tom Noble put it quote, never lived, but
Speaker 2: who nevertheless refuses to die. I'm Danish Schwartz and this
Speaker 2: is noble blood. To solve the mystery of how and
Speaker 2: why the legend of Pope Joan spread, we should look
Speaker 2: more closely at the first mention of her, the Monastery
Speaker 2: Chronicle from twelve fifty five. Unfortunately, we don't know much
Speaker 2: about it. The author of this text was a Dominican
Speaker 2: monk named Jean de Maii, but scholars don't know much
Speaker 2: about him other than that he wrote this article and
Speaker 2: one other book of legends. We don't know where he
Speaker 2: got his information about Pope Joan from, or what his
Speaker 2: intentions were for this story, or if he believed the
Speaker 2: story himself, but Maille's role as a Dominican monk gives
Speaker 2: us a clue. Maye wasn't alone in reproducing sketchy rumors.
Speaker 2: In fact, it was a matter of principle for friars
Speaker 2: to document as many stories as possible, no matter how apocryphal.
Speaker 2: It didn't even seem to matter whether or not the
Speaker 2: author believed the story they were reporting. Jean de Meili
Speaker 2: wrote about plenty of legends he didn't personally believe. For example,
Speaker 2: he wrote an account of the Nativity where Salome, one
Speaker 2: of Jesus' disciples, wanted to confirm Mary's virginity before she
Speaker 2: gave birth, so Salome felt her up, which caused her
Speaker 2: arm to wither away. At the end of the piece,
Speaker 2: Meilee concludes that this event probably never happened. This might
Speaker 2: raise the question if Malee didn't believe the story himself,
Speaker 2: then why did he spread it? After all, all, the
Speaker 2: Salome story, like the Pope Joan story, was not widely known.
Speaker 2: Mainly wasn't debunking a popular rumor. He was simply telling
Speaker 2: the story and then mentioning that he didn't find it plausible.
Speaker 2: Pope Joan scholar Elaine Borough argues that Dominican writers of
Speaker 2: that era emphasized quantity over quality. Part of this was
Speaker 2: politically motivated. After the end of the Crusades, the Catholic
Speaker 2: Church had more cultural power than ever, and they flexed
Speaker 2: that power by trying to explain and account for anything
Speaker 2: and everything, even traditions that seemed to challenge the Catholic
Speaker 2: Church's authority. Reproducing rumors, even ones that cast doubt on
Speaker 2: the authority of the Catholic Church or undermined biblical accounts,
Speaker 2: made them less threatening. Recording rumors and apocrypha was also
Speaker 2: a matter of religious doctrine. According to the Bible, Jesus
Speaker 2: appeared in the middle of human history rather than in
Speaker 2: the beginning, suggesting that a seismic divine event could occur
Speaker 2: at any time. Therefore, it was crucial that Catholic writers
Speaker 2: document any rumor because it may gain religious significance later.
Speaker 2: In the minds of these writers, it would be way
Speaker 2: worse to leave out a potentially significant event than it
Speaker 2: would be to spread a rumor that turned out to
Speaker 2: be irrelevant or untrue. Other Catholic writers would echo this
Speaker 2: logic when reproducing the story of Pope Joan. For centuries
Speaker 2: after that first story was originally published, it became something
Speaker 2: of a self fulfilling prophecy. The story had become so
Speaker 2: widespread that it would be weirder not to include it.
Speaker 2: One Catholic writer, Platina, would say this explicitly when he
Speaker 2: wrote his version of the story of Pope Joan in
Speaker 2: fourteen seventy nine, writing that he wasn't certain that Pope
Speaker 2: Joan actually existed, but he did not want quote to
Speaker 2: omit too obstinately and tenaciously what everyone affirms. Peer pressure
Speaker 2: wasn't the only reason the story gained traction. Another reason
Speaker 2: the story spread was that it was useful in clearing
Speaker 2: up some inconsistencies around papal infallibility. Around the time that
Speaker 2: Pope Joan appeared in the record in the twelve fifties,
Speaker 2: monks were pretty unhappy with the pope, Pope Innocent the Fourth,
Speaker 2: who limited Franciscan monk's right to preach and hear confession.
Speaker 2: This made the pope hugely unpopular, but he was difficult
Speaker 2: to criticize because, according to Catholic doctrine, he was ordained
Speaker 2: by God to rule. By suggesting that a woman could
Speaker 2: have ascended to the papacy, the Pope Joan story showed
Speaker 2: that the Church had made mistakes before, so it wouldn't
Speaker 2: be out of the question if it allowed an unworthy
Speaker 2: man like Pope Innocent to rule. In twelve seventy nine,
Speaker 2: an archbishop Martin of Opava emphasized that reading when he
Speaker 2: published another account of the female pope in his book
Speaker 2: of Legends. He explained that Pope Joan was intelligent and
Speaker 2: well respected, and that she was unanimously elected to the papacy.
Speaker 2: Even so, her reign was invalid because a woman could
Speaker 2: not be pope, suggesting that pope's could be illegitimate even
Speaker 2: if they were elected fairly. It's worth noting that we
Speaker 2: don't know for sure whether or not Martin of Opava
Speaker 2: actually intended to include the Pope Joan story in his work.
Speaker 2: Doesn't appear in early editions of the book, and the
Speaker 2: story actually first appears in editions of the book around
Speaker 2: thirteen oh four in different handwriting, leading many scholars to
Speaker 2: believe the story was added later by a different writer. Still,
Speaker 2: Martin of Opava's story became the definitive account of Pope Joan.
Speaker 2: His book was a best seller, and it spread the
Speaker 2: rumor throughout Europe, getting translated into several languages. It wasn't
Speaker 2: just popular, it was also the first version of the
Speaker 2: story that actually attempted to give historical evidence for her reign.
Speaker 2: Opava gave the pope a name John, which would later
Speaker 2: be feminized to Joan. He changed the date of her
Speaker 2: reign from eleven hundred to the eight fifties, and suggested
Speaker 2: that she ruled after Pope Leo the fourth. It's unclear
Speaker 2: how he came up with these details. There was a
Speaker 2: Pope John John the eighth in the eight hundreds. Like Joan,
Speaker 2: his reign was brief. He reconciled a schism between Western
Speaker 2: and Eastern branches of Catholicism through compromise, which many fellow
Speaker 2: Catholics considered weak and quote womanish Opava may have conflated
Speaker 2: criticisms of his quote effeminate nature into the idea that
Speaker 2: he was actually a woman disguised as a man the
Speaker 2: whole time. It also wasn't totally out of the question
Speaker 2: for a woman to have sought political power through the
Speaker 2: Church at that time. In the tenth century, there was
Speaker 2: what people called a government of harlots, or later a
Speaker 2: pornocracy in Rome, where a few wives and mistresses of
Speaker 2: noblemen attempted to manipulate papal succession from behind the scenes.
Speaker 2: A noble woman in Rome named Theodora advanced several men
Speaker 2: to the papacy, one of whom she allegedly slept with
Speaker 2: and another who had a child with her daughter, Morosia.
Speaker 2: Morosia herself would later advance her own son to the papacy.
Speaker 2: People mockingly called these women popouses, since these women seemed
Speaker 2: to be the true source of political power and influence,
Speaker 2: puppeting their popes to advance their own agendas. Many of
Speaker 2: those popes were also named John, connecting those accounts to
Speaker 2: Martin of Opava's story. These hypotheseses aren't perfect. The dates
Speaker 2: don't line up. Opava thought that Joan reigned in eight
Speaker 2: point fifty, while the quote effeminate Pope John the Eighth
Speaker 2: held the throne in eight seventy, and Theodora and Morosia
Speaker 2: rose to power in the nine hundreds. Still, they suggest
Speaker 2: that there was a pervasive anxiety in the Catholic Church
Speaker 2: about the influence of women and femininity in religious life,
Speaker 2: which brings us to another reason the story of Pope
Speaker 2: Joan proved useful to the Catholic Church. It discouraged women
Speaker 2: from pursuing political power within the church. Another writer from
Speaker 2: the twelve hundreds, at Tande bourbonc published a fiery polemic
Speaker 2: about Pope Joan, suggesting she was a harlot who had
Speaker 2: what he called quote the audacity or rather insanity to
Speaker 2: become pope. According to him, Joan solicits the help of
Speaker 2: the devil himself, who helps her achieve her political ambitions.
Speaker 2: This version of the story has a clear moral the
Speaker 2: Church should be wary of wily women with the audacity
Speaker 2: to seek religious power, because it clearly means they are
Speaker 2: in league with the devil. Opava and Bourbon's version of
Speaker 2: the Pope Joan stories couldn't be more different. Opava's account
Speaker 2: is even keeled, based in true or not what purports
Speaker 2: to be historical detail, and it's slightly critical of the
Speaker 2: Catholic Church, while Bourbone's account is salacious, over the top
Speaker 2: and fiercely defensive of the Church, suggesting that the only
Speaker 2: way a woman could have become pope was through black magic.
Speaker 2: But still, the differences in these stories suggest that Pope
Speaker 2: Joan was useful to Catholic writers with a variety of
Speaker 2: styles and agendas. By the fourteen hundreds, the story of
Speaker 2: Pope Joan had become so widespread that Pope jon became
Speaker 2: even more entrenched in the Catholic canon, beyond just compilations
Speaker 2: of legends. When the Duomo of Siena commissioned a series
Speaker 2: wories of busts of past popes to display in the
Speaker 2: giant ornate Cathedral, they included Pope Joan, proudly displaying her
Speaker 2: alongside seminole figures in Catholic history. The bust of Pope
Speaker 2: Joan wouldn't last forever. Two centuries later, on August seventh,
Speaker 2: sixteen hundred, the Governor of Sienna delivered an edict commanding
Speaker 2: quote remove the pope ess from the cathedral. Just two
Speaker 2: days later, the bust of the pope es was altered
Speaker 2: to depict Pope Zacharias, essentially disguising Joan as a man
Speaker 2: once more. This was the culmination of the work of
Speaker 2: Florimond de Raymond, who had campaigned for months to have
Speaker 2: the bust removed, suggesting that the legend.
Speaker 1: Was a hoax.
Speaker 2: This event, the bust removal, marks a massive shift in
Speaker 2: the Pope Joan story. The ledgend had lasted for almost
Speaker 2: four hundred years without question, but now people were calling
Speaker 2: the story blasphemous. So what happened in fourteen fifteen, more
Speaker 2: than four hundred years after she supposedly lived. Pope Joan
Speaker 2: appeared in an unlikely place, a heresy trial. The defendant,
Speaker 2: Jan Hus, was a czech Man who was once the
Speaker 2: rector for Prague University, but he had turned his back
Speaker 2: on the Church and became its best known critic. He
Speaker 2: was especially harsh about the sinful behavior of clergy, bishops,
Speaker 2: and even the papacy, arguing that the true authority of
Speaker 2: Catholicism wasn't the Pope but Christ himself. Unlike Jesus, who
Speaker 2: was infallible, popes and other clergy were subject to the
Speaker 2: same sinful urgent as everyone else. This belief was controversial,
Speaker 2: especially for the Catholic higher ups who capitalized off of
Speaker 2: their presumed infallibility. Hughes had been dragged to Constance, a
Speaker 2: small university town in Germany, to defend his beliefs in
Speaker 2: court or be executed. At the trial, he was asked
Speaker 2: to give examples of sinful or illegitimate popes. He listed
Speaker 2: a few, but the clergy struck each of them down
Speaker 2: one by one, with a single exception, Pope Joan. Hughes
Speaker 2: had written earlier in the century that Pope Joan was
Speaker 2: proof that quote, the most unlettered layman or a female
Speaker 2: or a heretic and Antichrist may be Pope end quote.
Speaker 2: The clergy, which had been disproving and discrediting us at
Speaker 2: every turn, could not challenge him on this point. This
Speaker 2: event mark's a turning point in the legend of Pope Joan.
Speaker 2: When it initially appeared, the Pope Joan myth was pretty harmless.
Speaker 2: It was a fanciful, salacious rumor that actually proved useful
Speaker 2: as a way for the Church to explore and explain
Speaker 2: doctrinal inconsistencies. But now Pope Joan was being used by
Speaker 2: enemies of the Church as a way to challenge the
Speaker 2: Pope's very existence. It wasn't just use using Joan to
Speaker 2: undermine the authority of the pope. At this time, the
Speaker 2: Catholic Church was in a political crisis. It had managed
Speaker 2: to elect two popes, one based in Rome and another
Speaker 2: in Avignon, who were fighting for legitimacy. A council in
Speaker 2: Pisa tried to resolve this by picking a new pope altogether,
Speaker 2: but this plan backfired. The two deposed popes stood their
Speaker 2: ground and kept control over their territories, so instead of
Speaker 2: one pope, Pisa now meant that there were three. While
Speaker 2: a pseudo pope like Joan may have been a funny
Speaker 2: anomaly in the thirteenth century. By the fifteenth century, with
Speaker 2: illegitimate popes and anti popes cropping up right and left,
Speaker 2: it was less funny. In the bitter debate about what
Speaker 2: to do with all of those popes, both sides used
Speaker 2: Joan to defend their positions. On the one hand, Pope
Speaker 2: Joan proved that there was a precedent for governing bodies
Speaker 2: to depose of an unfit pope. On the other hand,
Speaker 2: Pope Joan was a warning that deposing a pope could
Speaker 2: cause chaos because, according to another legend, after Pope Joan
Speaker 2: was executed, Catholic leadership struggled to replace her church was
Speaker 2: left popeless for two years. This reasoning was accidentally kind
Speaker 2: of progressive, because these thinkers are arguing that Pope Joan
Speaker 2: should have stayed in power and that it was better
Speaker 2: to have a female pope than no pope at all.
Speaker 2: And even though hus was successfully convicted of heresy and
Speaker 2: burned at the stake, his threat to the church only
Speaker 2: grew stronger after his death. His execution sparked a new
Speaker 2: religious movement, the Hussites, who rejected core Catholic doctrines like
Speaker 2: Latin masses, the veneration of Saints, and even churches. The
Speaker 2: movement started expanding across Bohemia. They too brought up Pope
Speaker 2: Joan as evidence that Church authorities were not infallible. In
Speaker 2: fourteen fifty one, the Bishop of Siena traveled to a
Speaker 2: Hussate stronghold in Tubor to debate them on that point.
Speaker 2: To discredit them, he undermined the veracity of the Pope
Speaker 2: Joan story, albeit in a fairly weak way, saying tentatively
Speaker 2: quote the story is not certain. This moment foreshadows the
Speaker 2: way the Catholic Church would majorly turn on Pope Joan
Speaker 2: in the sixteenth century, as threats to the Church's authority
Speaker 2: continued to spread, while the Holy Roman Empire managed to
Speaker 2: quash the Hussite Revolution by the end of the fifteenth century.
Speaker 2: In fifteen seventeen, a new threat to the Catholic Church
Speaker 2: emerged in the form of Martin Luther's ninety five Theses. Luther,
Speaker 2: like jan Hesse and the Hussites, would invoke Pope Joan.
Speaker 2: In one of Luther's informal talks, he mentioned seeing a
Speaker 2: statue of Joan during a trip to Rome, but he
Speaker 2: didn't make much of it. Instead, he wonders why the
Speaker 2: Church would put such an embarrassing object on public display,
Speaker 2: which is actually a pretty effective dis Though Martin Luther
Speaker 2: himself didn't spend much time delving into Pope Joan, he
Speaker 2: would of course spark the Protestant Reformation, which in turn
Speaker 2: caused an avalanche of Pope Joan discourse. From fifteen fifty
Speaker 2: to seventeen hundred, Protestants and Catholics would produce at least
Speaker 2: forty pamphlets devoted exclusively to Pope Joan, which doesn't include reprints,
Speaker 2: new editions, translations, and publications that are lost that are
Speaker 2: cited in surviving texts. Protestants started this century's long debate
Speaker 2: in the fifteen fifties, seizing on Joan as proof that
Speaker 2: the Catholic Church was toast. In fifteen fifty six, Italian
Speaker 2: Protestant Pierre Paolo Bulgario argued in over the top fiery
Speaker 2: prose that Joan seized the papacy by magical arts and
Speaker 2: gave the Catholic Church a whore for a leader and
Speaker 2: a mother for a father. John Calvin, the Protestant who
Speaker 2: would inspire his own namesake Christian sect, Calvinism went even further.
Speaker 2: According to him, not only did Pope jon prove that
Speaker 2: individual popes could sin, she also potentially undermined the whole
Speaker 2: structure of the Catholic Church. He argued that Catholic bishops
Speaker 2: couldn't claim to be directly descendants of Jesus's apostles if
Speaker 2: a fraudulent pope disrupted the chain. Similarly, in the two
Speaker 2: years she allegedly reigned, Pope Joan would have ordained priests
Speaker 2: and bishops, and those priests and bishops would have gone
Speaker 2: on to ordain other priests and bishops, and so on
Speaker 2: and so on, and so. If Pope Joan was illegitimate,
Speaker 2: her bishops and priests would be two, and so would
Speaker 2: all of the bishops and priests in their downlines. By
Speaker 2: that logic, the existence of Pope Joan could potentially render
Speaker 2: the entire structure of the Catholic Church illegitimate. Though Pope
Speaker 2: Joan had originally been a Catholic propaganda tool, after decades
Speaker 2: of watching the Protestants use her to discredit them, the
Speaker 2: Catholic Church had enough. In fifteen sixty two, they finally
Speaker 2: decided to fire back with a book by Anophrio Panvinio,
Speaker 2: which set out to definitively disprove the Pope jon myth
Speaker 2: for the final time. Like the Bishop of Siena who
Speaker 2: had argued about Joan with the Hussites in fourteen fifty,
Speaker 2: Anophrio took a reasonable cautious approach to undermine the story,
Speaker 2: focusing on the lack of documentary evidence, the confusing dates,
Speaker 2: and the tentative language in even the earliest retellings of
Speaker 2: the story. In fifteen eighty seven, a French Catholic writer
Speaker 2: named Flora and Raymond made a much bigger splash in
Speaker 2: his book length debunking of the Pope Joan myth. He
Speaker 2: argued that the introduction of Pope Joan in the thirteenth
Speaker 2: century was actually part of a German anti Catholic conspiracy.
Speaker 2: He thought that the Germans, who in his mind, were
Speaker 2: too promiscuous, wanted to undermine the Church's chastity. Those licentious
Speaker 2: Germans created this salacious story to make the Church seem
Speaker 2: hypocritical and giving them more licensed to sleep around. This
Speaker 2: was a bizarre claim, founded more on Raymond's bias against
Speaker 2: Germans than on any historical facts. Pope Jone. Historian Elainborough
Speaker 2: says that Raymond swung for the fences rhetorically speaking because
Speaker 2: of his quote relatively unenlightened mind end quote. Nevertheless, in
Speaker 2: his big mic drop moment, Raymond suggested that it was
Speaker 2: ironic that the Protestants were so fixated on Pope jan
Speaker 2: when they were under the spell of their own female
Speaker 2: usurper of religious authority, namely Queen Elizabeth I, who declared
Speaker 2: herself the leader of the Anglican Church after becoming Queen
Speaker 2: of England. Raymond's rebuttal pushed the Protestants to get even
Speaker 2: more conspiratorial. In sixteen ten, Alexander Cook wrote an elaborate,
Speaker 2: fervid defense of Pope Jones's existence to match the rays
Speaker 2: and takedown. Echoing contemporary clickbait, Cook bragged that Catholics quote
Speaker 2: hate him. Cook claimed that the lack of documentary evidence
Speaker 2: for Joan pointed to a Catholic cover up. According to Cook,
Speaker 2: Catholics were intentionally destroying textual evidence of Pope Joan in
Speaker 2: order to suppress her threats to the papal line of succession.
Speaker 2: The claim was just not true. If anything, Catholics of
Speaker 2: the fourteenth century were the Ones, adding in the story
Speaker 2: of Pope Joan into older texts to make her seem
Speaker 2: more legitimate. But in his enthusiasm to prove the existence
Speaker 2: of Pope Joan, it's pretty apparent that Alexander Cook lost
Speaker 2: the forest for the trees a little bit. One of
Speaker 2: the main tenets of Protestantism is that the Bible was
Speaker 2: the core of religious life, rather than legends of saints
Speaker 2: or elaborate ritual like Latin masses or ornate churches and cathedrals.
Speaker 2: Without documentary evidence of Pope Joan, Cook was turning to
Speaker 2: exactly the random books of legends and paintings that Protestants
Speaker 2: like Martin Luther and Jan Hess built their careers on. Repudiating.
Speaker 2: The massive reversal suggested how far the Pope Jones story
Speaker 2: had come. The story became so symbolically important that it
Speaker 2: had Catholics turning on each other and Protestants lionizing Catholic apocrypha.
Speaker 2: David Blondell, a seventeenth century Calvinist minister and writer, recognized
Speaker 2: the absurdity of the situation. In sixteen forty seven, he
Speaker 2: broke with his fellow Protestants and wrote a debunking of
Speaker 2: the Pope Jones story, which many considered a betrayal of
Speaker 2: the cause. Looking back on the time fifty years later,
Speaker 2: one source says, quote would it not have been better
Speaker 2: to leave the Papists the trouble of wiping their own
Speaker 2: filth away? End? Quote? Some even thought that he must
Speaker 2: have been in league with the Catholics, but it seems
Speaker 2: that Blundell was just motivated by the truth, and many
Speaker 2: Protestants and Catholics were convinced by Blundell's account Because of
Speaker 2: his unbiased approach. One could take issue with the Jones
Speaker 2: story for reasons other than defending Catholicism. After Blundell published
Speaker 2: his book, The Pace of Pope Joan, articles slowed down
Speaker 2: on both sides. Blundell set the stage for the modern
Speaker 2: attitude about Pope Joan that the story was largely a hoax.
Speaker 2: You might think that this was the last we'd hear
Speaker 2: about Pope Joan, But it turns out that the legend
Speaker 2: of the female Pope would take on a life of
Speaker 2: its own in the secular world, a life that would
Speaker 2: keep her legend alive for centuries to come. While the
Speaker 2: Catholics and Protestants were having their own centuries long flame
Speaker 2: war about Pope Jones's clerical legitimacy. Joan was gaining traction
Speaker 2: in the secular world as a folk hero, perhaps to
Speaker 2: the Church's chagrin. The Pope Jones story had broad appeal.
Speaker 2: What's not to love about a wily, plucky woman who
Speaker 2: outsmarted the church and also managed to get laid while
Speaker 2: doing it. In thirteen sixty, long before the Protestant Revolution
Speaker 2: and a century after the first mention of Pope Joan,
Speaker 2: Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio included a particularly salacious version of
Speaker 2: the story in his book On Faces Women, a compilation
Speaker 2: of stories of notable women from myth and history. Unlike
Speaker 2: his religious contemporaries, Boccaccio didn't care whether or not Joan
Speaker 2: was legitimate or an illegitimate pope. Instead, he focused on
Speaker 2: the more lurid aspects of her story, her alleged lust
Speaker 2: for sex, knowledge, and power. Boccaccio's story begins with Pope
Speaker 2: Joan falling in love with a student and accompanying him
Speaker 2: to Athens, disguising herself as a man to be able
Speaker 2: to pursue her studies as well as to be able
Speaker 2: to pursue her true love. In sort of an Ellwood's
Speaker 2: legally blonde situation. But when her lover dies, she continues
Speaker 2: her pursuit of religious knowledge as a tribute to him,
Speaker 2: and Joan becomes so widely recognized for her intellect that
Speaker 2: she is disguised as a man and unanimously elected Pope.
Speaker 2: The Devil doesn't enter the picture until after she's elected. Pope.
Speaker 2: The Devil encourages her to give in to temptation and
Speaker 2: start sleeping around, which she does. She gets pregnant, and
Speaker 2: the Romans discover her deception and stone her to death.
Speaker 2: In the ending shared by most Pope Joan accounts that said,
Speaker 2: in a stark departure from other Pope Jone stories, Boccaccio
Speaker 2: celebrates Joan for remarkable achievements, whether those achievements are eloping
Speaker 2: with her lover, cross dressing, advancing as a scholar, or
Speaker 2: pursuing clerical power. It's only after she starts seducing other
Speaker 2: men that Boccaccio begins to criticize her. Her tragic downfall
Speaker 2: is that she refused to remain loyal to her dead lover,
Speaker 2: even though she fell prey to lust. Eventually, Boccaccio's Pope
Speaker 2: Joan was a sympathetic portra of a woman as she
Speaker 2: amassed power. What gave Boccaccio's Pope Joan's story such remarkable
Speaker 2: staying power wasn't just that it was sympathetic to Joan,
Speaker 2: but that it presented Joan as an archetype rather than
Speaker 2: a historical figure. Women usually got political power in history
Speaker 2: through familial succession or through marriage, and they tended to
Speaker 2: express that power by manipulating men in their lives, at
Speaker 2: least according to the stories women like Theodora or Morosia
Speaker 2: the Mother Daughter power duo from the nine hundreds. But
Speaker 2: in Boccaccio's story, Pope Joan gained her power through a meritocracy,
Speaker 2: and she exercised it fairly. She was elected into the
Speaker 2: papacy as a result of her scholarly achievements and her
Speaker 2: ability to deceive the Romans by disguising herself as a man.
Speaker 2: Illustrated editions of Boccaccio's book spread the story of Pope
Speaker 2: Joan throughout Europe, with images of her sitting placidly on
Speaker 2: the throne, wearing her papal robes and an ornate triple tiara.
Speaker 2: These images of Pope Joan found their way into a
Speaker 2: tarot card deck, which was introduced into Europe around fourteen fifty.
Speaker 2: Tarot decks, like decks of playing cards, include various suits
Speaker 2: and numbers that a tarot reader interprets to tell you
Speaker 2: your fortune. But what distinguishes tarot decks from regular old
Speaker 2: playing cards are special symbolic cards like the World and
Speaker 2: the Moon, and these cards form what's called the major arcana.
Speaker 2: One card of the major Arcana is the High Priestess.
Speaker 2: Back in the fourteen hundreds, when the taro was initially
Speaker 2: introduced to Europe, this card was the pope Us. The
Speaker 2: oldest surviving tarot deck, commissioned in fourteen fifty by Filippo
Speaker 2: Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan, and by his successor and
Speaker 2: son in law, includes an image of the popis one
Speaker 2: that resembles the wood cut prints of Joan from the
Speaker 2: Boccaccio illustrations. In this image, hand painted with silver and
Speaker 2: gold leaf, the Popess sits on a throne, holding a
Speaker 2: pontifical staff and wearing the typical papal triple tiara, much
Speaker 2: like the Boccaccio illustrations. It wasn't until the late seventeen
Speaker 2: hundreds that the popess would transform into the high priestess.
Speaker 2: In the midst of the French Revolution, the Catholic Church
Speaker 2: was considered unpopular and corrupt. French tarot decks began to
Speaker 2: decenter images of the clergy, a shift that would eventually
Speaker 2: result in the development of the high priestess card in
Speaker 2: the nineteenth century. But while Pope Joan was being scrubbed
Speaker 2: from the tarot deck, she was about to have a
Speaker 2: major moment of resurgence in revolutionary France. In seventeen ninety
Speaker 2: three alone, three plays about Pope Joan debuted in France,
Speaker 2: all body farces aimed at satirizing the monarchy and the
Speaker 2: Catholic Church. Like Boccaccio's version of the Pope jon myth,
Speaker 2: these plays had almost no interest in confirming or denying
Speaker 2: the veracity of the story. Instead, they held up Joan
Speaker 2: as something of a folk hero, willing to thumb her
Speaker 2: nose at the Church's authority in the pursuit of true love.
Speaker 2: But even as Pope Joan established herself firmly as a
Speaker 2: folklore figure, even today, there are some scholars who stubbornly
Speaker 2: assert that Joan could have been a real historical figure
Speaker 2: in spite of the lack of evidence. After all, even
Speaker 2: from the few primary sources presented in this episode, I
Speaker 2: think it's pretty clear that the textual record is contentious
Speaker 2: and confusing. Some scholars think that the primary sources were
Speaker 2: later altered to provide proof of Pope Jones's existence, but
Speaker 2: others think, like the Protestants in the sixteen hundreds, that
Speaker 2: the lack of documentary evidence is more likely a result
Speaker 2: of Catholics frantically scrubbing the pope ess from the archive.
Speaker 2: There is always the possibility that some historian might stumble
Speaker 2: upon a long buried primary source that proves that Pope
Speaker 2: Joan was a real historical figure. Stranger things have happened,
Speaker 2: But until then, it is Joan's ambiguity that makes her compelling,
Speaker 2: at least in my mind. How she was manipulated and used, reinterpreted,
Speaker 2: and trotted out as evidence on every side of multiple debates. Joan,
Speaker 2: even in legendary form, fueled centuries of resistance to the
Speaker 2: Church's misdeeds from the Protestant Reformation all the way through
Speaker 2: the French Revolution. History is a slippery thing, and it
Speaker 2: doesn't work like simple fables with morals. At the end
Speaker 2: of the story. But if the moral of Pope jones
Speaker 2: story is resist the constraints of the institutions you're in
Speaker 2: to fight for more equal opportunities, then that's a pretty
Speaker 2: good lesson. That's the story of the myth of Pope Joan.
Speaker 2: Keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear about
Speaker 2: one of the silliest myths that still persists in Jon's legacy.
Speaker 2: A corollary of the Pope Jone myth was that because
Speaker 2: a woman snuck into the papacy, their needs to be
Speaker 2: a final check at the end of the pope election
Speaker 2: to make sure that all elected popes were male. According
Speaker 2: to legend, popes had to sit on a special chair
Speaker 2: with a hole in it so that someone could reach
Speaker 2: up through the hole and make sure that the Pope
Speaker 2: to be had testicles. This myth appeared initially in around
Speaker 2: twelve ninety in an account of Pope Joan from a
Speaker 2: Benedictine monk. He wrote, quote it is said that this
Speaker 2: is why Romans established the custom of verifying the sex
Speaker 2: of the elected pope through an opening in a stone
Speaker 2: throne end quote. At around the same time, another Dominican
Speaker 2: monk wrote of a spiritual vision he had where quote
Speaker 2: the Spirit of the Lord took hold of him and
Speaker 2: placed him in Rome, where he saw the chair for himself.
Speaker 2: In the next few hundred years, much like the Pope
Speaker 2: Joan myth, the the Chair ritual myth took on a
Speaker 2: life of its own and became known as the Right
Speaker 2: of Verification. Unlike the Pope Joan myth, the Right of
Speaker 2: Verification had more solid evidence for its existence. There are
Speaker 2: some eyewitness accounts of the ritual, and not just visions
Speaker 2: guided by the Holy Spirit. In fourteen oh four, someone
Speaker 2: mentioned that they saw the Pope elect sit on a
Speaker 2: stone throne as part of his inauguration, but it's not
Speaker 2: hard to poke holes in that account because the person
Speaker 2: who wrote it wasn't a member of the Roman Curia,
Speaker 2: so he wouldn't have been able to see the ritual
Speaker 2: in the first place. There was another account of the
Speaker 2: Right of Verification from someone who was actually in the Curia,
Speaker 2: a humanist and member of the Roman Academy named Platina
Speaker 2: that you might remember from earlier in this episode, but
Speaker 2: his version only complied Kate's the historical record, since he
Speaker 2: claimed that the stone throne with a hole in the
Speaker 2: seat wasn't used to verify the pope's sex, but rather
Speaker 2: it was used as a toilet. He wrote, quote that
Speaker 2: seat was prepared in such a manner so that one
Speaker 2: who is invested with such great domination will know that
Speaker 2: he is not God but a man, so he must defecate.
Speaker 2: End quote. It turns out, starting in ten ninety nine,
Speaker 2: a pope had to sit on a perforated marble throne
Speaker 2: as part of the papal election ritual, and in keeping
Speaker 2: with the spirit of Platina's explanation, it was meant to
Speaker 2: humble the pope in a moment that he was about
Speaker 2: to gain absolute power. The ritual was relatively uncontroversial it
Speaker 2: was performed up until fifteen thirteen, but the Pope Joan
Speaker 2: Myth added a rectale for the perforated chair and imbued
Speaker 2: the ritual with a scandalous origin story, which allowed it
Speaker 2: to become sensationalized and exaggerated for centuries. In tandem with
Speaker 2: the Pope Joan Myth, the quote right of verification became
Speaker 2: a hot topic during the Protestant Reformation, although it was
Speaker 2: less existentially threatening to the Catholic Church after all, As
Speaker 2: scholar Tom Noble wrote, quote in the early sixteenth century,
Speaker 2: several writers with grim humor said that the right had
Speaker 2: fallen out of use because recent popes had so many
Speaker 2: bastard children that their sex was not in doubt. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: flormand Durraymond, who you might remember as the one who
Speaker 2: thought that the Pope Joan story was a blasphemous, horny
Speaker 2: German conspiracy theory, was relatively chill about the right of verification.
Speaker 2: He wrote, so that the whole thing was quote so
Speaker 2: gross that the only good response for Catholics was to
Speaker 2: laugh at the Protestants who repeated it. Noble Blood is
Speaker 2: a production of iHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from
Speaker 2: Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is created and hosted by me
Speaker 2: Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston,
Speaker 2: Hannah Zuick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The
Speaker 2: show is edited and produced by Noemi Griffin and rima
Speaker 2: Il Kahali, with supervising producer Josh Thain and executive producers
Speaker 2: Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts
Speaker 2: from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 2: you listen to your favorite shows.