Though she never existed, the myth persists for a reason.
Was there really a pope named Joan? The historical evidence says no—that the story is just a myth. But the history behind this particular myth can teach us a great deal about Church history done well or poorly. At the same time, the tale of Pope Joan demonstrates why myths matter.
Several versions of la popessa (or “the popess”) story exist, but the most common tells of a ninth-century girl of great intellect and devotion who decided that she wanted to learn more about her faith. Since girls were largely excluded from studying, she dressed like a boy and adopted the name Johannes, which comes out as John, Joan, or Johanna in other versions. She may have been English, as we find her with last names such as Anglicus or Anglicanus. One version has her living with English parents in Germany under the names Jutta, Agnes, Anna, or Gilberta. Apparently, she later followed a lover from Mainz to Athens to Rome.
Disguised as a monk or scribe, Joan’s smarts brought her attention, and she quickly rose through the clerical ranks, all the way up to cardinal. Eventually, according to the myth, she was elected pope, but was discovered to be a woman when she gave birth while riding a horse down a particular street in Rome. In a brutal conclusion to the tale, the crowd—alarmed and enraged, shocked and surprised—pulled her from the horse and killed her and the child. Some of the tales add horrid details such as being tied to her horse’s tail and paraded around Rome before being stoned to death.
Pope Joan, Debunked
Historians deal with facts, not fable. To do so, we examine sources, but we don’t always take them at face value. We ask: Who was writing something? When were they writing? For what audience? Once we start to pull on the story of Joan, the tale unravels.
The first time that Joan appears is in the middle of the 13th century, when a Dominican friar named Jean de Mailly offers a German version in his Universal Chronicle of Metz. There, he places the story more than 150 years earlier, stating a legend that Pope Victor III was succeeded in 1087 by a woman disguised as a man. Others tell a similar tale starting about a decade after de Mailly, but they place it way back in the early 900s or move it forward into the early 1100s.
In his Chronicle of Popes and Emperors, a Dominican named Martin of Troppau placed John/Joan even farther back in time. When Leo IV died in 855, la popessa (referred to as John Anglicus) reigned for about two and-a-half years.
Clearly we have here far too wide a range of dates to be authentic. If we look closely, we immediately find several issues. In the first account, the one by de Mailly, we discover that he wrote the words “confirm” and “to be verified” in the margins. That is, it looked as if he was recording a myth and reminding himself to delve deeper later, though if he did, we don’t have the result of his investigation. (Think of the times we hear “there are uncon- firmed reports that . . .” on the news that turn out to be nothing more than rumor.)
Next, in other reliable accounts where historians have been able to check details, there simply is no place in the chronological record for Joan in 855 or 1087. Many of these sources, like that of de Mailly, use phrases like “it is reported” or “it is said.”
Some say Joan was erased from history by men who didn’t want her story told. Historians call this an argument ex silentio (“from silence”): that is, we can’t say something didn’t happen because we don’t have evidence that it didn’t. That’s a lot of double and triple negatives; it’s also not how historians work.
Where we don’t have full evidence, we go as far as the evidence can take us and then perhaps we judge as to what was or wasn’t likely, given the evidence. When you consider all the real evidence about Joan, she just doesn’t add up.
A French Protestant named David Blondel was the first person to debunk the Pope Joan myth. Working in a modern scientific way when it came to analyzing manuscripts, he looked closely at the sources and discovered that the myth simply didn’t fit the facts. He had no axe to grind; he just stuck to the evidence and found that there was no reliable data.
Why the Myth Matters
So why does the myth of Joan persist? Partially it’s because people love a good story. People might also want a myth to be true to serve their own purposes. Some stories, although they are myths, become so rooted in a popular belief or urban legend that people believe they truly happened. There is even a genre for this called “mythistory” (a portmanteau of myth and his- tory). An American version is George Washington chopping down the cherry tree and being unable to lie to his father about it.
One of the finest scholars of Pope Joan, a Frenchman named Alain Boureau, called Joan a “symbolic object.” Many commentators say that our opinions about the papacy are a Rorschach test. We might think of Pope Joan in the same way. What we think about the myth of Pope Joan tells people as much about ourselves and our agendas as it does about la popessa.
