Pope Joan

[7] Jean de Mailly's chronicle, written around 1250, contains the first mention of an unnamed female pope and inspired several more accounts over the next several years.

Martin introduced details that the female pope's birth name was John Anglicus of Mainz, that she reigned in the 9th century and that she entered the church to follow her lover.

[14][15] The earliest mention of a female pope appears in the Dominican Jean de Mailly's chronicle of Metz, Chronica Universalis Mettensis, written in the early 13th century.

[16]Jean de Mailly's story was picked up by his fellow Dominican Stephen of Bourbon, who adapted it for his work on the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost.

However the legend gained its greatest prominence when it appeared in the third recension (edited revision) of Martin of Opava's Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatorum later in the 13th century.

There she became proficient in a diversity of branches of knowledge, until she had no equal, and, afterward in Rome, she taught the liberal arts and had great masters among her students and audience.

Through ignorance of the exact time when the birth was expected, she was delivered of a child while in procession from St. Peter's to the Lateran, in a lane once named Via Sacra (the sacred way) but now known as the "shunned street" between the Colosseum and St Clement's church.

The golden bodies were rejected by the waves of the sea and corrupted the air, so that a great many people died.However the attribution of this work to Petrarch may be incorrect.

As she was going to the Lateran Church between the Colossean Theatre (so called from Nero's Colossus) and St. Clement's her travail came upon her, and she died upon the place, having sat two years, one month, and four days, and was buried there without any pomp.

This story is vulgarly told, but by very uncertain and obscure authors, and therefore I have related it barely and in short, lest I should seem obstinate and pertinacious if I had admitted what is so generally talked.

A late-14th-century edition of the Mirabilia Urbis Romae, a guidebook for pilgrims to Rome, tells readers that the female Pope's remains are buried at St. Peter's.

Hus's opponents at the trial insisted that his argument proved no such thing about the independence of the Church but they did not dispute that there had been a female pope at all.

The 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia elaborated 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.

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.

He strongly defended his own authority as patriarch and opposed the influence of the Pope in Rome and would have likely highlighted any scandals of that time regarding the papacy; but he never mentions the story once in any of his voluminous writings.

[34] Against the lack of historical evidence to her existence, the question remains as to why the Pope Joan story has been popular and widely believed.

Philip Jenkins in The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice 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.

[35] The sedes 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.

[15] Alain Boureau quotes the humanist Jacopo d'Angelo de Scarparia, who visited Rome in 1406 for the enthronement of Gregory XII.

[37] 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.

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.

Plays featuring or referencing her include Ludwig Achim von Arnim's Päpstin Johanna (1813), a fragment by Bertolt Brecht (in Werke Bd 10), a monodrama, Pausin Johanna, by Cees van der Pluijm (1996), and Caryl Churchill's 1982 play, Top Girls, which featured Pope Joan as a character.

In July 2019 a theatrical show, Pope Joan, was held in Malta at Mdina ditch featuring her as the main character.

The Greek author Emmanuel Rhoides' 1866 novel, The Papess Joanne, was admired by Mark Twain and Alfred Jarry and freely translated by Lawrence Durrell as The Curious History of Pope Joan (1954).

The American Donna Woolfolk Cross's 1996 historical romance, Pope Joan (later produced as a German musical and 2009 film).

Other novels include Wilhelm Smets' Das Mährchen von der Päpstin Johanna auf’s Neue erörtert (1829), Marjorie Bowen's Black Magic (1909), Ludwig Gorm's Päpstin Johanna (1912), Yves Bichet's La Papesse Jeanne (2005) and Hugo N. Gerstl's Scribe: The Story of the Only Female Pope (2005).

In the 2016 novel by Robert Harris, Conclave (later filmed), a liberal candidate to the Papacy states that his reginal name would be "John", foreshadowing a twist with parallels to the legend of Pope Joan.