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The Afterlife of Pope Joan

The University of Michigan Press

Chapter One

IMAGES, CEREMONY, AND THE GELDED TEXT

Writing in 1697 and looking back on more than a century of debate concerning the Pope Joan legend, the skeptical French Huguenot philosopher Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) observed: "I believe that some traditions, which are advantageous to the Popes, and supported by as strong reasons as those are which support this [popess] story, would seem worthy [of] the utmost contempt to those who dispute most ardently for it. So certain is it, that the same things appear to us true or false, according as they favour our own, or the opposite party" (Bayle 4: 732-33; Tinsley, "Sozzini's Ghost" 609). By alluding to Reformers' distrust of tradition and pointing to inconsistencies in what anti-Catholic writers embraced as convincing evidence, Bayle identifies a central difficulty for Protestant polemicists. The arguments they deployed to prove that Joan's pontificate had occurred often conflicted with common Protestant assumptions concerning the unreliability of tradition and images, the obscurity of ceremonies, and the certainty of written texts.

Reformers certainly found the popess legend useful and, to borrow Bayle's term,"advantageous." For John Jewel, Joan's "naughty" exploits illustrated popery's moral corruption, and, as we shall see, for John Bale and John Foxe (1516-87), they confirmed the equation between the Church of Rome and the Whore of Babylon (Jewel, Apology 52; Rev. 17-18; Bale, Scriptorvm illustrium 1:116-17; Bale, Pageant 55v-56v; Foxe 2: 7). John Calvin contended that Joan's pontificate undermined papal claims to unbroken apostolic succession from St. Peter, since it would be impossible for subsequent popes to "leap over Popess Joan" (qtd. in Tinsley, "Pope Joan" 388), and Alexander Cooke (1564-1632) went further, suggesting that the popess episode cast doubt on Catholicism's entire sacramental system. "For, it may be well enough," Cooke contends, "that the priests of this present age are descended from those who were ordained by her." In that case, the sacraments administered by such priests would be empty and ineffective: "For, unless the popish priests be priested by a lawful bishop, their priesthood is not worth a rush; unless you lay-papists be absolved by a lawful priest, your absolution is nought worth; and, unless the words of consecration be uttered by a lawful priest, intent upon his business, there follows no substantial change in the creatures of bread and wine" (Pope 108). One can understand, then, why Protestant polemicists wished to argue that the stories concerning Joan were true.

Actually, for more than a decade, such polemicists did not need to argue about the legend's veracity at all, since their assertions passed unchallenged. Although in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Pope Joan figured in debates, not until the sixteenth century did the legend itself become a subject of debate. The philosopher William of Ockham (ca. 1280-ca. 1349), for example, cited the popess in two tracts addressing the Franciscan order's disputes with Pope John XXII (reigning 1316-34) to demonstrate that a false pope, someone unable or unworthy to exercise true papal authority, could occupy the Chair of St. Peter. Although Ockham does not cite Joan by name, as he refers to the woman who "was venerated as pope by the universal Church for two years, seven months, and three days," he echoes Martinus Polonus's report concerning the length of Joan's pontificate almost exactly and thus points to Martinus's "Johannes Anglicus" as the person in question (qtd. in Pardoe and Pardoe 35-36; Boureau, Myth 153-55). Joan also figured in controversies surrounding the Great Schism of the West (1378-1417), the ecclesiastical crisis that erupted when two, and later three, rivals were hailed by different constituencies as the rightful pontiff. Both Jean Gerson, who in order to resolve the crisis asserted the authority of church councils over the pope, and Jean Roques (Jean de Rocha), who defended papal supremacy, cited Joan in their arguments (Boureau, Myth 161-62). Further, according to Peter of Mladonovice's eyewitness account, during the heresy trial of John Hus conducted at the Council of Constance (which was convened to end the Great Schism), Hus's accusers did not challenge his claim that the Church "had been without a head for two years and five months" while a popess occupied St. Peter's Chair (Petr 212). As I note in the earlier discussion of Pope Joan illustrations, even St. Antoninus Pierozzi of Florence, evidently concerned about how the popess narrative might figure in ecclesiastical controversies, contested its import but not its veracity (Boureau, Myth 155). With the modest exception of Enea Silvio de Piccolomini's cautious assertion "the story is not certain," the content of the popess narrative seems to have passed unquestioned until the sixteenth century (qtd. in Boureau, Myth 221-22).

In fact, not until 1562, more than a dozen years after Bale and Calvin incorporated Joan into their polemics, did a Catholic author set out for the first time to disprove the popess's existence. Commissioned by the Roman Curia to update the Liber de vita Christi ac omnium pontificum (Lives of the Popes) (1479) by Platina, the Augustinian friar Onofrio Panvinio (1530-68) took the opportunity to assess Platina's problematic entry on Pope Joan. Platina's text had circulated widely, appearing in forty-three Latin editions before 1600. Moreover, although Platina's early career was stormy, marked by charges of heresy and of conspiring to assassinate Pope Paul II, his later appointment as prefect of the Vatican Library lent authority to the papal biographies that he composed at the suggestion of Sixtus IV. Panvinio's efforts, then, were well placed (Boureau, Myth 22; Hay 147-48; Tinsley, "Pope Joan" 386-87).

In just three pages, Panvinio outlines the arguments against the veracity of the popess legend, arguments that subsequent Catholic writers would repeat and elaborate. He notes the tentativeness of Platina's report, which concludes, "This story is vulgarly told, but by very uncertain and obscure authors" (Platina 1: 225). He examines the documentary evidence, interrogates the least credible details, and speculates about the legend's true origins (Boureau, Myth 246-47). In doing so, he set off a flurry of publications. In 1584 the Austrian Jesuit Georg Scherer (1539-1605) published the first volume solely devoted to refuting the popess legend. Three years later, Florimond de Raemond published his own book-length refutation. Within a year, Protestants had begun publishing their responses. Between 1548 and 1700 the polemical exchange between Protestants and Catholics produced at least forty pamphlets devoted exclusively to the popess. Adding in reprints, new editions, translations, and lost publications cited in surviving texts would, Alain Boureau estimates, increase the number by a factor of at least four, producing "an average of one work per year for a century and a half" (Myth 251). Counting discussions of Pope Joan that constitute only one part of a more broadly focused text would swell that number even further. A century after Panvinio set this exchange in motion, the Calvinist pastor David Blondel (1591-1655) set the stage for its conclusion by, in effect, crossing party lines and composing a Protestant repudiation of the popess legend (published in French in 1647 and 1649, Dutch in 1650, and Latin in 1657). Blondel did not settle the matter; indeed, as recently as 1985 a book attempting to substantiate the legend (Joan Morris's Pope John VIII: An English Woman) appeared in print. However, Blondel's work did demonstrate that skepticism regarding the legend could derive from something other than sectarian bias. As recognition of that fact spread, the pamphlet wars cooled, and the pace of Pope Joan publications slowed.

The most elaborate and most frequently republished English contribution to this early modern exchange was Pope Joane: A Dialogue between a Protestant and a Papist, a text that we touched upon when discussing the images of the popess and child. Its author, the Anglican vicar Alexander Cooke, published at least three other polemical tracts, one in multiple editions, prompting Anthony à Wood (1632-95) to report that he was "hated" by all the Roman Catholics "who had read his works" (qtd. in Dictionary 4: 1001). Cooke's 128-page treatise on the popess was published in London in 1610 and again in 1625; translated into Latin and published at Oppenheim in 1616 and 1619; adapted into French in 1633; and transformed into a monologic tract and published again in 1675, 1740, and 1785 as A Present for a Papist: or The Life and Death of Pope Joan. It incorporates arguments advanced in less detail by earlier English writers such as John Jewel, Thomas Bell, John Mayo (died 1629), and Andrew Willet. Examining this widely circulated text, well grounded in the first fifty years of debate regarding the popess narrative, reveals the difficulties that Protestants confronted. Lacking compelling textual proof of Joan's career, they sought evidence from sources they conventionally approached with deep distrust: Catholic traditions, images, and ceremonies.

"If Your Stories Be True"

In addition to interrogating the evidence (textual or otherwise) for Joan's pontificate, Catholic writers also cited seemingly confused or implausible elements within the conventional popess narrative: the uncertain national or ethnic origin, for example, of a figure who, according to Martinus Polonus's highly influential thirteenth-century account, was named Johannes Anglicus (John English or John the Englishman) but born at Mainz on the Rhine. Catholics also questioned the likelihood that ninth-century Athens, where Joan reportedly achieved unequaled proficiency in various sciences, was in fact a great center of learning and, most important, the prospect that Joan could have disguised her true sex for so many years. Cooke's treatment of this last issue exemplifies a recurrent pattern in his handling of evidence. To confirm that a woman might succeed at an imposture such as Joan's, Cooke first cites the evidently effeminizing clerical practice of shaving: "For men by shaving may make themselves look like women" (Pope 73). However, since not only facial hair but also "countenance," "voice," and "actions" might betray a woman's sex, for further support Cooke falls back upon the unsteady foundation of Catholic hagiography, a structure that he has challenged earlier in his dialogue. Addressing his "Papist" counterpart, the Protestant interlocutor in Cooke's text contends that Joan's imposture could certainly pass undetected "if your stories be true, that divers women have lived longer among men, in men's apparel unknown, than Dame Joan lived in the Popedom" (Pope 73). To make much the same point, Jewel and Mayo cite a varied set of examples, including the ancient Greek women Lasthenia and Axiothea, who reportedly disguised themselves as men in order to study with Plato, and in his Restoration adaptation of Cooke's dialogue Humphrey Shuttleworth points to, among others, an unnamed English-woman who "in our late Civil wars ... was sixteen years a Soldier" (Jewel, Defence 651; Mayo 41; Shuttleworth 97). In contrast, the "divers" cross-dressed women whom Cooke cites are all Catholic saints, namely Marina, Eugenia, Pelagia, Euphrosyne ("Euphrusina"), and Margaret ("Margareta"), who each reportedly lived for several years disguised as a monk or hermit and whose stories belong to a set of roughly twenty transvestite saint narratives that, John Anson contends, originated in the monastic communities of sixth-century Egypt (12-13). As pieces of evidence within Cooke's argument, these narratives pose at least two sets of problems.

First, details in some of these saints' lives suggest that the transvestite disguise is less effective than Cooke's allusion implies. Forewarned by a dream concerning a female idol, the bishop Helenus recognizes the true gender and identity of the youth who presents himself as "Eugenius" and seeks admission to a monastery (Anson 22; Frantzen 463). Even so, declaring "Justly you call yourself Eugenius, for you are behaving like a man," Helenus endorses Eugenia's disguise, which successfully deceives those not enlightened by prophetic visions. More significantly perhaps, cross-dressing evidently fails to obscure completely Euphrosyne's erotic charms, since after she enters the monastery disguised as the eunuch Esmeraldus (or Smaragdus in Aelfric's version), her beauty so excites the other monks' desires that, in order to eliminate perilous temptations, the abbot restricts the new arrival to an isolated cell (Anson 16; Frantzen 464). If Joan's feminine beauty had proven as difficult to suppress as Euphrosyne's, or if she had suffered such isolation, her ecclesiastical career would have ended before it began.

Cooke's conditional clause "if your stories be true" points to a second, greater difficulty. Several elements within the transvestite saint narratives have prompted modern scholars to suggest that these tales borrow motifs and situations from ancient pagan fiction, modifying them to glorify not, as in the pagan narratives, the marriage of hero and heroine but rather "the union between Christ and the Church, or Christ and the individual soul" (Pavlovskis 138-39). In light of such borrowings, the transvestite saint narratives seem, as Anson puts it, to "move in a world of pure erotic romance" (11). Three of these tales include the folklorists' Potiphar's wife motif, which draws its name from an episode in the biblical story of Joseph (Genesis 39) and is also present in the biography of St. Macarius, who founded the Egyptian monastic community that seems to have produced these accounts (Anson 18). Thus, as monks, Marina, Eugenia, and Margaret are falsely accused of impregnating or violating a local woman, only to have the accusation discredited when, at trial or after death, their true sex is revealed. Two of these narratives also feature unlikely reunions between the saintly women and the family members they have left behind, as the disguised Marina is brought before her father, a prefect, to answer charges of impregnating a maiden, and the abbot of Euphrosyne's monastery, unaware of her true sex and identity, directs her to offer spiritual counsel to her father, who mourns his daughter's disappearance. Eugenia's tale also includes miraculous deliverance as she escapes Roman attempts to execute her through drowning, burning, and starvation before ultimately suffering martyrdom at the point of a gladiator's sword (Anson II, 15-16, 21, 25, 29-32). The foiled executions, improbable reunions, and Potiphar's wife motif suggest fantastic fiction rather than documented fact, and Cooke's tentative conditional clause does little to dispel that impression.

Moreover, Cooke's allusion to transvestite saints fails to meet the evidentiary standard that he sets for hagiography earlier in the dialogue. While critiquing religious artwork, Cooke's "Protestant" disparages representations of other saints (namely George, Christopher, Catharine of Alexandria, and Hippolytus), whose lives seem to belong to the world of romance, as he complains that "in all antiquity, there is no mention of such saints" (Pope 20). Later, however, when he cites the transvestite saints, Cooke does little to provide the ancient documentation that he appears to demand here. In the body of his text, he vaguely asserts that "Marina, they say, lived all her life among monks" (Pope 73, my emphasis). His marginal annotation cites Johannes Ravisius Textor's 1532 Officina; Textor in turn cites the late fifteenth-century scholar Raffaelo Maffei (Raphael Volaterranus, 1451-1522). A second annotation in the margins of Cooke's text cites as a further source the fourteenth-century hagiographer Petrus de Natalibus. None of these constitutes the ancient authority that Cooke earlier demands for the lives of St. Christopher and St. George. Here, then, Cooke's "Protestant" seems to illustrate Bayle's point, accepting weak evidence that if it were "advantageous to the Popes ... would seem worthy of the utmost contempt."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Afterlife of Pope Joan by Craig M. Rustici Copyright © 2006 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
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