 Pope
Joan (who has ever heard of a female Pope!) is one of the most
fascinating and
extraordinary people in Western history– and one
of the least well known. Not many people have heard of Joan the Pope,
and
those who have, mostly regard her story as
a legend.
Yet for hundreds
of years – up to the middle
of the seventeenth century – Joan's papacy
was universally known and accepted as true.
In the seventeenth century, however, the
Catholic Church, under increasing attack from
rising Protestantism, began a concerted effort
to destroy what they regarded as embarrassing
historical records of Joan's papacy. The
Vatican seized hundreds of manuscripts and
books and Joan's virtual disappearance from
modern consciousness attests to the effectiveness
of these measures.
One
ancient copy of the Liber pontificalis (overview of all Popes
since St. Peter) still
exists and contains a record of Joan's papacy.
The entry on Joan is obviously a later interpolation,
clumsily pieced into the main body of
the text. Blondel, a Protestant historian who
examined the text in 1647, concluded that
the entry on Joan was written in the fourteenth
century.
The
book Pope Joan was written making use of the facts of Joan's
life as far as they are
known, and has been accurately placed in
historical context. The author chose to make
it a work of fiction, as the truth of what really
happened between 853 and 855 AD, the
supposed years when Joan was Pope, can
never be fully verified.
The
story paints a vivid picture of the early 9th century and transports
you there. This is
the time where the empire of Charlemagne
is at its peak and extends into the greater
part of Europe. Louis, son of Charlemagne,
was crowned Emperor in the year 813.
A large part of the story of Joan takes place
during the reign of Louis. Joan grew up in the
area of what we now call Germany. During
this period, women hardly had any rights and
Joan, who clearly is a very bright girl, with the
help of her older brother Mathew, secretly
manages to learn to read and write. Later, a
Greek scholar, Aesculapius, who is contracted
to teach her younger brother John, spots her
rare intelligence and devotion to learning and
manages to convince her father to allow her to further develop her
reading and writing
skills and to learn Latin and Greek, alongside
her brother.
Aesculapius
manages to get her a place at the schola at Dorstadt, to further
her education.
Her father forbids her to go and sends
his son, John. Joan manages to escape with
her brother and so she continues her education,
with much resistance from her fellow
male students. The evening she arrives she
has a debate with, as it later turns out, Odo,
the master of the schola. She out reasons him
in public, and he never forgives her for this
and later this will be a determining factor in
her fate. She develops a special friendship
with Gerold, the man who takes her into his
home.
Her
life gets brutally changed by a Viking raid on the village Dorstadt,
when the whole congregation
is gathered in the church. She
manages to hide from them and turns out to
be the sole survivor of the entire village. At
that moment Gerold is far away, serving as a
judge in courts of justice in service to the
Emperor. Joan manages to flee to a monastery,
where she enters under the guise of her
younger brother and is called John Angelicus
from this day forward. In this Monastery she
receives her religious education and becomes
the apprentice of the community's physician.
She has access to all the material about medicine
and healing in the extensive monastery
library and in the end surpasses her master.
She
then decides to go to Rome, where she is asked to heal the reigning
Pope Sergius. She
succeeds and becomes his friend and looks
after him for the rest of his life. Leo succeeds
Sergius and he installs Joan as his Commander-
in-Chief of the papal militia. For Joan this
is a soul-searching moment, as Gerold whom
she has met again in Rome and she has come
to love, asks her to marry him, to leave Rome
behind and to raise a family. All her life she
has trained herself for duty, which is now calling,
and she decides to stay and work with
the idealistic Pope Leo. He then dies unexpectedly,
and to her amazement, she is voted to
be the next Pope.
Following
many intrigues she meets her end only two years later, during
an uprising of a
rival contender to the Papacy. Due to the
shock of seeing Gerold being killed, she gives
birth to their stillborn child and bleeds to death on the Via Sacra,
which was called the
'shunned street' after this incident. It was
only then that people found out that they
had had a female Pope in their midst! After
the shocking occurrence with Joan, papal
processions deliberately began to turn aside
from the Via Sacra, 'in abhorrence of that
event.' The street was not used again until in
the 16th century.
Joan
had a strong impact on all those around her, as she was seen
to be a humane and
truly devoted Pope, full of compassion for all
people, irrespective of their station in life.
Throughout
the centuries it has not been easy for women to escape the shackles
that
society put upon them and so there were
many women who made their dream come
true by portraying themselves as men. For
example in the third century, Eugenia, daughter
of the Prefect of Alexandria, entered a
monastery disguised as a man and eventually
rose to the office of Abbot. Her disguise
went undetected until she was forced to
reveal her sex as a last resort to refute the
accusation of having deflowered a virgin. In
the twelfth century, St. Hildegund, using the
name Joseph, became a brother of Schönau
Abbey and lived undiscovered among the
brethren until her death many years later.
The
light of hope kindled by such women flickered in a great darkness,
but it never
entirely went out. Opportunities were taken
by women strong enough to have a vision.
Pope Joan is the story of one of those
visionaries.
So
far this book only appeared in English, published by the Ballantine
Publishing Group,
Copyright © 1996 by Donna Woolfolk Cross.
ISBN: 0-345-41626-0. First edition: Nov. 1997.
Buy
this book through Amazon.co.uk or
Amazon.com
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