The Myth of Pope Joan

The Myth of Pope Joan. By Alain Boureau. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2001. Pp. x, 385. $60.00 clothbound; $22.50 paperback.)

Joan refuses to go away. If she had lived-and Boureau states early and often that this is highly unlikely-she was, presumably, an English woman educated at Mainz who ran off with a lover to Athens, secured a superb education, traveled to Rome, began a teaching career, and then, unrecognized as a woman, was elected pope in 855. According to the usual telling of the story, after she had reigned for two years and some months, while crossing Rome from St. Peter's to the Lateran, she gave birth to a child in a street near San Clemente and died immediately. Thereafter, for many centuries, newly elected popes were subjected to a physical inspection to prove their sex. Of course, there is no actual gap in the papal succession between Leo IV and Benedict III, so on occasion Joan has been identified with John VIII, or else with one or another of the tenth-century Johns (several of whom were sufficiently unattractive figures to evoke later ridicule). Joan's story was not told until it began circulating, especially in Dominican circles, in the thirteenth century, and then it proliferated with astonishing speed and breadth. Boreau devotes some space to telling the story in its familiar guise. It is not his intention to recapitulate the history of Joan but instead to tell and analyze the history of the Joan-myth. This he does brilliantly in a book that is learned, packed with keen observations on numerous aspects...