The Female Pope: The Mystery of Pope Joan

Pope Joan is a Medieval religious leader believed by some to have been a female pontiff who reigned over the Roman Catholic Church, who dismisses her as myth. She allegedly assumed the name John Anglicus, disguising herself as a man and eventually becoming pope. It is believed that her story was discovered when she gave birth to her child, which led to her immediate execution.

     POPE JOAN, so the story goes, was a young woman who ruled the Church of Rome at some time during the Middle Ages. Almost everyone has heard her name but her history and legend, like the Wandering Jew's, are largely unknown. Her image has become familiar to many through the Female Pope (or High Priestess) card in the Major Trumps of the Tarot deck, and others will have read about her in the feminist press, although they will probably have gained little more than an impression of an ecclesiastical cover-up, plotted and executed on a grand scale. Some may have sat through the film Pope Joan, made in the 1970s, and perhaps thought that they were watching a faithful dramatization of the facts. But the widespread ignorance of the truth behind the Pope Joan story is understandable, for impartial commentary is hard to find. For too many years no detailed examination of her life has been available in English, and other languages have not been much better served.
We decided to try to rectify this situation after becoming aware that the total acceptance of the female pope's reality in many feminist publications was based on no firm foundation. We hoped that with careful research we might provide that foundation, but at the same time we were determined to be the first writers on the subject ever to set about the task without preconceived ideas, and to keep an open mind throughout. As agnostics with no strong feelings either for or against the Catholic Church, neither of us had an axe to grind.

       FACTS

      Concerning a certain Pope or rather female Pope, who is not set down in the list of popes or Bishops of Rome, because she was a woman who disguised herself as a man and became, by her character and talents, a curial secretary, then a Cardinal and finally Pope. One day, while mounting a horse, she gave birth to a child. Immediately, by Roman justice, she was bound by the feet to a horse's tail and dragged and stoned by the people for half a league, and, where she died, there she was buried, and at the place is written: 'Petre, Pater Patrum, Papisse Prodito Partum' [Oh Peter, Father of Fathers, Betray the childbearing of the woman Pope]. At the same time, the four-day fast called the "fast of the female Pope" was first established"

—Jean de Mailly, Chronica Universalis Mettensis