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The Female Pope: The Mystery of Pope Joan

by Rosemary and Darroll Pardoe

CHAPTER 6:

MODERN TIMES

MOST sixteenth and seventeenth century Protestants considered that their cause was best served by stoutly defending the reality of Pope Joan. Nevertheless it was a French Protestant minister who wrote the first full-length book devoted to the opposite viewpoint, arguing the case for dismissing the story as pure invention. David Blondel's Familier Eclaircissement de la Question, Si une femme a esté assise au Siege Papal de Rome entre Leon IV & Benoist III was published in 1647, and either studiously ignored or greeted with horror by the polemicists. It certainly did nothing to check their outpourings.

His fellow-countryman Pierre Bayle, some fifty or so years later, described the widespead feeling that Blondel had been misguided in his efforts to reveal the fictional nature of the woman pontiff. Many people protested that:

The Protestant Interest requires it should be true, why must a Minister discover the falsity of it? Would it not have been better to leave the Papists the trouble of wiping their own filth away? Did they, who do not cease to reproach the Memory of the Reformers, deserve that any one should do them that good office.(1)

Blondel's work was a particularly important one in that, unlike the Catholic authors, he could not easily be accused of unreasonable bias, although this did not prevent some of his contemporaries from seeking to find a devious motive for his actions. It would seem that he simply wished to establish the truth of the matter, but not everyone was willing to believe or understand this. Blondel was a man ahead of his time, but over the next 150 years, many others followed his lead and wrote studies which were, by and large, fairly honest and intelligent. even though they all suffered from the lack of some important sources which were not then available.

The title of Blondel's book shows that he confined himself to the question of whether a female pope reigned between Leo IV and Benedict III, without considering the possibility that she might have ruled at some other date. The historians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not have access to the treatises of Jean de Mailly and Stephen of Bourbon, which place the woman pontiff around 1100, so they naturally assumed that the old chroniclers agreed unanimously in locating her reign in the ninth century. The inevitable result of this general ignorance was that they tended to spend a disproportionate amount of their time in showing that there was no suitable gap between Leo IV and Benedict III into which the female pope might be fitted.

The Dominican Michel Le Quien (1661-1733), for instance, devoted eighty columns of his Oriens Christianus, published posthumously in 1745, to Pope Joan. At least a quarter of them are concerned solely with listing and describing large numbers of letters and other ninth century documents which do not mention her. Useful as this is, it only goes part of the way to proving that she did not exist, and it is far from the complete answer which Le Quien thought it was. Within their limits, however, Blondel and those who followed him can only occasionally be seriously faulted on their interpretation of the facts.

Not every writer at this time held rigidly dogmatic views. John Laurence Mosheim in his Ecclesiastical History, which was compiled during the last half of the eighteenth century, tried hard to be fair to all sides, and suggested that some unusual event must have happened in the 850s to give rise to the story: 'But what it was... is yet to be discovered, and is likely to remain uncertain'. Mosheim would perhaps have gone along with the opinion expressed by the great philosopher G.W. Leibnitz, several decades previously, in a tongue-in-cheek attack on what he saw as the wrong-headedness of the Catholic viewpoint. His idea was that an important ninth-century bishop called John Anglicus may indeed have given birth to a child in full view of everyone on the streets of Rome, but that this bishop was not and never had been the pope.(2) Of course, there is no evidence whatever for this, as Leibnitz himself well knew. His theory has been taken literally by far too many subsequent authors, who seem to have missed his note of sarcasm.

The superficially well-balanced position of Mosheim was, in fact, based on the patently false premise that the event in question was 'universally believed and related in the same manner by a multitude of historians, during five centuries immediately succeeding its supposed date... nor, before the reformation undertaken by Luther, was it considered by any, either as incredible in itself, or as disgraceful to the church'.(3) That Mosheim managed to avoid the excesses of either side in the controversy is to his credit, but it proves nothing. If he had studied the researches of his ostensibly more extreme contemporaries with greater care, he might have realized how mistaken he was in some of his assumptions.

By 1863, when John J.I. Von Döllinger, Professor of Theology at the University of Munich, wrote his long chapter on the female pontiff in Die Pabstfabeln des Mittelalters (Fables Respecting the Popes of the Middle Ages), a wider variety of material was available and Döllinger was able to make an acceptably thorough analysis of the subject, marred only by his exceedingly dour and humourless style, and his belief that Jean de Mailly's Chronica Universalis was 'lost, or as yet undiscovered'.(4) Since he was aware of the chronicle of Stephen of Bourbon, his argument did not suffer greatly from the omission.

That most peculiar of Victorian High-Church Anglicans, Sabine Baring-Gould, who was Rector of Lew Trenchard in Devon and a prolific writer of fiction and non-fiction alike, devoted a chapter in his Curious Myths of the Middle Ages to 'Antichrist and Pope Joan',(5) linking these two legendary figures by means of certain old authorities who, he said, had stated that the female pope's child was the very Antichrist himself. Unfortunately the authorities are not identified, and we have been totally unable to trace them, which is disappointing since the theory is an intriguing and dramatic one. It is not supported by any of the early sources, only one of which hints at the later life of Pope Joan's son, saying that he became the Bishop of Ostia. However, it may have been invented by the Protestant polemicists, whose outpourings were so numerous that we have been quite unable to examine them all. According to Baring-Gould, some of the works to which he referred went on to maintain that the baby Antichrist was immediately spirited away to reappear in the Last Days, which would explain why he has not yet made his presence felt. In view of Baring-Gould's irritating failure to document his sources, little more can be said.

No doubt it was partly the connection with the Antichrist which caused Baring-Gould to see the female pontiff as a personification of the Scarlet Woman of Revelation. His attacks on those, like Mosheim, who were less certain of her unreality, are scathing in the extreme. This was a man who knew absolutely that he was right.

Throughout the nineteenth century, and even disregarding the polemicists, there was still an occasional lone voice crying out in favour of Pope Joan, and a few had sincere reasons for doing so. The Greek author, Emmanuel Rhöides, was so fascinated by the image of the woman pope that he wrote an influential novel about her, which we will discuss in the next chapter. In addition, he produced a learned and stylish examination of the subject, coming to the conclusion that she had definitely existed. It seems that Rhöides was blinded to the arguments against Joan, and to the flaws in his own case, by nothing more sinister than his overwhelming affection for her. The book was published in English translation in 1886, and it is amusing to note that the translator found it necessary to censor some of the more earthy passages of the original, which were presumably not thought suitable for the eyes of young Victorian ladies. The section which discusses the pierced seat is severely curtailed with the excuse that 'the details are not fit for publication'.(6)

In the present century, until the late 1960s, the story of the female pope was acknowledged by almost everyone to be completely fictional. Those writers who disagreed with the consensus usually had fairly obvious motives for doing so, as was the case with Clement Wood, an American whose novel of 1931, The Woman Who Was Pope, begins with a lengthy introduction. It is largely an exercise in anti-Catholic propaganda, using a variety of secondary sources to 'prove' the reality of Pope Joan. Not content with this, Wood proceeds to disparage the papacy at every opportunity, insisting among other things that Marozia, the Theophylact mother of John XI (931-5), committed incest with practically all the male members of her family, including her grandson, the future Pope John XII (955-63). Actually, when John XII was born in 937, his grandmother was already dead, a minor detail which appears to have escaped Wood's notice.

In complete contrast, the level-headed Jesuit, Herbert Thurston, produced a very valuable little booklet entitled Pope Joan for the Catholic Truth Society in 1917, which set the tone for future examinations of the legend. Thurston's assumption that his subject had no historical basis was perhaps inevitable in view of his audience, but the strikingly unbiased nature of his research might come as a surprise to those who have not encountered his work elsewhere. In his time he brought his keen intellect and healthy scepticism to bear on matters as varied as witchcraft, the Turin Shroud and the woman monk, St Hildegund. With Pope Joan he concentrated in particular on British chronicles and books, some of which had previously been completely overlooked, and thus produced a pamphlet containing much original information.

The same generally accepted opinion can be found in the entries for the female pope in most modern encyclopedias, and also in a disappointing, error-filled and derivative article in the often thought-provoking part-work, The Unexplained. Curiously, the Encyclopaedia Britannica and one or two others call her 'John Angelicus' instead of 'John Anglicus', a name-change which neatly side-steps the problem of why the so-called 'John English' should have come from Mainz in Germany. What a shame it never occurred to any of the medieval chroniclers, who went to such efforts to explain the apparent inconsistency by different means. No doubt the angelic John was the result of a printing or transcription error, and not an inspiration on the part of the encyclopedia compiler, but once in print a mistake like this tends to be copied so often that it takes on a reality of its own. We have probably not seen the last of 'John Angelicus'.

As the twentieth century wore on, it began to look as though the questions surrounding the female pontiff had all been answered to everybody's satisfaction. The resolution of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown story, 'The Doom of the Darnaways', depends on the certainty that a 'cultivated' man would know that 'there was no such person as Pope Joan'. But in the 1960s a new force appeared on the scene, which was to make her story once again the subject of controversy.

One of the many achievements of the feminist movement has been a complete and long overdue re-evaluation of the role of women in history. Influential and important women so often ignored, patronized and insulted by the textbooks have finally started to receive the credit they deserve. This enrichment of our knowledge of the past is a very welcome development, but regrettably, alongside the real figures, a small number of women whose historical standing is, to put it mildly, more than a little doubtful have been taken to the hearts of feminists. Among these is Pope Joan.

A minority - and it is only a minority - of the movement's historians seem to believe that it is perfectly acceptable to distort the facts, in order to counteract and set-off the widespread distortions of the truth, which are undeniably present in the standard patriarchal works. Looked at unemotionally, there can be no justification for this. In the long run it just provides an excuse for people to ignore all feminist research, including much which is balanced and sensible but still equally provocative. The unfortunate result of applying the technique to the female pontiff has been that today a great many women accept her reality as conclusively proven.

Ironically, the first book to take a definite feminist tone in its analysis of the story was written by a man. Henri Perrodo-Le Moyne's Un Pape Nommé Jeanne was published in 1972 and appears at first glance to be a fairly straightforward study. The careful reader, however, soon notices that Perrodo-Le Moyne has selected the evidence which agrees with his thesis and ignored or perverted that which does not. In other words, the method of the Protestant polemicists has again reared its ugly head, but this time better disguised and with a different aim. The author's misrepresentations of the facts are often wondrous to behold, as when he maintains that Leo IX's important letter of 1054 to Michael, the Patriarch of Constantinople, mentions the female pope. As we have seen, quite the opposite is true: the letter shows that she had not yet been heard of at that date.

Perrodo-Le Moyne's motives are made perfectly clear by the final section of the book, which is entitled Femmes, Levez-vous!' (Women, Arise!), and we are left in no doubt whatsoever by such statements as 'The day when woman frees herself, that day she will no longer be the "spare rib"... the papacy and the Church in its entirety will no longer blush concerning John VIII, the Papessa.'

A recurrent and popular theme in this type of work is the supposed conspiracv of silence about Pope Joan, of which the Church is said to have been guilty for many centuries. Some writers limit the plot to the 400 years before 1250, when she made her first appearance in the chronicles, but others extend it further, even down to the present day. Thus Perrodo-Le Moyne relates how he consulted a prelate at the Vatican who told him that 'some very important documents concerning this woman are secretly concealed in chests and under the papal seal'.(7) Again, in Elizabeth Gould Davis' ultra-polemical The First Sex,(8) this idea crops up with the claim that in 1601, Pope Clement VIII ordered 'all effigies, busts, statues, shrines and records of her utterly demolished and her name erased from the papal rolls'.

What the conspiracy theorists choose not to recognize, is that it would have taken a great deal more than a couple of hours of labour in the Vatican Library to delete all references to Joan from the pre-thirteenth century sources. It would have required the connivance of thousands of people throughout the known world, including both the Western and Eastern Churches. A conspiracy on this scale appeals to the paranoid in us all, but it hardly seems likely. Nevertheless, if by some massive suspension of disbelief we assume for the sake of argument that it might have been possible, then we can begin to wonder how the erasures were carried out. Were the appropriate sections of the various letters, documents and chronicles simply crossed out or cut away? We could easily detect such censorship today, but needless to say there is no sign of it. On the contrary, when ancient chronicles and papal catalogues have been tampered with in connection with the female pontiff, it has always been in order to insert her where she did not originally appear.

Perhaps, instead, everything mentioning her was collected up and locked away permanently in a forgotten corner of the Vatican, just as Perrodo-Le Moyne would have us believe on the evidence of his anonymous prelate. There is no easy way to prove or disprove such an allegation. The famous 'Secret Archives' of the Vatican are largely secret only in that they were until recently very badly indexed, or worse, not indexed at all, thus making access to particular documents almost impossible. The more modern indexing techniques increasingly being used in the archives today, should surely have brought to light some pre-thirteenth century material concerning Pope Joan by now, were it there to be found. Believers in sinister plots notwithstanding, it would be difficult to suppress news of such a discovery.

The hypothesis that all the records containing information about the woman pope were either locked away or destroyed wholesale raises a further problem. Quite a large number of sources for the period from the ninth to the twelfth century are still extant, but none of them gives any hint of her existence, except in the few cases where it has been added at a later date. So remarkable an event as the birth of a papal child in procession to the Lateran, should have been commented on by all who had occasion to refer to the papacy; and in a fairly short time the tale would have spread all over Europe in the regular correspondence of the literate classes. Yet it does not feature in even the most complete holograph manuscripts.

It might be argued that those writers who were sympathetic to the papacy would have refrained from discussing Pope Joan openly, out of a desire to spare the incumbent pontiff any embarrassment. Reasonable as this is, it does not account for her total absence from the letters and discourses of people who were, for one reason or another, ill-disposed towards the Roman church. If Joan had truly existed, neither Patriarch Photius of Constantinople in the ninth century, nor his successor Michael Cerularius some 200 years later, would have passed up such an opportunity for some excellent anti-Roman propaganda.

Clement Wood has a solution of sorts to this difficulty.(9) Conveniently disregarding the female pope's public parturition, he suggests that only one or two cardinals ever found out her secret, their knowledge being handed down by word of mouth until its eventual revelation in the thirteenth century. Up to then 'Pope John' would have been thought of as a wise and pious pontiff; a worthy if unexciting Bishop of Rome who held no interest for those seeking scandal to show the Church in a bad light. But Wood does not follow his explanation through to its logical and obvious conclusion. If almost everybody thought that Joan was a perfectly normal man, there would have been no reason to exclude her from the papal catalogues, at least for the first 400 years after her death, during the time when the truth was known only to a select few. Her contemporaries and near-contemporaries would also, no doubt, have mentioned the virtuous 'Pope John' now and then in their documents.

There were other authors beside the enemies of Rome who might be expected to have made some comment on the story of Pope Joan. Although such men as William of Malmesbury (c.1080-1142) were faithful Catholics, they refused to allow their respect for the papacy to interfere with their enjoyment of a good tale, even when it was derogatory to a particular pope. The much-maligned Sylvester II (999-1003) was probably the worst sufferer at the hands of the gossip-mongering chroniclers, and the results of his supposed compact with the Devil were described in increasingly colourful detail, starting one hundred or so years after the end of his reign. William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum Anglorum, written between 1118 and 1125, tells the tale at great length and with obvious relish. Sylvester, or Gerbert of Aurillac, was - it says - a monk of Fleury (St Benoît-sur-Loire) who studied magic at Toledo and rose to St Peter's Chair, assisted by demonic forces: 'So did he urge his fortunes with the Devil's patronage, that nothing which he ever planned was left unfinished'.(10) He constructed one of the brazen heads so beloved of medieval spinners of yarns, but eventually met a horrible end through the trickery of his attendant demons.

Of course, the legend has no basis in fact, and must have grown out of the unwillingness of Sylvester's contemporaries to attribute his unusually extensive learning merely to the natural quickness of his mind. In an era when the popes were not noted for their scholarship, Gerbert was a true polymath; a Renaissance man born five centuries too soon.

If such stories about Sylvester could spread unsuppressed, and be told by writers who saw no paradox in attacking individual pontiffs while still supporting the Church as a whole, then the subject of Pope Joan would hardly have posed any ethical problems either. William of Malmesbury, in particular, should have been fascinated by 'John Anglicus' because of her apparent English ancestry. Yet he is silent about her, and so are all his fellow-countrymen until the start of the fourteenth century.

Similarly, Vincent of Beauvais in the Speculum Majus relates the adventures of Sylvester II, while entirely omitting any mention of the female pope. His chronicle was written in about 1254; around the same time as Joan's first recorded appearance, in Jean de Mailly's Chronica Universalis Mettensis. If Vincent, a Paris Dominican, had known about her, he would almost certainly have included her in his history. His ignorance suggests that Jean de Mailly either invented the account himself or adapted it from oral sources strictly localized in the Metz area of eastern France. As late as the 1250s there seems to have been no popular or widespread tradition, even within the mendicant orders.

The final flaw in the 'conspiracy of silence' theory is simply that references to the woman pontiff occur in a great many works compiled from the late thirteenth century onwards, and no attempt has ever been made to conceal or censor these. In order to explain this sudden abundance of material, more than one person has put forward the idea that a secret Papal Bull was issued around this date, informing all members of the Church that they were now free to reveal the hidden truth about Joan. Why it should have been issued at a time when the papacy was certainly no more, and perhaps rather less, secure than it had been for the preceding centuries is not clear. Anyway, the concept of such a Bull is too ridiculous to contemplate, for its currency would have had to be so wide that it could scarcely have been regarded as 'secret', and it would surely have been preserved somewhere, or left detectable traces.

The existence of all the later sources creates particular difficulties when Elizabeth Gould Davis' claim about Clement VIII is considered. If, as she says, he ordered the destruction of every record of Pope Joan in 1601, then why on earth should his order have been applied only to those dating from before the late 1200s? Why were the remainder tolerated? It is true that during Clement's reign (1592-1605) the bust of Johannes VIII, Foemina de Anglia in Siena Cathedral was altered to one of Pope Zachary, but to suggest that this was part of a massive campaign to purge the Church of all knowledge of her is sheer foolishness.

The four pages devoted to the female pontiff in Gould Davis' The First Sex are crammed with similar fudged facts and dubious evidence. Without a doubt the book is the worst and most blatant example of its kind. Thus, we read that the mythical two-year gap between the pontificates of Leo IV and Benedict III can easily be found by anyone with 'sufficient interest to look up the facts'. It is certain, we are also told, that Joan's contemporary, Anastasius the Librarian, was among the writers who mentioned her; while the pierced seat was introduced into the ritual of papal enthronement in 855 'and not before' (Gould Davis' italics). That the first use of the various seats is well attested to have been in 1099, and to have involved no ceremonial sexing of the pope-elect, is a point which seems to have passed the author by. She also tries to make something out of the slight confusion into which the numbering of the various popes named John has fallen over the centuries. If only to clarify the situation, this matter does deserve some attention here, although in reality it is totally unconnected with the female pontiff.

To begin with, Gould Davis is unique in her belief that the acknowledged existence of two popes named John XXIII, separated in time by over 500 years, was the result of Pope Joan's imposture. The first of the two ruled 1410-15, and was responsible for the condemnation and burning of John Hus as a heretic. This happened during the Great Schism within the papacy, in the last years of which there were three popes reigning simultaneously, all claiming legitimacy for their line of succession; one based in Rome, one in Avignon and the third in Pisa. The Schism finally became so scandalous and confusing that it simply had to be resolved, and this end was achieved by the Council of Constance in 1417 when it elected Martin V to the pontificate. The settlement reached led to all the popes of the Avignon and Pisan lines being counted as antipopes, and their names and numbers were therefore available for re-use. John XXIII was one of the Pisan Obediance, so Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was able to take the same name, when he was chosen to succeed Plus XII in 1958. For identical reasons there have been two popes Benedict XIII, Clement VII and Clement VIII. Indeed, the only antipope from the Schism whose number has not reappeared is Alexander V.

Curiously enough, the matter of the second John XXIII has also attracted the interest of Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, the authors of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail (1982). Their explanation links the mystery with Rosicrucianism, but ignores the fact that there is really no mystery to explain.

A more intriguing and superficially more puzzling problem is the omission of any Pope John XX from the official list. John XIX died in 1032 and John XXI became supreme pontiff in 1276, but between these dates there was no other pope called John. Gould Davis explains this by proposing that, around the time of John XXI, it was decided to remove Pope Joan (alias John VIII) from the catalogue. Consequently all the other popes with the same name had to be moved back one number, leaving a gap which was never filled - at least not until a feeble attempt was made to do something about it in the present century with the selection of the new John XXIII. In support of the theory, she is forced to resort to statements which are entirely without foundation. Assertions like 'the Pope John (872-82) who is now numbered eighth was for seven centuries listed as number nine' are too easily disprovable to help her argument.

The true cause of the missing John XX is not to be found with John VIII in the ninth century, for no pope named John up to and including the fourteenth of that title has ever been renumbered. What seems to have happened is that, in the era of John XXI, a belief grew up that an additional pope had ruled briefly between John XIV (983-4) and John XV (985-96), within the one year gap when the See of Rome was actually in the hands of the antipope Boniface VII. Our old friend Martin Polonus, in his Chronicon written in the 1270s, lists this non-existent pontiff under 985 and gives him the title of John XV, adding 'of Roman birth, he reigned for four months'.(11) Thus to Martin Polonus the real John XV became John XVI, despite the contemporary evidence to the contrary, and each of the subsequent Johns had his number increased by one, so that John XIX was changed into John XX. Obviously John XXI accepted this prevailing opinion on the authenticity of his mythical predecessor, and took account of him when nominating his own title. Yet it is undoubtedly true that the mysterious John, 'son of Robertus',(12) never sat in St Peter's Chair and was not inserted into the papal lists until long after his supposed reign. In the beginning he was probably no more than a copyist's error, perhaps arising from the fact that in 984 John XIV spent the final four months of his short, eight month rule languishing in prison in the Castel Sant'Angelo, placed there by antipope Boniface.(13) The various popes John, from John XV onwards, have since had the original numbers which they bore during their lifetime restored to them, and so there is now no John XX. The responsibility for the gap can be placed squarely on the shoulders of John XXI whose only other claim to fame is the manner of his death in 1277. He was crushed when part of the pope's palace at Viterbo fell on him.

Remembering that all the earliest proponents of Pope Joan, and many later ones too, failed to give her a number and insisted that she was never officially counted in the papal catalogues, it is difficult in any case to see quite what Gould Davis was trying to prove with her unnecessary and untenable theory.

Henri Perrodo-Le Moyne's Un Pape Nommé Jeanne does at least show a reasonable background knowledge of the female pope legend, although the author has shamelessly perverted it to his own ends. For Elizabeth Gould Davis' book not even this can be said. The First Sex deals with innumerable women in history, and the section on Joan is a small one, but this can be no excuse for the use of only two sources, both modern, in its composition. An old edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia, together with Baring-Gould's quaint Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, can hardly have provided a thorough grounding from which to work, although they are evidently quite sufficient for Gould Davis' propagandist purpose.

She concludes with a comment inspired by Baring-Gould's suggestion that the female pontiff was a personification of the Great Whore of Babylon. 'Thus is history rewritten by the masculists,' she cries; an accusation not entirely unreasonable in the case of Baring-Gould, whose hatred of women is revealed again and again in his other works. In the fantasy short story, 'The Merewigs',(14) for instance, his attack on those 'blue- stockings' who dared to frequent the library at the British Museum is almost pathological in its intensity. However, Gould Davis seems unaware that Baring-Gould cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered an average representative of the establishment, 'masculist' or otherwise.

There is a displeasing tone to some feminist writing about Pope Joan, which is at times almost indistinguishable from the equally unhelpful Protestant polemic of an earlier age. Elizabeth Gould Davis is an extreme example, and not highly thought of even among other historians within the women's movement, but her views are by no means unique. Even in perfectly sensible feminist publications, the female pope often crops up in statements like 'Pope John VIII was a biological woman',(15) which show no appreciation of the arguments against her existence. The feminist movement does not need to resort to such a mythical and (literally) man-made figure to strengthen its case.

Notes & References:
(For the full titles and a key to abbreviations, see Bibliography)

(1) Pierre Bayle, Dictionary (1710), I, p.636.

(2) Clement Wood, The Woman Who Was Pope (1931), p.34.

(3) John Laurence Mosheim, Ecclesiastical History (1826), II, pp.270-72.

(4) John J.I. Von Döllinger, Fables Respecting the Popes of the Middle Ages (1871), p.14.

(5) Sabine Baring-Gould, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages (1877), pp.161-89.

(6) Emmanuel D. Rhöides, Pope Joan - A Historical Study (1886), p.90.

(7) Henri Perrodo-Le Moyne, Un Pape Nommé Jeanne (1972), p.175.

(8) Elizabeth Gould Davis, The First Sex (1973), pp.267-70.

(9) Wood, op. cit., p.65.

(10) William of Malmesbury, Gesta Reg. Angl.; Rolls Series XC pt 1 (Kraus reprint 1964), ed. William Stubbs, p.193.

(11) Martin Polonus, Chron. Pont. et Imp.; MGH:SS, XXII, p.432.

(12) So called in OC, III, cols 453-4.

(13) Horace K. Mann, The Lives of the Popes in the Middle Ages (1925), IV, p.331.

(14) Sabine Baring-Gould, A Book of Ghosts (1904).

(15) Carol Riddell, Divided Sisterhood (1980), p.18.

Copyright (c) 1988 Rosemary and Darroll Pardoe

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