In Our Time - Pope Joan

Episode Date: February 27, 2025

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss a story that circulated widely in the middle ages about a highly learned woman who lived in the ninth century, dressed as a man, travelled to Rome, and was elected Pope.Her papacy came to a dramatic end when it was revealed that she was a woman, a discovery that is said to have occurred when she gave birth in the street. The story became a popular cautionary tale directed at women who attempted to transgress traditional roles, and it famously blurred the boundary between fact and fiction. The story lives on as the subject of recent novels, plays and films.With:Katherine Lewis, Honorary Professor of Medieval History at the University of Lincoln and Research Associate at the University of YorkLaura Kalas, Senior Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Swansea UniversityAnd Anthony Bale, Professor of Medieval & Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Girton College.Producer: Eliane GlaserReading list:Alain Boureau (trans. Lydia G. Cochrane), The Myth of Pope Joan (University of Chicago Press, 2001)Stephen Harris and Bryon L. Grisby (eds.), Misconceptions about the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2008), especially 'The Medieval Popess' by Vincent DiMarcoValerie R. Hotchkiss, Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Medieval Europe (Routledge, 1996)Jacques Le Goff, Heroes and Marvels of the Middle Ages (Reaktion, 2020), especially the chapter ‘Pope Joan’Marina Montesano, Cross-dressing in the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2024)Joan Morris, Pope John VIII - An English Woman: Alias Pope Joan (Vrai, 1985)Thomas F. X. Noble, ‘Why Pope Joan?’ (Catholic Historical Review, vol. 99, no.2, 2013)Craig M. Rustici, The Afterlife of Pope Joan: Deploying the Popess Legend in Early Modern England (University of Michigan Press, 2006)In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio production

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, in medieval Europe,

a story began circulating about a highly learned woman who lived in the 9th century, dressed as a man, travelled to Rome and became for about two years, the Pope. Her papacy came to a dramatic end when it was revealed that she was a woman, a discovery that said to have occurred when she gave birth in this street. This legend, Pope Joan, became a popular warning directed at women who tried to step beyond their traditional roles, and it also shows how the boundary between truth and fiction was often blurred in historical

chronicles. After the Reformation, the story was used by Protestants to attack a Catholic church, and it continues to be retold today in novels and on stage and screen. With me to discuss the legend of Pope Joan are Anthony Bale, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Gerton College. Laura Callas, Senior Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Swansea University, and Catherine Lewis, Honorary Professor of Medieval History at the University of Lincoln and Research Associate at the University of York.

Catherine Lewis, what's the basic story about Pope Joan? Well, according to the story, Joan was born in the German city of Mainz to English parents. And while she was still relatively young, she left home disguised as a man. She travelled with her. What did her parents do? Well, we don't know anything really about her parents. What do we know a little bit? Well, what we can speculate about them, the idea of them being English and living in Mainz,

is that they may have something to do with the English mission to Mainz or to that part of Germany that was led by St. Boniface the century before. But that's speculation. We don't actually know anything specific about her parents. Okay, you were going on when I interrupted you. So we got to her being still at a relatively young age, and she leaves home. She goes with her lover to Athens,

and she's disguised as a man. The reason that they both go to Athens is because they want to get a university education. And apparently Joan excelled in this setting. She was an excellent scholar, and she had no equal. Then she travels on to Rome. She's still dressed as a man and she's calling herself John. And she becomes a teacher herself.

So she actually teaches the trivium, the academic syllabus. And she gains a reputation not only for her academic brilliance, but also for her moral integrity. To such an extent that she actually manages to rise to the ranks of the church. She becomes a cardinal. And then she's unanimously elected Pope as the successor to Leo IV, who died in 855. We might come to where I've got the information of that from in a minute,

but what I'm essentially giving you here is a composite of the key elements of her legend. Thought to be. Thought to be, yes. But she is elected Pope, allegedly, on the death of Pope Leo IV. And she is Pope for two years, seven months and four days. and she apparently exercises the office of Pope very well indeed with one exception which is that she does not follow the celibate lifestyle required of a Pope and she becomes pregnant and gives birth very publicly in the street as part of a procession.

You've told the whole story in one answer but we can go back to the beginning of it. She was attracted to Athens and get a better education. That's what we're told, yes, that that's the reason for travelling there because she wants to gain an education and the reason that she dresses as a man is that this is a form of education that would not be allowed to her as a woman because women did not receive that kind of specific university education. But she had no trouble in disguising herself. That's one of the key things, isn't it?

Do we know how she disguises herself? No? No, I'm shaking you. I suppose what I'm giving you is just the outline at this point. There are, in later iterations of the story, we do start to get more detail. But really all that we're told is that she dresses as a man, and we assume that her impersonation was very convincing because it's only at the point where she gives birth

that people realise that in fact she was a woman all along. Just to speculate a touch, how would she disguise herself as a man? Well, I suppose by wearing clerical dress. And I suppose one might argue that clerical dress in that period, I mean, I suppose the word dress, we think of it. It's more of a robe, I suppose. and it would be conceivably quite easy to disguise a woman's body under a robe. And I assume, although the legend isn't specific about that,

I assume that that is the implication of it. When did the legend, how was it instigated and when? Well, she's supposed to have lived in the 9th century, as I've said, but it's actually not until the mid-13th century that the legend is first written down. That's a long gap. It is a long gap. And it's possible that the story was circulating in oral form before that, but obviously we can't tell for sure.

What we do know is that the first written version was produced by a man called Jean de Mae in the 1250s. And he includes it in a chronicle that he's written. And interestingly, he prefaces it with the words to be verified. So it's something that he's going to include in his chronicle, but he's not necessarily sure that it's definitely true. It might be true, but it might not be, but he still includes it. So his is the earliest written account.

And then fairly soon after we have another account written by somebody called Stephen of Bourbon. And he is not writing a chronicle. He's actually writing a handbook for preachers. And he basically tells the same story as Jean de Mae. But he adds in a novel element, which is that Jones' ascendancy to the papacy was achieved with the help of the devil. And that becomes important in later versions. But the most important version of all, the most influential version is the one that appears in a chronicle written by Martin of Poland. He's writing in the 1270s. There is a little bit of debate about whether he wrote the story of Joan

or whether somebody else included it in the Chronicle. But that doesn't really matter for our purposes. The point is it becomes part of Martin's Chronicle. And Martin's Chronicle was hugely popular. It survives in about 400 manuscripts. It's translated into many different languages. And that is essentially the medium by which Joan's story becomes known. And the composite story that you gave at the beginning

and that I elaborated on essentially comes from Martin. So he is the basis for all of these later iterations of the story. And it really does appear in hundreds of chronicles. And that's one of the reasons why people started to think that it must be true, because otherwise why would all of these historians included it in their chronicles? Well, why would they have if it wasn't true? Well, perhaps because they weren't sure that it might be true, or perhaps because they were reporting an interesting, a funny, an unusual story.

that they had heard. And that's one of the purposes of Chronicles as well. It's not just to report things that they believe are factually true, but to give a sense of what the wider populace believes. Sometimes those beliefs might be. You mean they can make things up if it helps their case along the way? Well, I mean, possibly, yes, although sometimes it's, I mean, how could we, how could we tell if they're making something up? But they do think that it's important. But we ought to be if we're historians. Well, yes, but sadly, it's not always as easy as that. But it's this sense that it's important to know what everyone is thinking, even if you are reporting things that you as a chronicler believe to be untrue or ridiculous,

it's still useful to know that that's what other people believe. Laura, did this story come with many variations from the beginning? Yes, it does come with several variations, some of which Catherine's just touched on. The tale sort of develops, if you like. And as Catherine said, it's Martin of Poland, Martinus Polonis, who expands on the tale. But some of the key differences between these chronicle iterations include whether or not Joan is specifically named.

So the first chronicle account that we have by Jean de Mae does not name Joan as the Pope. It's an unnamed female Pope who is described to have somehow made her way to the papacy and is in procession, gives birth on the street, and because of the sort of intense horror of this act undergoes a very brutal execution. Can you tell us, Anthony, but can you tell us how the legends circulated more widely in the 13th century? That's quite a long time afterwards.

This story goes in leaps that we happen then, and a few centuries later, something else, then a few centuries later. So where are we with the 13th century dimension to it? Absolutely. So as Catherine said, we have these three key early versions by Jean de Maille, Stephen or Etienne of Bourbon, and then by Martinus Polonis, Martin of Poland. All three of those are broadly similar versions with some elaborations, and all three come from Dominican writers. And the story seems to be circulating amongst Dominican preachers. The Dominicans are a relatively young order at this point and are famous for their preaching. And one of the purposes, of this story seems to be to be used by preachers in their sermons, maybe to illustrate an anti-feminist moral or a misogynistic moral, or maybe to illustrate something to do with truth and deceit. And all three of those early versions are from the kind of 1250s to 1270.

So it's taken off within 15, 20 years of it first appearing in writing. In the early 1290s, Jacobus de Verojini, very famous for the Golden Legend, And he also includes a version of the story in his chronicle of the history of Genoa. And there he draws out a very strong anti-feminist moral to it, a very explicit anti-feminist moral. In fact, I can quote it, he says, Woman begins with presumption, continues with silliness, and ends with ignominy. And this is the kind of very strident take he has on where the stories come from, that it's useful as an anti-feminist story.

By this point, the story seems to be very widely known, widely read, and all the texts that we've talked about are spreading both as chronicles and in this genre of medieval writing called Exemplar. And Exempla are small, pithy, quasi-historic stories to be used by preachers, and they appear midway or towards the end of a sermon. And so the story has, it has, in modern terms we might call it a meme.

It kind of takes on its own energy and is transmitted very widely. But it is appearing in a particular form of writing, which are chronicles and in preaching texts. By around 1400, the story is certainly known in England. And it's included in one of the preeminent chronicles of the time, which is Ranulf Higden's Polar Chronicon. Higden was a monk in Chester who wrote a world history starting at creation up to the present day and he includes this story

really taken from Martin of Poland as an important historical narrative I've got the text here if I can read it I think it gives a nice sense of what the story I'll try and hurry it up but I'll read it in the Middle English version he says John Anglicus was born in Magonsia, minds

and he succeeded Leo the Pope two yera and five months, two years and five months. But it is said, and we find this in all versions of the story early on, it is said, or it is reputed that, or I have heard that. It is said that this Pope was a woman and brought in young Arja from her country to Athens in the habit of a man by her special, by her lover, by her sweetheart, where she profitee so greatly in conning, in knowledge, in so much that she coming to Rome had noble auditors, and disciples to whom she read the art triviala, the trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric.

After that, she elect into Pope by the favour of Allerman was get with child by her special, which not being in certainty of the time of her childing, of her childbirth, and going from the Church of St. Peter, from the Vatican, to the Church Lataranense, the Church of St. John Lateran, was delivered between the Colosse, the Coliseum, and St. Clement, the Basilica of St. Clement. and buried afterwards as it is said. This is twice in this little story, it says, as it is said. And then he finishes just by saying, and because of this, the Pope avoids, leaveth that way.

Sholdsema that he shall do that for detestation of that chaunce. He avoids this place, the Pope now, because he detests this event. And this Pope is not put in the number of other bishops of Rome. This Pope is not counted amongst the bishops. And this speaks, I think, to that question you asked of Laura, and Catherine about the historicity of it, they say that the Pope isn't counted in the number of popes and so we can't actually verify whether she, throw a key, fits in.

Okay, Catherine, why was it important that she addressed as a man? Well, it's important that she dressed as a man because otherwise she would not have been able to, well, get an academic education, and she wouldn't have been able to take on a clerical role within the church because, of course, women were forbidden from taking on priest orders. But there had been educated women before. I mean, we're talking about hundreds of years before, St. Hilda and so and so forth. Oh, absolutely. They had been educated. So this isn't an entire,

this isn't a shock to the system is it? No, it's not. But the, but the idea that Joan actually specifically goes to a university and gains an academic education, that's what sets her aside. I mean, yes, you're quite right. There have been plenty of other examples of educated women, but they had tended to be women who were in conventional roles within the church. So these are women who are nuns and abesses. And the whole point about Joan's story is that she doesn't take on that role. Instead, she disguises herself as a man, gets an academic education and becomes a priest and then a pope. And all of these were things that were completely forbidden to women. And I think the importance is that she manages to achieve these things partly because of her ability.

So she is said to be a brilliant scholar and a number of commentators later do say that actually she was rather a good Pope up and to the point at which she got pregnant and gave birth. But it's not just about her abilities, of course, it's because everybody thinks that she was a man. And this is a really interesting point because we often think of medieval ideas about gender as being very essentialist and being about biology. And if you are a man, you are automatically superior to a woman. But the whole point about Joan's story, fascinatingly, is that it gives us a different idea that gender isn't just a matter of of biology because in the story, masculinity is something that Joan adopts. It's something that she performs. And the implication is that the reason that she does this is precisely in order to

gain this education and this position, which otherwise would have been completely unattainable to her. So this was the cause of the shock when it was discovered that she had a child. Exactly. Yes. And this is what's really interesting about it because the implication of the legend is that there was absolutely no reason to think that Joan was anything other than a man up to the point. And it fits in with the misogyny that Anthony was talking about really. You know, that in the end she can't, as it were, escape her female body and that's what lets her down.

But that up to that moment, everybody just assumed that she was a man and she was being Pope and she was doing rather a good job of it, apparently. Thank you very much. Laura, her story took off, didn't it? hundreds of repetitions, elaborations, embellishment, exaggerations. Can you give the list of some idea of the storm and the fury that followed this? Yes, it does sort of escalate over the centuries. And the story gets appropriated and used in different ways as it moves and progresses. Some of those ways maintain the sort of status quo from those earlier 13th century accounts that we've been hearing about.

There's a text by Bartholomeus Platinus in 1479, which describes the story of Joan, leaving it more or less as it is in the previous iterations, but adding, just as Stephen de Bourbon did earlier in the 13th century, the addition of a sort of a diabolical or an evil influence over Joan. And there is a hint towards the end of that account that Bartholomeus is sort of slightly. beginning to question the veracity of this story by saying, you know, this has previously been told by many chroniclers and accounts that in a very vulgar way and in an obscene way. And he sort of finishes by saying that he thinks that this is not an altogether impossible story nevertheless. So there is still a sense that this is being sort of believed at the end of the 15th century. The stories taken up by later writers include later greater writers, Boccaccio, Petrarch, it even appears on tarot cards.

So what's going on there? Why is it clutched up so fiercely and advertised and used so intensively? Yes, well, this is really interesting. Baccio sort of really goes to town on Joan, actually, in his account, in his 14th century work called de Moliaris Claris on famous women, which is a series of biographies about historical and mythological women. And he includes Joan in this account in a complementary way to begin with. So the story is quite positive for the first half.

She's, as we've heard, a very illustrious woman. She's a very brilliant, intelligent woman. She's very learned. And everything goes very wrong from that point. So he starts to use incredibly misogynistic language there, describing her as a sort of an aberration. Why do you think it does that? I think that was a lot of the sentiment at the time.

He's a writer who's kind of picking up on perhaps more of the salacious details of the story in order to entertain his readership in a little bit more detail. He refers to her as a sort of wicked woman. He refers to her lustfulness that she's got this sort of voracious sexual appetite, which was quite a common trope about women in the middle ages. You know, Catherine gestured towards the way in which in medieval culture, women are often seen in these very sort of polarised ways as sort of chaste Virgin Mary typology versus the sort of whore-like Eve typology. And so Baccio seems to be placing Joan in the later category there and seeing her as this wicked woman who's brought great, great shame on the church. And then Petrarch takes things even further, actually, and sort of creates this.

quite dramatic story about the ramifications of Joan being revealed as a woman at the moment of her childbirth. And Petrarch describes how when Joan's gender is revealed on the street that in Italy, it rains blood for three days and three nights. And in France, there miraculously appear many giant locusts with six wings and powerful teeth. And the locusts fly around and then they drown in the sea, but they're sort of golden bodies, as it's described. The vapours of their bodies fly up and corrupt the air and many, many people die, apparently.

So Petrarch writes about the way in which Joan's actions disrupt nature. Anthony, what does this story tell us about the relationship then between truth and fiction? Well, this really is the kind of kernel of the story, isn't it? A, did Joan exist, but then also within the story, what is the truth of her as a Pope? Yeah, that's what we're asking. The body kind of, Joan's body then asserts its truth in this parade when she gives birth. So I think there's two ways of looking at this.

One is about the importance of fiction within medieval historical writing. That this is a medieval historical writing is not necessarily supposed to be true in the historical sense that we think of it today. it's supposed to be morally true or... What's the distinction? That it's something which can be useful for telling us about contemporary morality using the past to tell a story about that. And that seems to be how this is used. And historians will often include prefaces which say

you can use history to see kind of virtues or morals rather than to see facts as we think of them now. But then I think the story itself... The moral, the exemplary thing, had authority. didn't it? Absolutely, and I think that word authority is very important here because medieval definitions of authority or octaritas are about things worthy of repetition. So anything which, whether it's true or, you know, kind of provably true or morally true, that's what's worthy of repetition, not whether there's some kind of archaeological evidence for it. And then the story

itself, I think, is you can read it as a parable about truth. The story suggests, that Joan is able to pass as a man, to be educated as a man, to teach as a man, to be a good pope. But the truth of her body as a biological woman will assert itself. And the clothes can make the man, but the truth will out. And that seems to be one of the things that the story is articulating. And I think it's important that from those early versions of the story from the 13th century, there's a lot of evidence given about where this happened. and this happens on the ceremonial axis in the centre of Rome.

This doesn't happen in private. It's something which happens in a very public, humiliating and kind of shameful way. And this is to... Yes, and it's happening between the Vatican and the latter and the two main sites of papal power and by the Colosseum, the kind of icon of ancient Rome. And the idea is that her body is then publicly displayed as a lie and the truth appears.

And I think this connects to a very much a 13th century debate, which is raging about truth in philosophy, something that Thomas Aquinas, who's writing at this time writes about a lot, about the proper nature of something as preconceived by God to make it true. And the proper nature of a pope cannot be female, this story suggests. But also this idea of how do you prove the devil from God,

that they are also, what is a true statement when the devil is everywhere, intervening in everyone's plans. Catherine, Catherine, were the times when the idea of Pope Joan was more powerfully accepted and less powerfully accepted, and if so, when was that and why? Well, it does seem that for most of the Middle Ages, people believed the story. And Laura's already alluded to this, that the Vatican librarian Pletina, even though he expresses some reservations with it, he still says he thinks it probably was true.

And it does see... So what the whole, the Vatican goes along with it? Well, I mean, it's difficult to know. I can't help thinking that perhaps some people in the church felt that this was such a ridiculous story that they didn't even need to give it the time of day and that it wasn't something that they needed to rebut because the very notion of a woman Pope would be utterly ridiculous.

But generally, it does seem that nobody really really brings up any strident objections to the story. This doesn't really happen until we get to the 16th century and to the Reformation. That's the first time at which people really start questioning the story. And what's really interesting is that Joan plays a part in wider doctrinal arguments between Catholics and Protestants. And what happens is that Joan is now a threat, essentially, because in the 16th century, Western Christendom has fragmented whole regions and kingdoms have broken away from the church and are denying the authority of the Pope. So suddenly the idea of there having been a woman Pope,

and the propagandist use that the Protestants are putting her to, is a real threat. And because this is what's happening. All of a sudden the Protestants are arguing very strongly that Joan did exist. And they are basically saying that this invalidates the papacy, the fact that there was a woman Pope. They can't claim that they are linked in unbroken succession. and back to St. Peter, exactly, the fact that she ordained priests, invalidates the sacraments and so on and so forth.

And so you have these, ironically, these Protestants who ordinarily would never believe the word of medieval chroniclers are drawing on medieval chroniclers and saying, look, all these medieval chroniclers say that Joan existed, so she must have done. And in fact, one of them, you asked earlier about dressing and passing as a man, and one of these, Alexander Cook, one of these Protestant writers, he adds a little xenophobia to this because he says that Italian men was so effeminate that it would have been very easy for Joan

to pass herself off as a man among them. So the Protestants are saying absolutely that Joan existed and so all of a sudden the Catholics realised that they actually do now have to counter this. And so we start to have the emergence of works produced in a humanist historical methodological tradition and they are really the first ones that start to comprehensively dismantle the legend because they realise that they can't just leave it anymore.

They have to show that it is categorically not true. Anthony, the church, a Catholic church, wanted to sort this out. So it introduced a rather bizarre ritual to make sure that future popes who said there were men were men. Can you discuss that in the most tasteful manner? I will try my best. So in 1291, another Dominican, Robert de Uzes, has a vision of the Lateran Palace where he describes two porphyry marble stools, which are used, as it is said, to verify the sex of the Pope.

And this is repeating a rumour which seems to have developed in the wake of the Pope Joan story that when a new pope was installed, they reached the Lateran Palace and they sat on these two chairs which had holes cut in them and a junior deacon or a low-ranking cleric would feel under the chair and shout, he has testicles

and then everyone would shout, Deo Gracius, thank God for that. And then the pope would be verified as a man. Now, this story is really a myth placed on top of a myth. It's a rumour placed on top of a rumour. But it was current, clearly, from at least the 1290s, well into the 15th century,

and was being told around Rome as fact. And to add a kind of detail to this, these two chairs did exist. They were ancient Roman chairs with a kind of key-shaped hole in the bottom, probably bathing chairs or obstetric chairs, but one is now in the Vatican and one's now in the Louvre in Paris.

And they were there in Rue in France. Rome. And so this is kind of making sense of a real object by adding a story on top of it. There is no evidence that this right ever really happened. Though one or two people say they believe it did, but really it's always prefaced with a clause like the vulgar people say or the common people say or rumour has it that. This is not an established ritual. This is more of a rumor. I see. But it was a cautionary tale sent out a... Quite a lot of things that have happened in this discussion.

There's a cautionary tale, and this is what people thought at the time. Laura, what's your view of that? Is it a cautionary tale or is it not a cautionary tale? I think it very much depends on who's using the tale at the time, in the Middle Ages, especially. For the Catholic writers, the tale is harnessed as a way of justifying why women should not be ordained, why women's power should be severely limited or completely limited in the church. why perhaps women should be limited in various other different ways as well, not least in terms of their sexuality and so on. And then Protestant writers then obviously use the tale as a way

of criticising Catholicism and sort of using it as an exemplary tale in that respect that, you know, we can't possibly trust the Catholic Church. If they've allowed a female pope on the papal throne, then obviously this is a corrupt and a distrustworthy institution. and it's used in that way as a sort of an exemplary text. So it varies in terms of its application, actually. Interestingly enough, there's another use of the tale by Walter Brut in his trial for heresy of 1391, and Brut is one of the early reformers of the church,

along with John Wickliff, arguing that the Catholic Church are sort of, you know, incorrect in some of the dealings that they're doing, doing that women should perhaps be allowed to preach even, to potentially be able to consecrate the Eucharist and so on. And during his trial, Walter Brute harnesses the story of Joan, perhaps in an exemplary way, perhaps not. But he's arguing in his refutation of the heresy accusation

that Joan is an example of a woman who was ordained, allegedly to the papal throne, and that therefore, if her ordination is not valid, then that calls into question the ordination of all the subsequent popes, who are supposedly from this direct line from St Peter. And so Walter Brut is arguing that this is a justification for women having a greater role in the church and for women to be accorded more power in that sense. You want to come in, Anthony? Yeah, I'm just to read it.

To add to that a very similar moral of the stories taken up by Jan Hus, also in a reformer who in the early 15th century uses a story, he calls her Agnes, but he uses a story to say, if a woman can become Pope, then an unlearned man or a heretic or even the devil could become Pope. So it's kind of being used to question the very basis of papal, the line of the lineage of the papacy and also the authority of the papacy. The only thing I would add to that, I think, is that so here we have two examples of people who on the face of it, could say are perhaps championing women and saying women could be priests. But as Anthony just said,

in fact, it's not really necessarily an argument that women could be priests, but that even a woman could be priest, you know, that anybody could be a priest. So that's quite different to some much more recent feminist appropriations of Joan in relation to issues of women's ordination, which have claimed Joan as some kind of precursor or model in a more positive way, I would say, as a kind of icon really of what women might be able to achieve within the church. Did a lot of other women try to go down the same path? Well, no, this is the thing, not as far as we know. Because it was just simply shut off from women, essentially.

It wasn't even a matter for discussion, except in these arenas, except people who were far outside the Orthodox boundaries of the church. You know, within the Orthodox Church, there was never any question that women could. be ordained. Although there are certainly examples, if we think about abesses, so the women who are in charge of convents, there are certainly examples of abesses who took on part of the role of priests. So, and they would often get into trouble. So I'm talking here about women who would preach to their community and they would hear the confessions of their community. And that seems to be as far as they would go. But even that was regarded as a step too far by the church

authorities. You know, women were not supposed to take on any of the roles of a priest. But did she in any way inspire other people to be bolding what they took over in the practices of the church? Not in a medieval setting, no. And it's really not until, again, not until the present day, or the 20th century, I would say, that we'd start to have people seeing her as a potential model in those terms. And I suppose a good example here is Joan Morris, who wrote a book about Pope Joan in 1985. And Morris was herself a feminist. She was a Catholic and she was a real campaigner for women's ordination. And interestingly, in her book, she really set out to prove that Pope Joan had existed. And it was because of this agenda that she had. She saw that

Joan was a valuable precursor as a woman priest. And indeed, Morris had earlier written a book about the possibility of female bishops in the early church as well. So her work, on Pope Joan is that the two of them go together essentially. So she clearly did see Joan in that way as saying what might be possible for women. But that's very much a modern development. It's not something that we see happening in the Middle Ages. It's always much more, you know, women should absolutely not be allowed to be priests. That's the import of the medieval versions of the story. Her presence has been, it does endure, doesn't it? Laura, how has Pope Joan lived on in novels and stage and screenplays and so on?

Let's take it up to date. Yeah, well, remarkably, right up to the present day, in fact, there have been myriad recreations of Jones' legend, if you like. There are novels from the 19th century, quite a few productions in the 20th century. There is a play by Carol Churchill called Top Girls, in which Joan features. It's set around a sort of dinner party format,

and Joan is one of the dinner party guests. And it has a feminist sort of undercurrent in the sense that this is a play about women trying to progress in a patriarchal world. And Joan is given a seat at that table in that play. There have been some other novels in the 20th century. There's a famous one by Joanna Cross, which also inspired one of the films that came out. There are a couple of films. There was a film in 1972 and then a subsequent one in 2009, which was based on Cross's novel.

And that's quite an interesting interpretation of Joan's legend and life, quite anti-Catholic and sentiment, I think, but actually the ending of the film has a very positive representation of Joan. Her childbirth on the street is kind of represented in the 2009 film, but not in the shameful, it's public, but it's not presented in the shameful way that the early 13th century chroniclers would have it represented. This is in a much more sympathetic way to her as somebody who's sort of fallen foul of this supposed dishonesty, but she's still seen as a very sympathetic figure.

There have been musicals. There's even a sort of an illusion to Pope Joan in the film that's currently on in the cinema called Conclave. so her tale has resonance currently still. Anthony, we're coming to the end now, but what does it say about the Middle Ages? For me, this story is an invention of the 13th and 14th century, not of the 9th century. It doesn't tell us much about the early Middle Ages,

but it tells us a lot about the later Middle Ages. It tells us a lot about the discussions around women's role in the Androocracy, the kind of rule of men that the medieval church was, and how far a woman can go. And it does that at a time in the 13th, 14th century where women's roles were being increasingly limited in the church. We think of things like mysticism, Begienes, and the invention of the witch.

These are all happening around the same time. And one of the crucial details in the story that Joan is such a great teacher is about her transgression of this rule that a woman cannot teach like that. So it tells us quite a lot about the construction of the exclusion of women from men's society. I think it also shows us that the questions that we have today about gender and embodiment

are very long discursive historical questions. They are things which people have been thinking about for a long time in creative and quite self-contradictory ways at times because Joan can pass, but she cannot succeed as a female Pope. So I think it tells us a lot about those kinds of how medieval society worked out some of these tricky issues and thought through some of these tricky issues around gender, power, exclusion. And then it actually speaks to these quite timeless issues around shame versus guilt, where Jones' guilt doesn't stop her, shame does, truth and deceit, truth does conquer her. And about the embrace of the fictional past, there is still a little chapel in the centre of Rome, which is kind of informally dedicated to Joan,

For a long time, there was said to be a stone in the street, which kind of warned people against the story of Joan. And then we have these porphyry chairs in the Vatican. So the story kind of has a material resonance over time. It shows us how the Middle Ages has long shadows. All I was really going to add in terms of thinking about what the story tells us is actually partly to pick on something that Laura said, which is that you mentioned that the novel and the film are quite,

anti-Catholic. And I was just going to add that I think it has always been given sustenance, I think, the story from the Reformation onwards by a certain anti-Catholic sentiment. And that's one of the reasons why the story persists, I think, because perhaps not so much anti-Catholic, but I suppose perhaps suspicion and hostility aimed at the institution of the church. And this sense that people keep coming back to this question of her existence. And And, you know, there is no evidence for her, as we've said. But of course, what people say is that there is no evidence for her because the church destroyed that evidence. I can understand why some people would believe that because we know that there are all sorts of things that the church genuinely has covered up, you know, criminal activities of various sorts. And it has this reputation of being a body that has suppressed, for example, the role that women played in the early church. And so I think that gives it another kind of veracity for some people. that even though there isn't the evidence, it feels real because they suspect that if Joan had existed, she would have to have been erased. I think the other thing that it tells us is the way in which medieval culture is so much more complex and nuanced than we might like to think.

We've talked already about the way in which medieval culture liked, very much liked binaries, particularly in relation to gender. and the church especially wanted to enforce these very strict binary categories of gender. But of course, Joan transgresses all of that, and she goes beyond. She can't be so easily fit into those particular taxonomies. And that's, I think, what unsettles a lot of the people in the middle age is that she transgresses those boundaries. She's between certain points, and that's what provides so much anxiety for so many of those readers.

Catherine mentioned them briefly, but these saints that are kind of cross-dressing and living in different embodiments and St. Wilco Fortis who sprouts a beard to protect her chastity, that gender is very, very remarkable in medieval texts and occupies all kinds of fabulous, literally, positions for people in medieval culture. Well, thank you very much. And thanks to Anthony Bale, Laura Callas and Catherine Lewis. Next week, John Soane, the son of a bricklayer, who became a renowned architect, and he's a... is now perhaps best known for designing his house in London as a grand tour of Europe in microcosm. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Catherine, what would you like to have said that you didn't get time or opportunity to say?

There's this well-established type of saint who is a woman who, similarly to Joan, for a variety of reasons, disguises herself as a man and enters a monastery and lives, much like Joan, lives completely undetected as a man until death, essentially. Although in the case of these saints, it's not a shameful, humiliating reveal. It only happens after death. And it's generally the idea is that when their bodies are being prepared for burial, the monks are astonished to discover that, in fact, this was not a man,

but underneath they have the body of a biological female. We're looking at the people who were writing Jones' story, possibly taking this as one of the influences. It would have been a story that a lot of people would have been very familiar with, and it would have helped to make sense of Joan's story. There was precedence. Would you like to add anything, Laura? Yeah, I think it would be worth picking up on the idea about women's medical, biological, perhaps ontological presentation in the Middle Ages.

Anthony touched earlier on the Chronicle by Jacobus DeVorgesen, where he talks about Joan as going against the nature of a woman. And this is something that really does resonate throughout the whole of the Middle Ages in the sense that women are set up by their very physiology to be both inferior to men, but also to be susceptible to particular ideas because their bodies were understood to be more sort of, fluid and more sort of cold and receptive to immoral ideas and so on and so forth. And so

those sorts of ideas about what is natural start to get used to justify moral codes of behaviour and sort of to justify sort of ecclesiastical structures and so on. And so you get this very interesting conflation of sort of, you know, physiological ideas about women, if you like, which then actually get followed through into the theology and so on, which is what really Joan is up against in terms of the situation that she's in. And perhaps one of the reasons why she decides that she needs to dress as a man to overcome those prejudices about women in their bodies and their sort of, you know, their ontological situation in the world, if you like.

Finally, Anthony. I think we should have perhaps mentioned Julie Alma, who is a late 13th century real world example. Giulialma was a northern Italian ascetic who was a member of the Humiliati who whipped themselves and strayed into heresy through preaching and teaching. And when she died, one of her followers called Manfreda, a woman, declared herself Pope of this group and said that when Giulialma was resurrected, she would lead a Church of Women. That's a very condensed version of the story, but it's an amazing story which is

happening just around the same time as this story is starting to flourish. And so there is a sense in which this is a, with female religious communities, with enthusiastic, mystical communities, with independent women's authority, people like Marguerite Porett. The church is worried about this very specific notion of women's power. And Julie Alma does seem to instantiate that around this time. Well, thank you all very much. Thanks very much indeed. I enjoyed that.

I'm sure many other people will. Thank you. Thank you. I think I'll have some more water. Water, Anthony. Just some water would be fine. Can I have a cup of tea, please? I could murder a cup of tea as well.

That's right. I'll have a cup of tea as well, then. Thank you. In our time with Melvin Bragg was produced by Elian Glazer, and it is a BBC Studios audio production for Radio 4. I'm Natalia Melman Petrazella, and from the BBC, this is extreme, peak danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world.

If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2. And of the risks will take, to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme peak danger. Listen first on BBC Sounds.