Noble Blood - How Pope Joan Became the High Priestess

Episode Date: January 2, 2024

According to legend, around 1100, a woman disguised herself as a man and was unanimously elected Pope. The ruse lasted until she gave birth while riding her horse through the streets of Rome. The story isn't true, but how the story came to be, and why it persisted, becomes its own history of Christianity in Europe and the power of propoganda. Support Noble Blood:— Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon— Merch— Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong,

dance. And then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. In 1255, a pope in northeast France hand wrote a strange tale. Hoax in Rome. a woman becomes Pope. According to the Chronicle, in around 1,100, a woman disguised herself as a man in order to rise through the ranks of the Catholic hierarchy, from notary to cardinal and all the way to Pope. This woman pulled off her scheme for a while until one day, she, the Pope, was riding on horseback

and went into labor, revealing her deception to the Romans. The citizens of Rome dragged her by horseback and stoned her as punishment for breaking the rules. This short, scandalous story raised a number of questions. Who was this woman? Where was she from? And how did she make it through the gauntlet of Catholic politics without getting caught? How did she get pregnant? If this happened in 1,100, then why is this a female pope, objectively a massive deal, only being reported for the first time 150 years later? Why is the one detail we get about her time as Pope that she

gave birth on horseback, which, while impressive and interesting, doesn't seem to be the main headline of the story, which, again, is that a woman was Pope for the first. first and only time in recorded history. This handwritten chronicle from the monastery is even more ambiguous about the Pope's gender than you might imagine. While the headline explicitly calls the Pope in the story a woman, the text itself never refers to the Pope with any female pronouns, instead opting for gender-neutral pronouns like it and the neuter animated, which is a Latin tense that default to mail. The publication notes that the story is, quote, to be verified, seeming to hedge the

scandalous nature of the story. In spite of these inconsistencies, the story of the alleged Popes spread among the medieval Catholic world, with various authors filling in their own details about the legend. The Popes became an English woman from Mainz, as a young woman, she she fell in love with a scholar and accompanied him to Athens. While she was intellectually voracious, the Athenian professors wouldn't let her into their classrooms, and so she disguised herself as a man and moved to Rome. Admired for her vast knowledge of scripture,

she so successfully embedded herself in the Catholic Church that she was unanimously elected Pope. She served in the position for two years, until she suddenly gave birth, traveling from St. Peter's Basilica to St. John Lantern, which uncovered her deception. Carved busts reveal her name,

Johannes VIII, or Pope Joan. But there is still one massive problem with that more detailed history. There is no actual evidence to prove that Pope Joan ever again. existed. The story I just told about the Englishwoman from Mainz, it became the most popular version of the legend, but that story was cobbled together from hundreds of different accounts with wildly disparate details. Some versions of the Pope Joan story take place in the year 900,

others in 850, others in 1100. In some accounts, Joan is named Agnes, Anna, or, and or Gilberta, and the length of her papacy varies from two months to two years. One would think that such a scandal would have produced some documentary evidence. She might have been depicted in paintings or sculptures or mentioned in articles or letters. But there were no references to her to be found, so I have to be the unfortunate bearer of bad news on this story and make it very clear to you, the listener, that it is incredibly unlikely that a female Pope ever existed. One would think that this lack of evidence would deter people from spreading the story,

but the opposite happened. There wouldn't be a single source questioning the validity of the Pope Jones story until 300 years after the initial chronicle was published in 1250, and Jones' legend would continue to spread for centuries after that, surviving debunking after debunking. In fact, Pope Joan became a kind of Catholic forest gum, popping up throughout pivotal moments in the history of the Catholic Church and playing central roles in religious conflicts. She even spread far beyond the church into secular life, popping up in plays, novels, and even card games. How did the almost certainly false myth of Pope Joan manage to survive for almost a millennium in spite of shoddy evidence and multiple debunkings? In this episode, we'll try to

solve that mystery, tracing the story of a woman who, as Catholic scholar Tom Noble put it, quote, never lived, but who nevertheless refuses to die. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. Solve the mystery of how and why the legend of Pope Joan spread, we should look more closely at the first mention of her, the Monastery Chronicle from 1255. Unfortunately, we don't know much about it. The author of this text was a Dominican monk named Jean Demeley,

but scholars don't know much about him, other than that he wrote this article. and one other book of legends. We don't know where he got his information about Pope Joan from, or what his intentions were for this story, or if he believed the story himself. But Mayle's role as a Dominican monk gives us a clue. Mali wasn't alone in reproducing sketchy rumors.

In fact, it was a matter of principle for friars to document as many stories as possible, no matter how apocryphal. It didn't even seem to matter whether or not the author believed the story they were reporting. Jean de Milly wrote about plenty of legends he didn't personally believe. For example, he wrote an account of the nativity

where Salome, one of Jesus' disciples, wanted to confirm Mary's virginity before she gave birth, so Salome felt her up, which caused her arm to wither away. At the end of the piece, Maley concludes that this event probably never happened. This might raise the question. If Maly didn't believe the story himself, then why did he spread it? After all, the Salome story, like the Pope Joan story, was not widely known.

Maly wasn't debunking a popular rumor. He was simply telling the story and then mentioning that he didn't find it plausible. Pope Joan Scholar Elaine Burrough argues that Dominican writers of that era emphasized quantity over quality. Part of this was politically motivated. After the end of the Crusades, the Catholic Church had more cultural power than ever, and they flexed that power by trying to explain and account for anything and everything. even traditions that seemed to challenge the Catholic Church's authority. Reproducing rumors, even ones that cast doubt on the authority of the Catholic Church or undermined biblical accounts, made them less threatening.

Recording rumors and apocrypha was also a matter of religious doctrine. According to the Bible, Jesus appeared in the middle of human history rather than in the beginning, suggesting that a seismic divine event could occur at any time. Therefore, it was crucial that Catholic writers document any rumor because it may gain religious significance later. In the minds of these writers, it would be way worse to leave out a potentially significant event than it would be to spread a rumor that turned out to be irrelevant or untrue. Other Catholic writers would echo this logic when repeat.

producing the story of Pope Joan for centuries after that first story was originally published. It became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The story had become so widespread that it would be weirder not to include it. One Catholic writer, Platna, would say this explicitly when he wrote his version of the story of Pope Joan in 1479, writing that he wasn't certain that Pope Joan actually existed, but he did not want, quote, to omit too obstinately and tenaciously what everyone affirms. Peer pressure wasn't the only reason the story gained traction. Another reason the story spread was that it was useful in clearing up some inconsistencies around papal infallibility.

Around the time that Pope Joan appeared in the record in the 1250s, Monks were pretty unhappy with the Pope, Pope Innocent the Fourth, who limited Franciscan monks' right to preach and hear confession. This made the Pope hugely unpopular, but he was difficult to criticize because, according to Catholic doctrine, he was ordained by God to rule. By suggesting that a woman could have ascended to the papacy, the Pope Joan story showed that the church had made mistakes

before, so it wouldn't be out of the question if it allowed an unworthy man like Pope innocent to rule. In 1279, an archbishop Martin of Opava emphasized that reading when he published another account of the female Pope in his book of legends. He explained that Pope Joan was intelligent and well respected, and that she was unanimously elected to the papacy. Even so, her reign was invalid because a woman could not be Pope, suggesting that popes could be illegitimate even if they were elected fairly. It's worth noting that we don't know for sure whether or not Martin of Opava actually intended to include the Pope Joan story in his work. Joan doesn't appear in early editions of the book, and the story actually first appears in

editions of the book, around 1304 in different handwriting, leading many scholars to believe the story was added later by a different writer. Still, Martin of Opava's story became the definitive account of Pope Joan. His book was a bestseller, and it spread the rumor throughout Europe, getting translated into several languages. It wasn't just popular, it was also the first version of the story that actually attempted to give historical evidence for her reign. Opava gave the pope a name, John, which would later be feminized to Joan. He changed the date of her reign from 1,100 to the 850s, and suggested that she ruled after Pope Leo IV.

It's unclear how he came up with these details. There was a Pope John, John the 8th, in the 800s. Like Joan, his reign was brief. He reconciled a schism between western and eastern branches of Catholicism through compromise, which many fellow Catholics considered weak and, quote, womanish. Opava may have conflated criticisms of his, quote, effeminate nature, into the idea that he was actually a woman disguised as a man the whole time. It also wasn't totally out of the question for a woman to have sought political power through the church at that time.

In the 10th century, there was what people called a government of harlots, or later a cornucracy in Rome, where a few wives and mistresses of noblemen attempted to manipulate papal succession from behind the scenes. A noble woman in Rome named Theodora advanced several men to the papacy, one of whom she allegedly slept with, and another who had a child with her daughter, Morosia. Morosia herself would later advance her own son to the papacy. People mockingly called these women popuses, since these women seemed to be the true source of political power and influence, puppeting their popes to advance their own agendas.

Many of those popes were also named John, connecting those accounts to Martin of Opava's story. These hypotheses aren't perfect. The dates don't line up. Opava thought that Joan reigned in 850, while the, quote, effeminate Pope John VIII, held the throne in 870, and Theodora and Morosia rose to power

in the 900s. Still, they suggest that there was a pervasive anxiety in the Catholic Church about the influence of women and femininity in religious life. Which brings us to another reason the story of Pope Joan proved useful to the Catholic Church. It discouraged women from pursuing political power within the church. Another writer from the 1200s at Tien de Bourbonne, published a fiery polemic about Pope Joan, suggesting she was a harlot who had what he called, quote, the audacity, or rather insanity, to become Pope. According to him, Joan solicits the help of the devil himself,

who helps her achieve her political ambitions. This version of the story has a clear moral. The church should be wary of wily women with the audacity to seek religious power, because it clearly means they're in league with the devil. Opava and Bourbon's version of the Pope Joan stories couldn't be more different. Opova's account is even keeled, based in, true or not, what purports to be historical detail.

And it's lightly critical of the Catholic Church, while Bourbonne's account is salacious, over-the-top and fiercely defensive of the church, suggesting that the only way a woman could have become Pope was through black magic. But still, the differences in these stories suggest that Pope Joan was useful to Catholic writers with a variety of styles and agendas. By the 1400s, the story of Pope Joan had become so widespread that Pope Joan became even more entrenched in the Catholic canon, beyond just compilations of legends. When the Duomo of Siena commissioned a series of busts of past popes

to display in the giant ornate cathedral, they included Pope Joan, proudly displaying her alongside seminal figures in Catholic history. The bust of Pope Joan wouldn't last forever. Two centuries later, on August 7, 1600, the governor of Sienna delivered an evening, edict, commanding, quote, remove the popes from the cathedral. Just two days later, the bust of the popes was altered to depict Pope Zacharias, essentially disguising Joan as a man once more.

This was the culmination of the work of Florimonde de Raymond, who had campaigned for months to have the bust removed, suggesting that the legend was a hoax. This event, the bust removal, marks a massive shift in the Pope Joan story. The legend had lasted for almost 400 years without question, but now people were calling the story blasphemous. So what happened? In 1415, more than 400 years after she supposedly lived, Pope Joan appeared in an unlikely place, a heresy trial.

The defendant, Jan Hus, was a Czech man who was once the rector for Prague University. But he had turned his back on the church and became its best-known critic. He was especially harsh about the sinful behavior of clergy, bishops, and even the papacy, arguing that the true authority of Catholicism wasn't the Pope, but Christ's. himself. Unlike Jesus, who was infallible, popes and other clergy were subject to the same sinful urges as everyone else. This belief was controversial, especially for the Catholic higher-ups who capitalized off of their presumed infallibility. Hughes had been dragged to Constance, a small university town in Germany to defend his beliefs in court or be executed.

At the trial, he was asked to give examples of sinful or illegitimate popes. He listed a few, but the clergy struck each of them down one by one with a single exception. Pope Joan. Hughes had written earlier in the century that Pope Joan was proof that, quote, the most unlettered layman or a female, or a heretic and antichrist, may be Pope, end quote. The clergy, which had been disproving and discrediting use at every turn, could not challenge him on this point. This event marks a turning point in the legend of Pope Joan. When it initially appeared, the Pope Joan myth was pretty harmless.

It was a fanciful, salacious rumor that actually proved useful as a way for the church to explore and explain doctrinal inconsistencies. But now, Pope Joan was being used by enemies of the church as a way to challenge the Pope's very existence. It wasn't just use using Joan to undermine the authority of the Pope. At this time, the Catholic Church was in a political crisis. It had managed to elect two popes, one based in Rome and another in Avignon, who were fighting for legitimacy. A council in Pisa tried to resolve this by picking a new pope altogether, but this plan backfired. The two deposed popes stood their ground and kept control over their territories, so instead of one pope, Pisa now meant that there were three.

While a pseudo-pope, like Joan, may have been a funny anomaly in the 13th century, by the 15th century, with illegitimate popes and anti-popes cropping up right and left, it was less funny. In the bitter debate about what to do with all of those popes, both sides used Joan to defend their positions. On the one hand, Pope Joan proved that there was a precedent for governing bodies to depose of an unfit Pope. On the other hand, Pope Joan was a warning that deposing a pope could cause chaos. because, according to another legend, after Pope Joan was executed, Catholic leadership struggled to replace her, and the church was left popeless for two years.

This reasoning was accidentally kind of progressive, because these thinkers are arguing that Pope Joan should have stayed in power and that it was better to have a female pope than no Pope at all. And even though Husse was successfully convicted of, heresy and burned at the stake, his threat to the church only grew stronger after his death. His execution sparked a new religious movement, the Hussites who rejected core Catholic doctrines like Latin masses, the veneration of saints, and even churches. The movement started expanding across Bohemia. They, too, brought up Pope Joan as evidence that church authorities,

were not infallible. In 1451, the Bishop of Siena traveled to a Husset stronghold in Tabor to debate them on that point. To discredit them, he undermined the veracity of the Pope Joan story, albeit in a fairly weak way, saying tentatively, quote, the story is not certain. This moment foreshadows the way the Catholic Church would majorly turn on Pope Joan in the 16th century. as threats to the church's authority continued to spread. While the Holy Roman Empire managed to quash the Hussite revolution by the end of the 15th century, in 1517, a new threat to the Catholic Church emerged in the form of Martin Luther's 95 thesis.

Luther, like Jan Hess and the Hussites, would invoke Pope Joan, in one of Luther's informed Pope Joan, In one of Luther's informal talks, he mentioned seeing a statue of Joan during a trip to Rome, but he didn't make much of it. Instead, he wonders why the church would put such an embarrassing object on public display, which is actually a pretty effective dis. Though Martin Luther himself didn't spend much time delving into Pope Joan, he would, of course, spark the Protestant Reformation, which in turn caused an avalanche,

of Pope Joan discourse. From 1550 to 1700, Protestants and Catholics would produce at least 40 pamphlets devoted exclusively to Pope Joan, which doesn't include reprints, new editions, translations, and publications that are lost that are cited in surviving texts. Protestants started this centuries-long debate in the 1550s, seizing on Joan as proof that the Catholic Church was toast. In 1556, Italian Protestant Pierre Paolo Vergario argued in over-the-top fiery prose that, quote, Joan seized the papacy by magical arts and gave the Catholic Church a whore for a leader and a mother for a father. John Calvin, the Protestant who would inspire his own namesake Christian sect Calvinism,

went even further. According to him, not only did Pope Joan prove that individual popes could sin, she also potentially undermined the whole structure of the Catholic Church. He argued that Catholic bishops couldn't claim to be directly descendants of Jesus' apostles if a fraudulent Pope disrupted the chain. Similarly, in the two years she allegedly reigned, Pope Joan would have ordained priests and bishops, and those priests and bishops would have gone on to ordain other priests and bishops, and so on and so on. And so if Pope Joan was illegitimate,

her bishops and priests would be too, and so would all of the bishops and priests in their downlines. By that logic, the existence of Pope Joan could potentially render the entire structure of the Catholic Church illegitimate. Though Pope Joan had originally been a Catholic propaganda tool, after decades of watching the Protestants use her to discredit them, the Catholic Church had enough. In 1562, they finally decided to fire back with a book by Anofrio Penvenio, which set out to definitively disprove the Pope Joan myth for the final time. Like the Bishop of Sienna, who had argued

about Joan with the Hesites in 1450, Anofrio took a reasonable, cautious approach to undermining the story, focusing on the lack of documentary evidence, the confusing dates, and the tentative language in even the earliest retellings of the story. In 1587, a French Catholic writer named Florim and Raymond

made a much bigger splash. In his book-length debunked, of the Pope Joan myth, he argued that the introduction of Pope Joan in the 13th century was actually part of a German anti-Catholic conspiracy. He thought that the Germans, who in his mind were too promiscuous, wanted to undermine the church's chastity. Those licentious Germans created this salacious story to make the church seem hypocritical and giving them more license to sleep around. This was a bizarre claim founded more on Raymond's bias against Germans than on any historical facts. Pope Joan historian Alainborough says that Raymond swung for the

fences, rhetorically speaking, because of his, quote, relatively unenlightened mind, end quote. Nevertheless, in his big mic-drop moment, Raymond suggested that it was ironic that the Protestants were so fixated on Pope Joan when they were under the spell of their own female usurper of religious authority, namely Queen Elizabeth I, who declared herself the leader of the Anglican Church after becoming Queen of England. Raymond's rebuttal pushed the Protestants to get even more conspiratorial. In 1610, Alexander Cook wrote an elaborate, fervid,

defense of Pope Joan's existence to match the Raymond takedown. Echoing contemporary clickbait, Cook bragged that Catholics, quote, hate him. Cook claimed that the lack of documentary evidence for Joan pointed to a Catholic cover-up. According to Cook, Catholics were intentionally destroying textual evidence of Pope Joan in order to suppress her threats to the papal line of succession. The claim was just not true. If anything, Catholics of the 14th century were the ones adding in the story of Pope Joan into older texts to make her seem more legitimate. But in his enthusiasm to prove the existence of Pope Joan, it's pretty apparent that Alexander Cook lost the forest for the trees a little bit.

One of the main tenets of Protestantism is that the Bible was the core of religiously. religious life, rather than legends of saints, elaborate rituals like Latin masses, or or inate churches and cathedrals. Without documentary evidence of Pope Joan, Cook was turning to exactly the random books of legends and paintings that Protestants like Martin Luther and Jan Hess built their careers on repudiating. The massive reversal suggested how far the Pope Joan story had come. The story became so symbolically important that it had Catholics turning on each other and Protestants lionizing Catholic apocrypha. David Blondell, a 17th century Calvinist minister and writer, recognized the absurdity of the situation. In 1647, he broke with his fellow

Protestants and wrote a debunking of the Pope Jones story, which many considered a betrayal of the cause. Looking back on the time 50 years later, one source says, quote, would it not have been better to leave the papists the trouble of wiping their own filth away? And quote, some even thought that he must have been in league with the Catholics. But it seems that Blondell was just motivated by the truth, and many Protestants and Catholics were convinced by Blondell's accounts because of his unbiased approach. One could take issue with the Joan story for reasons other than defending Catholicism. After Blondell published his book, the pace of Pope Joan articles slowed down on both sides. Blondell set the stage for the modern attitude about Pope Joan that the story was

largely a hoax. You might think that this was the last we'd hear about Pope Joan, but it turns out that the legend of the female Pope would take on a life of its own in the secular world, a life that would keep her legend alive for centuries to come. While the Catholics and Protestants were having their own centuries-long flame war about Pope Joan's clerical legitimacy, Joan was gaining track in the secular world as a folk hero. Perhaps to the church's chagrin, the Pope Joan story had broad appeal. What's not to love about a wily, plucky woman

who outsmarted the church and also managed to get laid while doing it? In 1360, long before the Protestant Revolution and a century after the first mention of Pope Joan, Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio included a particularly salacious version of the story in his book On Famous Women, a compilation of stories of notable women from myth and history. Unlike his religious contemporaries, Boccaccio didn't care whether or not Joan was legitimate or an illegitimate pope. Instead, he focused on the more lurid aspects of her story, her alleged lust for sex, knowledge, and power.

Boccaccio's story begins with Pope Joan falling in love with a student and accompanying him to Athens, disguising herself as a man to be able to pursue her studies, as well as to be able to pursue her true love in sort of an Elwood's legally blonde situation. But when her lover dies, she continues her pursuits of religious knowledge as a tribute to him, and Joan becomes so widely recognized for her intellect that she is, disguised as a man, unanimously elected Pope. The devil doesn't enter the picture until after she's elected Pope. The devil encourages her to give in to temptation and start sleeping around, which she does. She gets pregnant and the Romans discover her deception and stone her to death.

In the ending shared by most Pope Joan accounts. That said, in a stark departure from other Pope Joan stories, Baccio celebrates Joan for remarkable achievements, whether those achievements are eloping with her lover, cross-dressing, advancing as a scholar, or pursuing clerical power. It's only after she starts seducing. other men that Baccio begins to criticize her. Her tragic downfall is that she refused to remain loyal to her dead lover. Even though she fell prey to lust eventually, Baccio's Pope Joan was a

sympathetic portrait of a woman as she amassed power. What gave Bacchon's Pope Joan story such remarkable staying power wasn't just that it was sympathetic to Joan, but that it presented Joan as an archetype rather than a historical figure. Women usually got political power in history through familial succession or through marriage, and they tended to express that power by manipulating men in their lives, at least according to the stories. Women like Theodora or Morosia, the mother-daughter power duo from the 900s. But in Boccaccio's story, Pope Joan gained her power through a massive, meritocracy, and she exercised it fairly. She was elected into the papacy as a result of her

scholarly achievements and her ability to deceive the Romans by disguising herself as a man. Illustrated editions of Boccaccio's book spread the story of Pope Joan throughout Europe, with images of her sitting placidly on the throne, wearing her papal robes and an ornate triple Tiara. These images of Pope Joan found their way into a tarot card deck, which was introduced into Europe around 1450. Tarot decks like decks of playing cards include various suits and numbers that a tarot reader interprets to tell you your fortune. But what distinguishes tarot decks from regular old playing cards are special symbolic cards like the world and the moon, and these These cards form what's called the Major Arcana.

One card of the Major Arcana is the High Priestess. Back in the 1400s when the tarot was initially introduced to Europe, this card was the Popas, the oldest surviving tarot deck commissioned in 1450 by Felipe Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan, and by his successor and son-in-law, includes an image of the Popes, one that resembles the woodcut prints of Joan from the Boccaccio illustrations. In this image, Han painted with silver and gold leaf,

the Popes sits on a throne, holding a pontifical staff and wearing the typical papal triple tiara, much like the Boccaccio illustrations. It wasn't until the late 1700s that the Popes would transform into the high priestess. In the midst of the French Revolution, the Catholic Church was considered unpopular and corrupt. French tarot decks began to de-center images of the clergy, a shift that would eventually result in the development of the High Priestess Card in the 19th century. But while Pope Joan was being scrubbed from the tarot deck, she was about to have a major moment of resurgence in Revolutionary France.

In 1793 alone, three plays about Pope Joan debuted in France. All body farses aimed at satirizing the monarchy and the Catholic Church. Like Boccaccio's version of the Pope Joan myth, these plays had almost no interest in confirming or denying the veracity of the story. Instead, they held up Joan as something of a folk hero, willing to thumb her nose at the church's authority, in the pursuit of true love. But even as Pope Joan established herself firmly as a folklore figure,

even today there are some scholars who stubbornly assert that Joan could have been a real historical figure in spite of the lack of evidence. After all, even from the few primary sources presented in this episode, I think it's pretty clear that the textual record is contentious and confusing, Some scholars think that the primary sources were later altered to provide proof of Pope Jones' existence, but others think, like the Protestants in the 1600s, that the lack of documentary evidence is more likely a result of Catholics frantically scrubbing the Popesse from the archive. There is always the possibility that some historian might stumble upon a long-buried primary source

that proves that Pope Joan was a real historical figure. Stranger things have happened, but until then, it is Joan's ambiguity that makes her compelling, at least in my mind, how she was manipulated and used, reinterpreted, and trotted out as evidence on every side of multiple debates. Joan, even in legendary form, fueled centuries of resistance to the church's misdeeds, from the Protestant Reformation all the way through the French Revolution. History is a slippery thing, and it doesn't work like simple fables with morals at the end of the story. But if the moral of Pope Joan's story is,

resist the constraints of the institutions you're in to fight for more equal opportunities, then that's a pretty good lesson. That's the story of the myth of Pope Joan. Keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear about one of the silliest myths that still persists in Jones' legacy. I'm Iris Palmer and my new podcast is called Against All Od, and that's exactly what the show is about, doing whatever it takes to be the odds. Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs and entertainers as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers, and breaking generational patterns. I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Eva Langoria. I think I had like $200 in my savings account and my mom goes, what are you going to do?

And I was like, I'll figure it out. We got a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month and we all could not afford. Like, I was like, how am I going to make $100 a month? I'm opening up like I've never before. For those of you who think you know me from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me. Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part. part of the My Cultura Podcast Network, available on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Iris Palmer and my new podcast is called Against All Od, and that's exactly what the show is about, doing whatever it takes to be thoughts.

Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs and entertainers as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers and breaking generational patterns. I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Eva Langoria. I think I had like $200 in my savings account, and my mom goes, what are you going to do? And I was like, I'll figure it out. We got a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month, and we all could not afford. Like, I was like, how am I going to make $100 a month? I'm opening up like I've never before. For those of you who think you know me from what you've seen on social media,

get ready to see a whole new side of me. Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part of the MyCultura podcast network, available on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you, you get your podcast. A corollary of the Pope Joan myth was that because a woman snuck into the papacy, there needed to be a final check at the end of the Pope election to make sure that all elected popes were male. According to legend, popes had to sit on a special chair with a hole in it, so that someone could reach up through the hole and make sure that the Pope to be had testicles. This myth appeared initially in around 1290, in an account of Pope Joan from a Benedictine monk.

He wrote, quote, It is said that this is why Romans established the custom of verifying the sex of the elected pope through an opening in a stone throne, end quote. At around the same time, another Dominican monk wrote of a spiritual vision he had where, quote, the spirit of the Lord took hold of him and placed him in Rome where he saw the chair for himself. In the next few hundred years, much like the Pope Joan myth, the chair ritual myth took on a life of its own and became known as the right of verification. Unlike the Pope Joan myth, the right of verification had more solid evidence for its existence. There are some eyewitness accounts of the ritual, and not just visions guided by the Holy Spirit.

In 1404, someone mentioned that they saw the Pope elect sit on a stone throne as part of his inauguration. But it's not hard to poke holes in that account because the person who wrote it wasn't a member of the Roman Curia, so he wouldn't have been able to see the ritual in the first place. There was another account of the right of verification from someone who was actually in the Curia, a humanist and member of the Roman Academy named Plotina that you might remember from earlier in this episode. But his version only complicates the historical record, since he claimed that the stone throne with a hole in the seat wasn't used to verify the Pope's sex, but rather it was used as a toilet.

He wrote, quote, That seat was prepared in such a manner so that one who is invested with such great domination will know that he is not God but a man, so he must defecate. End quote. It turns out, starting in 1099, a pope had to sit on a perforated marble throne

as part of the papal election ritual, and in keeping with the spirit of Plataena's explanation, it was meant to humble the Pope in a moment that he was about to gain absolute power. The ritual was relatively uncontroversial. It was performed up until 1513. But the Pope Joan myth added a rationale for the perforated chair and imbued the ritual with a scandalous origin story,

which allowed it to become sensationalized and exaggerated for centuries. In tandem with the Pope Joan myth, the, quote, right of verification became a hot topic during the Protestant Reformation, although it was less existentially threatening to the Catholic Church. After all, as scholar Tom Noble wrote, quote, In the early 16th century, several writers with grim humor said that the right had followed out of use because recent popes had so many bastard children that their sex was not in doubt. Meanwhile, Florimond de Raymond, who you might remember as the one who thought that the Pope Joan's story was a blasphemous, horny German conspiracy theory, was relatively chill about the

right of verification. He wrote that the whole thing was, quote, so gross that the only good response for Catholics was to laugh at the Protestants who repeated it. Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio, and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is created and hosted by me, Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by Noamie Griffin and Rima Il-K.

with supervising producer Josh Thane and executive producers Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance.

And then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human