The Rest Is History - 403. The Mystery of the Pregnant Pope

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

A Pope of great renown once reigned during chaotic years for the medieval Church: she was an extraordinary figure, from a time when women were forbidden from even becoming priests - indeed she is History’s only female Pope. But did this “Popess" really exist, and if so, who was this mysterious, awesome woman? What does her story reveal about the murky politics of the medieval Vatican? The original account described an English woman named Joan, who through her brilliance rose to become none other than Pope John VIII. Then, in a shocking turn of events, she fell pregnant and gave birth to a son during a procession, before meeting a sinister end…  Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss this most remarkable of legends and discover the truth behind the story of the pregnant Pope - a tale of teenage Popes, female persecution, blinding, castration, and Europe’s greatest revolution. Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. There was one Pope, or to be more accurate, a Popess, who is not included in the list of the bishops of Rome. This is because she was a woman. She disguised herself as a man and became, by virtue of her character and talents, first a secretary in the papal court, and then a cardinal, and finally pope. One day, while climbing onto her horse, she went into labour and gave birth to a child. Immediately, in accordance with the dictates of Roman justices, she was bound by her feet to a horse's tail and dragged for half a league while the people stoned her. When she died, she was buried at the spot where she had breathed her last, and an inscription was written there, Petre, parta patrum, papice prodoto partum, which is to say, Peter, father of fathers, make known the childbearing of the Popes.

So that was Jean de Mailly, who was a Dominican chronicler writing the early 13th century. And that, Tom, is a remarkable moment in the history of the Catholic Church, isn't it? It is, isn't it? A female pope, a popess, who gives birth while getting onto the horse and is then stoned to death by her own adherents. So first of all, did this happen? And secondly, what is going on? What is going on? I'm not aware of any female popes. Right. So this is the very first mention of a female pope. Jean de Mey gives a very precise date, which is 1099. So maybe 120, 130 years before he's writing. The pope in this passage is not named, but it is written up a lot over the decades and centuries that follow.

And the pope is generally known as Joan. So Pope Joan. And the story attains probably its canonical form in the mid-13th century with a chronicler and bishop, again, a Dominican like Jean de Mailly called Martin of Poland. And he writes a chronicle of all the popes and all the emperors. And he's actually the first person to have the brilliant idea of kind of setting popes and emperors in separate columns so that you can kind of cross-reference them. And the story he tells is in its outline, he sets it Martin of Poland. And so this is the one that goes into the mainstream of tradition. That in the early ninth century, so well before 1099, there is an English woman who

was born in Mainz, so presumably of English parents. In Germany. In Germany. She disguises herself as a man because she has a lover who goes off to become a clerk. And this is a very kind of exclusively masculine environment for him to go in. And so the only way that Joan can follow her lover is to disguise herself as a man and go off and become a clerk, a student, a scholar as well. And she turns out to be absolutely brilliant. She has a brilliant, brilliant scholarly brain. And she studies first in Athens, we're told, and then she goes to Rome. And in Rome, she attracts the attention of the papal court. And so she is brought into the papal court. She ends up a

cardinal, as Jean de Mey said, and then she gets elected Pope. Crikey, that's a twist. And she takes the name of John. This pontificate, according to Martin de Poden, lasts for two years. Not only has she disguised herself as a man, but she is continuing to have sex. So very unpapal behaviour all round. Well, it depends on the Pope, I suppose, doesn't it? I mean, definitely becoming pregnant is unusual for an heir of St. Peter. And as in the account that you read out, she gives birth in public and Martin of Poland specifies that it takes place

during a public procession from St. Peter's in the Vatican to the Lateran Palace, which is the palace that was given to the papacy by Constantine. So it's in the heart of ancient Rome. And Martin specifies that this passageway is a narrow street that was once known as the Sacred Way, and it runs between the Colosseum and San Clemente, the great church where to this day, you can go deep down into the depths and ultimately reach all the way down to the Roman street level. And Martin says that ever since this shocking episode, the popes have made a point of avoiding the street, although this street is the most direct route from the Vatican to the Lateran. Right. And just to put this into some context for our audience, Tom, the extraordinary thing about all this, in case you know nothing of Christianity and Catholicism,

is that women aren't even allowed to be priests, let alone to be popes. So a woman pope challenges the very basis, one of the foundations of Catholic Christianity. And so it would seem. And this is why the penalty as described by Jeanne de Mey is so terrible that she's dragged on a horse and stoned. But Martin of Poland, fans of Pope Joan will be relieved to hear, gives a slightly more upbeat resolution to the story, which is that John isn't killed, but deposed. And he does many years penance. And the child that she has given birth to is a boy, and he becomes the bishop of Ostia, which is the port of Rome, so at the mouth of the Tiber. And in due course, when she dies,

he buries his mother with all honor in the cathedral of Ostia. So it's an odd story. It is. And you might think that it's just a kind of mad folk tale. I mean, where's it come from? Except that for two to three centuries, pretty much up to the 16th century, it's believed to be true. So the chronicle list that Martin of Poland has written is accepted by the church as definitive. Pope Joan appears in this list. So it's basically got the imprimatur of the Roman church. And all kinds of substantiating evidence seems to have emerged. So there is the fact that the popes don't take this road.

There is the fact that certainly by the 15th century, if you're a visitor to Rome, you can go to the spot where she is meant to have been stoned or had the baby and see this inscription that you read out, Petrae pata patrum papice prodita partum. Come on, Tom, you can do it. Which is supposedly said by the devil. Yeah. And also you can see a statue of Pope Joan marking the spot where she died. Now, that statue presumably is some ancient Roman statue of a woman that they found and put up.

Right. But it is believed genuinely to mark the spot where she is killed. Yeah. And in the great cathedral of Siena that we talked about in the episode about Catherine of Siena, they were planning a massive extension of it in the Black Death. It gets stopped by the eruption of the plague. But they sculpt a whole series of images of the various popes, and Pope Joan appears in this list. And she's labelled John VIII, a woman from England. So hold on, Tom. For about 250 years, maybe even 300 years, people lived and died believing that there had been Pope Joan. Yeah. John VIII, a female pope. Yeah.

Crikey. But more than that, Dominic, that the church is giving its imprimatur to it. I mean, that's what's really, really odd. And then, of course, what happens in the 16th century is that you have the Reformation. And this is exactly the kind of story that Protestant propagandists love. Of course. And so they start making all kinds of mischief with it. And the Roman church becomes ever more kind of embarrassed by the story.

And then by 1601, Clement VIII definitively declares the legend to be untrue. And so it is then kind of parked. Will you say the legend? That presupposes that it is a legend rather than an embarrassing story that they want to suppress. Correct. Right. So the obvious question is, where does this story come from? I mean, what are the origins of it? And as you say, one obvious solution would be that it is true, that Pope John really did exist. It has to be said that there are scholars today who do make the case for it, but they're very, very much in a minority.

Pretty much since the 17th century, everyone, say Protestants as well as Catholics, have tended to assume that it's a legend. In fact, it is a Protestant from France, a guy called David Blondel, who publishes a dissertation in 1647 in which Edward Gibbon, writing the following century, says that Blondel annihilated Pope Joan. He goes through all the sources for it. He sifts it and evaluates it. I mean, this is very much what Protestant scholars are doing in the 17th century. They're going over all these kind of ancient stories that are told about the church and kind of demonstrating that they are fantastical. So the details that Blondel is marshalling to demonstrate that Pope Joan can't possibly be a true story.

I mean, the classic one, which I'm sure you will have picked up on, is that the account, the first mention of the female Pope takes place a long time after the events that they're describing. So even if it's in 1099, I mean, that's still over a century. And if it's in the ninth century, then that's 300 years and there is no mention of her whatsoever. But Tom, we've said so many times on this podcast, the sources for Alexander the Great or any of these things are written long after the event. Well, as I remember, you and I had a slight disagreement about the reliability of those sources. I think you'd now admit you were wrong, wouldn't you? Of course you would. No, I don't think I would. Because the thing is that it's

not as though we lack sources from the 11th century. 1099 is the year that Jerusalem gets captured by the first crusaders. A lot is going on. We have a lot of material. There is no mention of this whatsoever. And even the ninth century where the sources are definitely more sparse. So Martin of Poland places Joan very precisely between the pontificates of two popes. One is Leo III, who was by the standards of ninth century popes, very formidable and impressive. And another one, Benedict III, who's the guy who receives the young Alfred the Great, you remember, who goes on pilgrimage to Rome. Oh, yeah. And gives him his sword and gives him his consul's cloak and all that kind of thing.

Yeah. A consul's regalia. Yeah. And there's no place for Joan. They succeed one another. So it seems improbable, to put it mildly. Now, Martin of Poland describes Pope Joan as having ruled as John VIII. So you may wonder, well, was there a John VIII? And there was, but he definitely wasn't a woman. And he didn't rule for two years. He ruled for 10 years. He was a very formidable figure. The Saracens were busy launching raids deep up towards Rome, sometimes sailing up the Tiber. He is busy combating that. He's a considerable diplomat. He's marshalling allies across Italy against the Saracen threat.

He doesn't die while giving birth. He is actually, in the best tradition of popes in the 9th century, poisoned and clubbed to death by his rivals in the church. But a question, Tom. You say he's definitely not a woman. I mean, how do you know? I think it would have been mentioned. He's not publicly a woman. He's certainly not publicly outed.

Right. Okay. Fine. He's busy negotiating with people and marshalling, you know, alliances and things. And I think people would probably have noticed if he wasn't. It would have been spotted is what you're saying. Yeah. I imagine there's a lot of academic theorists at work today who would have, you know, very

complicated things to say about a story, Tom, but let's not get into that thicket. They do. Yeah. Obviously, I mean, it's of great interest to feminist and LGBT scholars, but I mean, I don't think they would say it was true. They would find it interesting as it is interesting because of what it says about the nature of gender and so on. But I don't think they are saying it's true. Basically, it's not true. I mean, it really isn't true. I think we can definitively say it's not true. It didn't happen.

So the next item in your notes I read is distorted memory of the... This is not a misprint. No. The pornocracy. The pornocracy. The pornocracy. What is the pornocracy? So the pornocracy is a phrase that was used by later generations of historians of the church to describe the papacy in the ninth century. They call it the pornocracy.

They do. And it reflects the fact that this is absolutely the low point for the moral standing of the Bishop of Rome. Because it's basically, it's not just that Rome is under attack from the Saracens. It's also that it is the plaything of very, very powerful rival dynasties in Rome, and particularly of women. And so the idea that the papacy is a plaything of powerful women. To clerics writing later, this is seen as- Pornographic. Porn is a prostitute. So this is prostituting the church, but also it's the implication that

the women who are getting their hands on the papacy are themselves whores. Getting their hands on in every sense, Tom, presumably. Well, completely. So David Blondel in his, you know, the Protestant in 17th century France, he focused on one of these pornai, these prostitute, powerful women in Rome, as they were characterized, who was actually a remarkable woman called Marozia. And I mean, she wasn't just the most powerful woman in Rome during her lifetime. She was the most powerful figure in Rome. She was an absolute power broker. And so inevitably, she was viewed by outraged clerics in the most disobliging terms. So Leoprand of Cremona, who's a brilliant historian of this period, he goes to Constantinople and

gives a sensational description of an audience with the emperor. And he's fabulously rude about everyone, but he's very, very rude about Marozia. He describes her as a shameless whore who ruled the Roman people as though she were a man. So you could see perhaps there's a kind of distorted echo there. But she goes one stage further and she arranges for her son, who is only 21 years old, to become Pope. He takes the name of John XI. And a further source of outrage for clerical chroniclers is that he himself is said to have been the son of a Pope, that Morozzi had had an affair with Sergius III. Textbook papal behavior, Tom. And so Edward Gibbon, the great author of The Decline of the Roman Empire, who loved all this stuff. Of course he did. I mean, there was nothing he enjoyed more than popes behaving badly. He says of the 9th century

that the bastard son, two grandsons, two great-grandsons, and one great-great-grandson of Morozia, a rare genealogy, was seated in the chair of St. Peter. Thomas Cromwell would have loved all this, Tom, wouldn't he? So it's an interesting theory. And actually, Blondel isn't the only guy who kind of proposes this as a possibility. So in the 16th century, there's an Italian historian of the papacy, a guy called Ornifrio Panvinio, who suggested that the story of Pope Joan derived from the guy who is possibly the worst, the most shocking, the most badly behaved Pope of all time, who ruled between 955 and 964, another John. So perhaps kind of echoes of Joan. And he was John the 12th. He becomes Pope when he's still a teenager. So kind of 17 or 18.

He became Pope as a teenager. That's bonkers. That is bonkers. And Dominic, kind of doubling down on that, he ordains a boy who's 10 as a bishop. So if you're a young boy and you want to get on in the Catholic church, this is definitely the time to have been born. Start early. I think a lot of people would say 11 or 12 is too late to be a bishop. He variously blinds and castrates priests who offend him. He's reputed to have toasted the devil and he dies in the midst of sexual congress, Dominic.

Of course he does. Either of an apoplexy or at the hands of his mistress's outraged husband. Right. Who's presumably not the person he's having Congress with, I would assume. No. And he has lots of these mistresses. So Leoprand says of him that he turned the latter into a brothel. And one of these mistresses was supposedly called Joan. So this is the theory. But again, the problem is that there is absolutely no trace of how these traditions would have evolved. There's no kind of hint of them. So again, I don't think that that is the explanation. And Dominic, it may not surprise you to learn that my explanation would be that it emerges out of perhaps the most significant revolutionary movement in European history, the great revolution that has been largely forgotten because it was so successful,

the Gregorian revolution, it's called, after Gregory VII, the great pope in the 11th century, who was the standard bearer for it. I don't want to imply, Tom, in what follows, any form of disapproval of this subject or weariness or anything like that. I want to convey to the audience great enthusiasm. Brilliant. Thank you. However, I will say, for the second time in about three weeks, you have smuggled in a discussion of theology and one of your pet subjects beneath an ostensibly Sandbrook-friendly, crowd-pleasing title. Is that fair to say? What the listeners don't know is that three minutes before we started

this program, I'd sent Dominic notes long ago and he confessed he hadn't read them. Yeah, last night. Last night. So that's your problem. I'm afraid that is entirely your problem. I was loving this. The pornocracy, whores, the blatter in a brothel, and then I turn the page, the Gregorian revolution. Oh no. Okay, Dominic, let's get back to 1099, which is the year that John de May gives as the date of Pope Joan. Does anything significant happen in this year? Well, yeah, we've mentioned the capture of Jerusalem by the first crusade, but there is also a key event, which is that Urban II, the Pope who had launched that crusade, dies and is succeeded by a guy who takes the name of Pascal II. And both these men are key players in the papal revolution.

And in essence, it's a hugely complicated subject. But essentially, the key motivation in the Gregorian revolution is this idea that the universal church has to be freed from the grubby clutches of earthly rulers, that there is a dimension of the cyclone, which is earthly, which is fallen. And then there is this dimension where religio joins the fallen earth to the radiant eternity of heaven. It's this that generates what will become the great divide between the secular and the religious, which becomes the defining feature of West European culture. To force through this sense that the church has to be freed from the hold of kings and emperors and so on. Reformers seize control of the Roman church and all these popes are kind of pushing

it forward. And whereas in the beginning of the 11th century, emperors are arriving in Italy and appointing popes, by the end of it, this is anathema to any pope. And instead, popes are being appointed by cardinals. So it's in the 11th century as part of this reform program that cardinals take on the role that they still have today, the College of Cardinals. These are the people who vote on the papacy. And these cardinals are drawn from across the whole of Christendom. And this is the key point. And I think that this is what provides the context for it. And the guy who argues this is a brilliant French historian, Alain Bourreau, whose book on Pope Joan is really wonderful.

It's by miles the best book out there on the subject. And Bourreau points out that when Pascal II goes through the ritual of being a pope, before he's crowned in the Vatican, there is a similar kind of coronation in the Lateran palace. And for the first time, a pope is described as sitting in twin chairs in the Lateran. And these twin chairs are very, very distinctive because they still survive. There is one in the Vatican Museum. There's one in the Louvre.

And both of them have holes in the seat. So what are they? They're like toilet seats. Well, toilets or bidets or perhaps birthing chairs. But they are very, very beautiful. They are traditionally described as being made of porphyry. So very, very grand. And they retain a definite antique Roman aura. And these chairs, these thrones link the Lateran palace back to ancient Rome, back to the time of Constantine, but also even earlier than Constantine. Because I think that the key question is, why is Pascal sitting in two chairs? What's the significance of that?

And in the ritual where he's being crowned, these chairs are described as curule chairs. And curule chairs are the chairs that the consul sat on. Okay. Yeah. So the consuls are the two leading magistrates in the Roman Republic, but they last right the way through under the emperors as well. These are the heads of the Roman state. And if the Pope is sitting on these two chairs to symbolize the fact that he is the heir of the consuls, then that is to cast the cardinals as the heirs of the Senate. Right. So they're deliberately taking up the

classical legacy. That's an unusual thing, isn't it, for Christians to do? They are, because it's giving a dignity to the cardinals and to the papacy that precedes the emergence of the empire. So what the papacy is doing is saying that as the heir of the Roman consuls, his office is older than that of Augustus. And this is very popular. So you have all kinds of propagandists for the Gregorian reform. So one of them describes cardinals as the spiritual senators of the universal church. I think you can see very clearly that the use of these two chairs with the holes in them is a very specific response to a specific moment in papal history.

I like the detail about the chairs. I'm curious how you're going to link that to the legend of Pope Joan, because this would sound like a weird question, but where do the holes fit in to her story? Right. So I think the holes in 1099 are coincidental. What matters is the fact that these are very grand chairs. But what happens is that the specific context of 1099 comes to be forgotten. But as is the nature of rituals, popes, when they become pope, continue to sit in these two chairs. And so inevitably, 100 years on, people are wondering, well, what's going on?

What's the thing about them? What are the holes for? Yeah. What are the holes for? And by 1290, so we've had 100 years of stories of Pope Joan by this point, you have a chronicler called Geoffrey de Coulon who writes about Pope Joan, deriving his account from Martin of Poland, but adding his own spin. And he says that because of the scandal of Pope Joan, and I quote, the Romans established the custom of verifying the sex of the elected Pope through an opening in the stone throne. Imagine being the person who had to do that, to lie underneath the chair and look up. has to kind of reach underneath and go up with his hands and then announce in Latin, habet duos testiculos et bene pendentes. And I guess that even if you don't know Latin,

you can work out what that means. He has a pair of bollocks and they are hanging down very nicely is basically what it says. Right. Nice. But obviously this rite never existed, but it serves to explain why they're sitting on these chairs and it can be related to the story of Pope Joan. And I think that that's a brilliant solution. I mean, a kind of wonderful explanation for it. The question then is, is it an adequate explanation for the story of Pope Joan? Yeah, because how does that explain the whole complicated story about being English, being born in mounts, coming to the throne, being stoned? I mean, I can see that people would say, well, they had the chairs with the host because once there was

a female. It's a great story, but where do all the incidental details come from? It's a kind of just so story, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, I think it's clear that the story of Pope Joan reflects a very obsessional concern for the masculinity of the Pope, and he has to have his full tackle. I mean, this is the point of the ritual, even though he's never going to use it. And so that leaves two questions, as it were, hanging. Right. You know, why does it matter so much that a celibate man is seen to be masculine? And of course, the question that I'm sure lots of our female listeners in particular would have been asking themselves, what's so wrong with a woman being a Pope anyway? Brilliant. Well, what a cliffhanger, Tom. I don't know the answer to either of those questions. I'm looking forward

to finding out. So we will be back after the break, and Tom will answer those two thrilling questions. Bye-bye. Reviews, a splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes, and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. Now, Tom, you were taking us masterfully through the legend of Pope James.

But I have a burning question that I am guessing many of the audience will also have. Why in the Middle Ages, and indeed today, do Catholics take it for granted, A, that a woman cannot become Pope, head of the Roman Church, and B, that a woman cannot even be a priest? It's a very simple answer, really. It's because, according to the Gospels, Christ summoned men to be his apostles and not women. And therefore, according to Catholic doctrine, when priests handle the sacraments, they are doing so in persona Christi, in the person of Christ himself. And a woman cannot personate Christ, but a man can. Is that the claim? Yes, because there is also the notion which the Pope actually, when he reaffirmed this doctrine

earlier this year, he drew on it, which derives from Paul, that man is seen as being in the image of Christ and that women are seen as being the image of the church, the beloved of Christ. So of course, in an age of gender equality, this can seem very misogynist. Well, I was about to say, lots of people listening to this will say, does this not reflect a deep seated, specifically Catholic, this would be the philip pullman take tom uh specifically catholic but also wider christian fear of women of sexuality generally of the body but specifically of women i mean there is absolutely no question that there is a deep vein of misogyny in medieval culture and we touched on this in the episode that we did on catherine of Siena. But Christian misogyny is qualitatively different to the misogyny that is completely taken for granted in antiquity.

So Aristotle, who is the great authority for this throughout antiquity, he categorizes women as essentially being inadequate men, men who haven't quite made it to being men. At the same time as the legends of Pope Joan are starting to crystallize, at exactly the same time, Aristotle is coming to be enshrined at the heart of West European Latin scholarly traditions. There is a huge temptation for clerics who are all men, who are all as oozing, as bleeding, as being like bogs that will engulf the man who is foolish enough to stray into their depths, as it were. Increasingly, over this period, wherever Aristotle is being taught, and he is coming to be taught pretty much everywhere in Latin universities, the Daughters of Eve are coming to be measured

by standards that are less biblical than Greek, than Aristotelian. But the problem is that you still have to square these views, these Aristotelian views, with the Bible. The Bible doesn't really allow for that kind of Aristotelian notion that women are just an inferior version of men. This is acknowledged by Thomas Aquinas, who is the greatest of the interpreters of Aristotle in this period, who admits that women can't simply be understood as defective versions of men, because in Genesis, it is explicitly stated that women as well as men are images of the divine. Aquinas acknowledges that the body of Eve was ordained by nature for the purposes of generation, and that this is the point of correspondence because God

is the universal author of nature. Therefore, the body of Eve exists no less in the image of God than the body of Adam does. I think that it's really telling that this is the intellectual background to the age when the legend of Pope Joan is starting to clarify, because there is a real, real obsession in this period on the part, again, of male clerics with the idea of Christ himself as being female. So in the Bible, Christ does compare himself as a mother hen who collects her chicks under her wings. Even a scholar as great as Anselm, writing a couple of centuries before, he says, praising Christ, truly, Lord, you are a mother. Bernard of Clairvaux, the great preacher who inspires the second Crusade, compares himself to a nursing mother with breasts filled with the milk of doctrine. Dominic, you're looking very

Protestant on the Zoom. That's not an analogy I would choose. As I say all this. And so, there's nothing shameful in male priests, male clerics, describing themselves in female terms and thinking of God the Father as simultaneously being a mother. And the church is a mother, of course, right? Mother church. Absolutely. But the question is, what does this mean for women themselves? Because on one level, clearly it does elevate them. This is the age where devotion to the Virgin is kind of universal. Again, we've mentioned Catherine of Siena. I mean, she is a hugely significant figure in the 14th century. She is seen as being holy in a way that is somehow more total and stranger than any man can hope to possess holiness. So that is a counterpoint to the parallel misogyny that you definitely get.

And this whole idea that the Pope is still alluding to today, in 2023, the idea that Christ is the groom, the church is the bride. This is what underpins the Gregorian reform. Because if the church is Christ's bride, then this explains why emperors and kings can't be allowed to get their grubby rapist's fingers on her. That's the whole essence of it. But it also, at the same time, explains why priests have to be celibate. Because if they're not celibate, then their fingers too are grubby. They lack the purity that is required to handle the sacraments of the bride of Christ. Right. So the priests are married to the church. Yeah. The church is a virgin bride. Simultaneously, their mother and their virgin bride. And if they take another bride,

they are cheating on the church. Absolutely. And so the implications of this for women is very paradoxical because simultaneously it's serving to equate them to the radiant purity of the church, but also casting them as temptresses because it's women who will seduce priests from their godly, celibate role. I've just noted down here one commentary on women by a priest, but there are multitude equivalents. The woman is the confusion of man, an insatiable beast, a continuous anxiety, an incessant warfare, a daily ruin, a house of tempest, a hindrance of devotion. When you look at it in those terms, you can understand why the idea of the most eminent of all priests in the Catholic church having to have his tackle, his manhood verified,

would have such a kind of resonance. So that's, I think, from the masculine perspective. I think that's how men are seeing it. But again, lots of listeners, and again, I'm sure lots of female listeners especially, may be wondering whether there is anything in this theology, this idea that God, Christ can be female. Is there anything in this that leads people in this period to argue that actually women can be priests, they can be cardinals, maybe they can even be a pope? And the answer amazingly is yes, that there is an extraordinary episode. It's like something out of The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco novel. And it's set in the late 13th, early 14th century. So again, the

period when all the stories of St. Joan are starting to clarify. And it is focused around a remarkable woman called Guglielma. And the traditions that are told about Guglielma, because we have very unreliable sources for her life for reasons that will become evident, but to the extent that we know them, she is said to have been a noble woman in Bohemia, which like Mains is part of the empire. She is said to have married an English prince. So again, there's a kind of English link as in the stories of Pope Joan. And she's said to have come to Milan. So that is Italy. Yes. Just as Pope Joan is said to have come to Rome. And she comes to Milan and she lives a life of

absolutely spotless poverty and charity. So there are kind of weird echoes in the biography of Guglielmo of the story that's told of Pope Joan. Now, Guglielmo dies in around 1280, and she is buried in an abbey at Chiaravalle, which is a district south of Milan. It's now a part of Milan itself, but back then it was a kind of separate place. And her grave becomes a great object of pilgrimage. People come, they pray before it, miracles are performed, candles are lit, and she's given a kind of popular canonization. She's come to be seen by the pilgrims as a saint. And there are many, many cults like this. It's nothing particularly unusual. But then in 1300, something absolutely astounding happens, which is that a whole team of inquisitors arrive in the

abbey and they have not come as pilgrims. They have not come to show their respect. Instead, they have come to desecrate Guglielmo's tomb. So they brought crowbars, they open it, they scoop out the body, they light a fire and they toss the corpse of Guglielmo onto the fire and they burn it utterly. And then they get the ashes and they scatter them to the winds. And then they go back into the abbey and they pulverize the tomb of Guglielmo and they trample down all the icons and images of her. And this is an amazing way to treat a woman who is being viewed by pilgrims as a saint. So you may wonder, what is going on? Well, what is going on?

There is a clue in the fact that even as Guglielmo's body is being destroyed, so the abbess, the woman in charge of the abbey, the woman who has been supervising this cult, is arrested. This is all the more amazing for the fact that this woman, she's called Merefreda, she is a cousin of the most powerful man in Milan, Matteo Visconti. The Visconti, through the 13th into the 14th century, are the rulers of Milan, but he can't save his cousin. She is condemned. She is burnt at the stake, accused of having preached an absolutely terrible heresy, a subversive, arrogant, grotesque body of doctrines. And what Mayor Freyda has been teaching the nuns in her abbey is that she, Mayor Freyda, is destined to become Pope.

So how has Mayor Freyda come to this conclusion? Yeah, a feminist theologian from the 13th century. Incredible. We do not have detailed records of this because all the documents relating to Guglielmo and Mayor Freyda that the Inquisitors could find were burnt along with both Guglielmo's body and Mare Freyda herself. But there are fragments that report that Guglielmo, when she came to Milan, and I'm quoting here, claimed that she was the Holy Spirit made flesh for the redemption of women. She baptized women in the name of the Father and of the Son and of herself. So this is the idea that the Holy Spirit, just as God the Son had become flesh in the form of Jesus, so now God the Spirit has become meme. I mean, it's slightly more than a meme. It's a kind of a sense of excitement. It's a sense of potentiality that is sweeping the Latin world in the 13th century and originates with a guy called Joachim, who comes from the Abbey of Fiore

in Southern Italy in the late 12th century. Joachim of Fiore teaches that the ages of the world are to be divided into three. There was the age of the father, which ended with the birth of Jesus, which initiated the age of the son. Now, in the 12th century, the world, the church, the Christian people are approaching the age of the spirit, which is destined to start in 1260, which by coincidence is the very year that Guglielmo is supposed to start in 1260, which by coincidence is the very year that Guglielmo is supposed to have arrived in Milan. So this is the context for it. And so this is why Guglielmo comes to be seen by her followers as being, and again, I quote, the Holy Spirit and true God. So she comes and then Myfreda believes that Guglielmo has instituted this new age in which

she will become the head of the church. Is that right? Yeah. So Mayfreda and her followers claim to have seen Guglielmo risen from the dead, just as Jesus had risen from the dead. Right. And they believe that this heralds this new age of the spirit when corruption will be scoured away from the church.

The papacy at this point is widely seen as corrupt, as characterized by greed and by cruelty. So the reigning pope at this time, Boniface VIII, is widely viewed as a man unworthy of his post. And the cardinal at which elected him is seen as having failed the Christian people. And so this is why Mayfreder is able to preach that the time has come for a complete cleaning out of the Aegean stables, get rid of all the men. So it won't just be the Pope who will be a woman, all the cardinals will be women as well. And the age of the Spirit will be a feminine one. It's an extraordinary, extraordinary story.

It's clearly, I would guess, emerging from the same swirl of ambivalences and paradoxes and tensions in the Christian world at this time that is giving rise to the story of the female Pope, Pope Joan. But male hegemony, the patriarchy proves too strong. The patriarchy strikes back, Dominic. Yeah. Because my Freda ends up being burned at the stake. And the story of Pope Joan, so you're saying that it's in this milieu that the legend of Pope Joan is written down as a kind of cautionary tale. Is that right? As an antecedent of this, a story to scare priests and cardinals and men generally. It is a cautionary tale, but it is also kind of playing postman's knock with the idea that there is something feminine about the

priestly role, I think. Right. Well, the celibacy, you're not sexually active as most men would have been expected to be, right? So that in itself demasculinizes you. But also this idea that if the priest's role is in persona Christi, is kind of Christ-like, and Christ compared himself to a mother hen sheltering her chicks under her wing, then there is something female about the priestly role. I mean, it's an issue that clearly generates all kinds of anxieties, but I think that these stories work when they do kind of make play with anxieties. So I think it's not just a kind of a salutary tale. It's a tale that kind of opens up avenues that then immediately get closed down again. And I think that that's why the echoes in the authentic story of Guglielmo and Mayor Freyda are so intriguing. And Dominic also,

of course, it anticipates the role that someone like Catherine of Siena, who we did an episode earlier this year about, is also so key. Because it's not like in this period, the church is completely closing down the idea that women can have a sacral role, dare I say. Because of course, just as the church is married to Christ, so Catherine of Siena becomes married to Christ. And to go back to the quotation we began the episode with from Jean de Mailly, the chronicler. So he writes that in the early 13th century, doesn't he? He does, yeah.

Does he believe it? I don't know what the rest of his chronicle is like. So I don't know whether the rest of it is very melodramatic and sensational, or whether it's very sober and serious. But do you think he believes that it's true? Or do you think he's consciously fabricating a story that matches the anxieties of his age? Both. I mean, I think he does think it's true. He wouldn't put it in his chronicle otherwise, but he's not writing as a historian in the 21st century would write. What happens, I mean, it happens, but everything that happens has a deeper meaning, a meaning that opens up lessons and teachings. And I guess that that is how he would see it. And that is how the story

is understood by the Roman church right the way up to the Reformation. For obvious reasons, it comes to take on a kind of different significance and becomes an embarrassment. Final question for you, Tom. This is such a fascinating subject. I'm going to assume we're not going to see a female Pope in our lifetimes. In our children's lifetimes, do you think there'll be a female Pope? No. Okay. Right. do you think there'll be a female Pope? No. Okay. Do you think there'll even be female Catholic priests? I wouldn't have thought so because I think it's so fundamental to Catholic teaching and doctrine that I don't really see how it can be reversed.

Okay. Right. Without doing immense damage to the inheritance of Catholic doctrine that is now 2,000 years old. But I'm not a Catholic theologian, so who am I to say? Nor am I a prophet. You don't have a dog in the fight though, Tom, do you? I don't have a dog in the fight, no. But that would be my sense. You made it sound as though you would really care and you would be very disappointed about the centuries of Catholic theology, but I get the sense that you probably wouldn't. You wouldn't take it to the streets.

Well, I say that because Pope Francis, who is seen by many conservative Catholics as being alarmingly radical in his views, say, on homosexuality or social issues, he's very, very conservative on this issue. So if even the least conservative Pope in recent times is conservative on this matter, I can't really see it changing, certainly within our lifetimes. Okay. All right. So on that bombshell, Tom, that was absolutely fascinating. What a strange and intriguing story that was. It was a nice companion piece, as you said, to our podcast about Catherine of Siena that we did in the summer.

And I'm sure you've got lots of saints and popes to come on the rest of Sydney, haven't you? If you'll let me. Yeah. So tune in in 2028 for the next appearance of a medieval saint or if tom has his way probably february february yeah yeah and we will see you all next time thank you for listening thank you very much tom tour de force goodbye bye-bye i'm marina hyde and i'm richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment I'm Marina Hyde.

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