The legend of Pope Joan is one which has persisted in some form since the
13th century. According to the most typical version of the story, Joan was a
9th century woman who spent a lifetime disguised as a man, mostly living a
monk's life. She was said to be so holy, compassionate and brilliant that she
eventually rose in the church hierarchy to the very summit - the throne of
Peter. She was beloved by the people and her reign ended only because of an
unplanned pregnancy.
As told by the medieval chronicler Martin of Opava (cited
in Wikipedia):
"John Anglicus, born at Mainz, was Pope for two years, seven months and four
days, and died in Rome, after which there was a vacancy in the Papacy of one
month. It is claimed that this John was a woman, who as a girl had been led
to Athens dressed in the clothes of a man by a certain lover of hers . There
she became proficient in a diversity of branches of knowledge, until she had
no equal, and afterwards in Rome, she taught the liberal arts and had great
masters among her students and audience. A high opinion of her life and
learning arose in the city, and she was chosen for Pope. While Pope, however,
she became pregnant by her companion. Through ignorance of the exact time
when the birth was expected, she was delivered of a child while in procession
from St Peter's to the Lateran, in a lane once named Via Sacra (the sacred
way) but now known as the "shunned street" between the Colisseum and St
Clement's church. After her death, it is said she was buried in that same
place. The Lord Pope always turns aside from the street and it is believed by
many that this is done because of abhorrence of the event. Nor is she placed
on the list of the Holy Pontiffs, both because of her female sex and on
account of the foulness of the matter (Martin of Opava, Chronicon
Pontificum et Imperatorum)."
In reality, she could not have existed. There is no room for her regnancy
between the known papal tenures, and there is absolutely no mention of her in
any document - secular or sacred - until some time in the 13th century.
Although some Medieval writers referred to the female Pope as John VIII, the
real
Pope John VIII reigned between 872 and 882, roughly the same time frame
used in this film, and his life does not resemble that of the fictional
female pope in any way. Other stories place Joan to have first sat on the
throne of Peter in 855, upon the death of Leo IV, although there was a
different and truly historical figure who actually succeeded Leo. Joan is a medieval urban
legend. On the other hand, if you could travel back in time
to the 14th or 15th century, you would find that this legend had become so
deeply ingrained in the public consciousness that Joan of Mains was
universally considered to be a historical character whose papacy had been
covered up by an embarrassed inner sanctum of the Catholic Church. Boccaccio
himself believed the tall tales about the female pope. Given the shameful
depravity, scheming and greed which often characterized the ascension to the
papacy in the 9th to 11th centuries, it is unsurprising that the legend of
Pope Joan was considered totally credible, so much so that some of the
church's rituals and taboos had even been retroactively linked to events
related to the life of Pope Joan, notably in the case of a special kind of
traditional throne with a hole like a toilet seat. The design of this chair
was of unknown origin, and was retroactively explained by the need to check
the pope's gender. (Another such retrofitted explanation would be the story about the Via
Sacra, as cited above.)
It may have been possible in theory for a woman of those times to become pope
by living her life as a man, and it may even have been possible for her to
have an affair with one of her guards. Other similar scandals were
commonplace in medieval times.
As the Straight Dope summarizes:
"Many other papal horror stories are entirely legit. In
the Middle Ages many popes were elevated to office following the murder of
their predecessors. During one particularly grim period from 882 to 1046,
there were 37 popes, some of whom served only a few weeks.
Leo V (903), for instance, had been pope
for only a month before being imprisoned and tortured by one Christophorus, who
then enthroned himself. Both men were killed in 904 on the orders of Pope
Sergius III (904-911). Sergius later had a son by his teenaged mistress Marozia
who became Pope John XI (931-935). In 914, according to one chronicler,
Marozia's mother Theodora installed her lover on the papal throne as John X
(914-928). (Theodora and Marozia effectively controlled the papacy through their
menfolk and may be the source of the Pope Joan legend.) John XII (955-963), who
ascended to the papacy at 19, was accused, perhaps falsely, of sleeping with his
father's mistress, committing incest with his niece, and castrating a deacon.
Murder gave way to bribery as a route to
the papacy in later centuries; some 40 popes are believed to have bought their
jobs. But the lax attitude toward celibacy remained unchanged. In large part
this was because the Church was an important route to wealth and power. Sons of
influential families were pushed into Church careers much as we might send a kid
to MBA school, apparently with similar expectations regarding morals. Noblemen
with mistresses saw no reason to adjust their life-styles just because they had
taken vows."
A powerful, conniving woman just might have been able to
ascend to the papacy in those dark days, but that was not the woman portrayed here.
The Pope Joan of this film is humble, brilliant, kind and without guile, save
for her gender disguise. She is selfless, and never utters a mean word. She's
unrealistically one-dimensional to begin with, but if such a person could exist,
she's exactly the type of person who should be pope in an ideal world. The
script therefore posits a 9th century in which such a good and modest person
could achieve the papacy without scheming, greed, or powerful friends. Wrong.
What would have kept this person from the papacy was not her gender, but her
lack of cunning and powerful alliances. Popes in that time were not holy men,
but those with imperial designs. The gender issue was irrelevant in that a
saintly male cleric, a man like John Paul II, had he existed in those
days, would certainly not have been acclaimed pope because
of the universal recognition of his goodness and benevolence.
This particular portrayal of Pope Joan was created in a recent
historical novel by an American author named Donna Woolfolk Cross, who
premised her work on the assumption that the Pope Joan legend is
substantially true, and that her absence from the historical record can be
explained by a whitewashing campaign waged by the Church. The novel places
her reign as having begun in 847, upon the death of Sergius II, a time frame
unique to this book. Ms Cross used this
hypothesis to examine life of the 9th century, placing her particular
emphasis on the place of women in society in the chaotic century following
the death of Charlemagne. I haven't read the book, but I gather that the film
script is closely adapted from it, based on certain literary devices, like
copious first person voice-over by a narrator whose identity is an 11th hour
surprise.
The running time is substantially more than two hours and the presentation
style is corny and old-fashioned, exactly in the manner of a 1930s epic film,
filled with multiple improbable coincidences, syrupy orchestral music, a mushy love story, last-second
rescues, stereotyped white-hat heroes without flaw, and stereotyped black-hat
villains who could be played by Basil Rathbone in full Guy of Gisbourne
mode.
One of the stars of the film is John Goodman, who uses a pseudo-British
accent to play Pope Joan's
predecessor, Pope Sergius II, a real historical character who existed between
844 and 847. None of the common legends place him as Joan's predecessor in
the papacy, but the details of his real life were quite similar to the events
portrayed in the film, except of course that he was thin and Italian. (Why
did Goodman need to affect a British accent rather than his normal midwestern
American twang to play an Italian? Why, English guys just sound so much more
medieval and papal, don't you know. It's movie magic!) In some of the most improbable casting in history,
Goodman has now played the Pope and the King of England! Goodman was perhaps
not the oddest bit of casting. He got some competition from Joanna Wokalek,
who played Pope Joan starting from age 15. She looked perfectly
convincing as a male, but not as a youthful one. In a supreme bit of post-modernism
she was a 34-year-old woman playing a 15-year-old girl impersonating a
15-year-old boy, but looking like a 34-year-old man.
