Thank you for listening to The Rest is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, sign up at restishistorypod. Com. That's restishistorypod. Com. There was one Pope, or to be more accurate.

A Popeess 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 labor 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, part offrom papice prodotopartum, which is to say, Peter, father of fathers, make known the childbearing of the Popeess. That was Jean de Mailles, who was a Dominican chronicler writing the early 13th century. 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 Popeess who gives birth while getting onto the horse and is then stoned to death by her own adherence. First of all, did this happen? Secondly, what is going on? What is going on? I'm not aware of any female popes.

Right. This is the very first mention of a female Pope. Jean de Maye gives a very 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. The Pope is generally known as Joan. Pope Joan. Pope Joan. The story attains probably its canonical form in the mid-13th century with a chronicler and bishop, again, a Dominican like Jean-Domain called Martin of Poland. He writes a chronicle of all the popes and all the emperors. He's actually the first person to have the brilliant idea of setting popes and emperors in separate columns so that you can cross reference them. 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. But in the early ninth century, so well before 1099, there is an English woman who is 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. This is a very exclusively masculine environment for him to go in. 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 Maye said, and then she gets elected Pope.

Crikey, that's a twist.

And she takes the name of John. This Pontificate, according to Martin O'Polen, lasts for two years. Not only has she disguised herself as a man, but she is continuing to have sex. So very unpapel behavior all around.

Well, depends on the Pope, I.

Suppose, doesn't it? But 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 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. Correct. 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 John de May, 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. The child that she has given birth to is a boy and he becomes the Bishop of Osteia, which is the Port of Rome, so the mouth of the Tyber. In due course, when she dies, he buries his mother with all honor in the Cathedral of Osteia. So it's an odd story. It is. You might think that it's just a mad, folk tale. I mean, where does it come from? Except that for 2-3 centuries, pretty much up to the 16th century, it's believed to be true. The chronical 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 imprimata of the Roman Church. Right. All kinds of substantiating evidence seems to have emerged. 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, petre, pata, patrum, papicee, prodata.

Patum- Come on, Tom, you.

Can do it. -which is supposedly said by the devil.

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.

But.

It is believed genuinely to mark the spot where she is killed. And in the great Cathedral of Siana that we talked about in the episode about Catherine of Siana, 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 labeled 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. Joan the eighth, a female Pope.

Yeah. Crikey. But more than that, Dominic, that the Church is giving its impromata to it. I mean, that's what's really odd. Then, of course, what happens in the 16th century is that you have the Reformation. This is exactly the story that Protestant propagandists love. Of course. They start making all kinds of mischief with it. The Roman Church becomes ever more embarrassed by the story. Then by 1601, Clement VIII definitively declares the legend to be untrue, and so it is then parked.

When 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. Now, it has to be said that there are scholars today who do make the case for it, but they're 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. And in fact, it is a Protestant from France, a guy called David Blondell, who publishes a dissertation in 1647 in which Edward Gibben, writing the following century, says that Blondell 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 ancient stories that are told about the Church and demonstrating that they are fantasticalSo the details that Blondale is marshaling 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 in 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. 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 the III, who was by the stance of ninth century popes, very permissible and impressive. Another one, Benedict the third, 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 thing.

Yeah, the consul's regalia. Yeah.

There's no place for Joan. They succeed one another. So it seems improbable, to put it mildly. Okay. 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 Sarsans 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 marshaling allies across Italy against the Sarsan threat. He doesn't die while giving birth. He is actually in the best tradition of popes in the ninth century, poisoned and clubbed to death by his rivals in the Church.

But a question, Tom. You say he's definitely not a woman. 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 marshaling alliances and things. I think people would probably have noticed if he wasn't.

It would have been spotted, is what you're saying. I imagine there's a lot of academic theorists at work today who would have very complicated things to say about the story time, but let's not get into that thicket.

They do. Obviously, I mean, it's of great interest to feminist and LGBT scholars, but 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. Exactly. But I don't think they are saying it's true. Basically, it's not true. Okay. I mean, it really isn't true. All right. I think we can definitively say it's not true. It didn't happen.

The next item in your notes, I read, is distorted memory of the... This is not a misprint. The pornocracy.

The pornocracy.

What is the pornocracy?

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 paunocracy. They do.

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 Sarsans, it's also that it is the plaything of very, very powerful rival dynasties in Rome and particularly of women. The idea that the papacy is a plaything of powerful women, to clerics writing later, this is seen as pornographic. Pornay is a prostitute. Right. This is prostituting the Church, but also is the implication that the women who are getting their hands on the papacy are themselves whores.

Getting their hands on in every sense, John, presumably.

Well, completely. David Blondell and his, 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 Marotia. 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 Leoprande of Cremona, who's brilliant historian of this period, I mean, 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 Moroveria. He describes her as a shameless whore who ruled the Roman people as though she were a man. Crikey. So you could see perhaps there's a distorted echo there. But she goes one stage further and she arranges for her son, who is only 21 years old to become Pope. And 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 Moritzia had had an affair with Sergius the 3.

Textbook hateful behavior, Tom.

And so Edward Gibbon, 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 ninth century that the bastard son, two grandson, two great grandson, and one great, great grandson of Moroxia, a rare genealogy, was seated in the chair of St. Peter.

Thomas Cromwell would have loved all this, Tom, wouldn't he?

It's an interesting theory, and actually Blondell isn't the only guy who proposed thatposes this as a possibility. In the 16th century, there's an Italian historian of the paper, see a guy called Ornefrio 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 95 and 964, another John, so perhaps echoes of Joan, and he was John the 12th. He becomes Pope when he's still a teenager, so 17 or 18.

He became Pope as a teenager? Yeah. That's bonkers.

That is bonkers. Dominic, doubling down on that, he ordains a boy who's 10 as a bishop. 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. He's presumably not the person that he's having Congress with. No. I would assume.

No. He has lots of these mistresses. Leoprand says to him that he turned the latter into a brothel. One of these mistresses was supposedly called Joan. 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 hint of them. Right. So again, I don't think that that is the explanation. 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 the seventh, the great Pope in the 11th century, who was the standard bearer for it.

I don't want to imply, Tom, and 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 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. That's your problem. I'm afraid that is entirely your problem.

I was loving this, the pornography, pause, the blatter and a brothel, and then I turned the page, The Gregorian Revolution. I'm like, 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. Both these men are key players in the papal Revolution. 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 of rulers. That there is a dimension of the cyclum, which is earthly, which is fallen. And then there is this dimension where religious joins the fallen Earth to the radiant eternity of heaven. And 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. And 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 pushing it forward. 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. 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. 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 coronation in the Lateran Palace. For the first time, a Pope is described as sitting in twin chairs in the Lateran. These twin chairs are very, very distinctive because they still survive.

There is one in the Vatican Museum, there's one in the Louver, and both of them have holes in the seat. 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. They retain a definite antique Roman aura. 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? In the ritual where he's being crowned, these chairs are described as carouled chairs. Carouled chairs are the chairs that the consuls sat on.

Okay.

Yeah. 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, he is older, his office is older than that of Augustus. Yeah. And this is very popular. So you have all kinds of propagandists for the Gregorian reform. 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 will sound like a weird question, but where do the holes fit in to.

Her story? Right. 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? By 1290, so we've had 100 years of stories of Pope John by this point, you have a chronicler called Jeffrey de Coulon who writes about Pope John deriving his account from Martin of Poland, but adding his own spin. He says that because of the scandal of Pope John, and I quote, The Romans established the custom of verifying the sex of the elected Pope through an opening in the stone throne.

Imagine the person who had to do that to lie underneath the chair and look up.

Right. But we have various accounts of this, and the story keeps being repeated that the Pope sits down, presumably he's wearing his caset, so he's open and fresh to-.

He wears no underwear.

Yeah, he has no underwear. Somebody has to reach underneath and go up with his hands and then announce in Latin, habit duos testiculus et bene pendinges. 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 right 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. I think that that's a brilliant solution. I mean, a 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 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 did all the incidental details come from?

It's a just-so story, isn't it? Yeah. 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. 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, water-to-clifthing, 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. Welcome back to The Rest of History. Now, Tom, you were taking us masterfully through the legend of Pope Jamey, 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 summon men to be his apostles and not women. Therefore, according to Catholic doctrine, when priests handle the sacraments, they are doing so in persona Christi, in the person of Christ himself.

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.

What 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. Specifically Catholic, but also wider Christian fear of.

Women.

Of sexuality generally, of the body, the, but specifically of women.

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 Siana. But Christian misogyny is qualitatively different to the misogyny that is completely taken for granted in antiquity. 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. And 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. And so there is a huge temptation for clerics who are all men, who are all celibate, or at least meant to be, to embrace the views of Aristotle that women are basically biologically inferior to men. And you're absolutely right that there is a lot of writings in this period that express a incredible sense of nervousness of female biology. So women are described 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.

And so 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 Aristotlean. But the problem is that you still have to square these views, these Aristotleian views with the Bible. And the Bible doesn't really allow for that Aristotlean notion that women are just an inferior version of men. And 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, and 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.

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 Clairvaut, the great preacher who inspires the Second crusade, compares himself to a nursing mother with breasts filled with the milk of doctrine, Dominant, you're looking very Protestant on the zoom.

That's not exactly what I would choose.

As I say all of this. There's nothing shameful in male priests, male clerics describing themselves in female terms and of thinking of God the Father as simultaneously being a mother.

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 universal. Again, we've mentioned Catherine of Siana. 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 their holiness. That is a counterpoint to the parallel misogyny that you definitely get. 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, rapists fingers on her. That's the whole the 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. The priests are married to the Church.

Yes. The Church is a virgin bride.

It's simultaneously their mother and their virgin bride. If they take another bride, they are cheating on the Church.

Absolutely. The implications of this for women is very paradoxical because simultaneously it's serving to equate them to the the purity of the Church, but also casting them as tempresses because it's women who will seduce priests from their godly, celibate role. I mean, I've just noted down here one commentary on women by a priest, but there are a 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 resonance. 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, Umbertoeco 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 Gugli Elma. The traditions that are told about Gugli Elma, 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 Mates, is part of the Empire. She is said to have married an English prince. So again, there's a 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 come to Rome and she comes to Milan and she lives a life of absolutely spotless poverty and charity. So there are weird echoes in the biography of Gugli Elma of the story that's told of Pope Joan. Now, Gugli Elma dies in around 1280 and she is buried in an Abbey at Ciarra Valley, which is a district south of Milan, is now a part of Milan itself.

But back then it was a separate place. 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 popular canonization. She's come to be seen by the Pilgrims as a saint. There are many, many cultures 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 Gugli Elma's tomb. So they brought crowbars, they open it, they scoop out the body, they light a fire, and they toss the corpse of Gugli Elma onto the fire and they burn it utterly. Then they get the ashes and they scatter into the winds. Then they go back into the Abbey and they pulverize the tomb of Gugli Elma, and they trample down all the icons and images of her. This is harsh.

I'm an amazing way to treat a woman who is being viewed by pilgrims as a saint. You may wonder what is going on. Well, what is going on? There is a clue in the fact that even as Guglielma is body is being destroyed, so the Abess, 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 Mare Freda, she is a cousin of the most powerful man in Milan, Mateo 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. What Mayr Freder has been teaching the nuns in her Abbey is that she, Mayr Freder, is destined to become Pope.

How.

Has Mayr Freder come to this conclusion?

Yeah, the feminist theologian from the 13th century. Incredible.

We do not have detailed records of this because all the documents relating to Gugliamma and May of Radar that the inquisitors could find were burnt along with both Gugliamma's body and Mare Frida herself. But there are fragments that report. But Gugliamma, when she came to Milan, and I'm quoting here, claimed that she was the Holy Spirit made flesh for the redemption of women, and she baptized women in the name of the Father and of the Son and of herself. 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 incarnate in the form of Guglioma. This is tapping into something that is a very, very live, almost attempt to say meme. I mean, it's slightly more than a meme. It's 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. So there was the Age of the Father, which ended with the birth of Jesus, which initiated the Age of the Son.

And 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 Guglielma is supposed to have arrived in Milan. This is the context for it. This is why Guglielma comes to be seen by her followers as being, and again, I quote, The Holy Spirit and the true God.

So she comes and then May Freder believes that Guglielma has instituted this new age in which she will become the head of the Church.

Is that right? Yeah. So May Freder and her followers claim to have seen Guglielma risen from the dead, just as Jesus had risen from the dead.

Right.

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. The reigning Pope at this time, Boniface the eighth, is widely viewed as a man unworthy of his post. The Cardinale at which elected him is seen as having failed the Christian people. This is why May Frater is able to preach that the time has come for a complete cleaning out of the Agean stables, get rid of all the men. So it won't just be the Pope who will be a woman, or will be women as well, and the Age of the Spirit will be a feminine one. It's an extraordinary, extraordinary story and is 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 May Freder ends up being burned at the stake. And the story of Pope Joan. So you're saying that it's in this millier that the legend of Pope Joan is written down as a cautionary tale. Is that right? There's an antecedent of this, a story to scare priests and cardinals and men generally.

It is a cautionary tale, but it is also playing postman's knock with the idea that there is something feminine about the Priestley role, I think.

Right. Well, the celibacy, you're not sexually active, as most men would have been expected to be. That in itself, demasculises you.

But also this idea that if the priest's role is in persona, Christy, is Christlike and Christ compared himself to a mother hen sheltering her chicks under her wing, then there is something female about the priesty role. I mean, it's an issue that is clearly generates all kinds of anxieties. But I think that these stories work when they do make play with anxieties. So I think it's not just a salitry tale. It's a tale that opens up avenues that then immediately get closed down again. And I think that that's why the echoes in the authentic story of Gugli, Elma, and May Freder are so intriguing. And Dominic also, of course, it anticipates the role that someone like Catherine of Sienne, 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 Sienne becomes married to Christ.

To go back to the quotation we began the episode with from Jean de Mailles, the chronicler. 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 chronicler 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. I guess that that is how he would see it. 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 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. Do you think they'll even be female Catholic priests?

I wouldn't have thought so because I think it's so fundamental to Catholic teaching and that I don't really see how it can.

Be reversed 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 take 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. I mean, 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. There's a nice companion piece, as you said, to our podcast about Catherine of Sienne. Yes, that we did in the summer. I'm sure you've got lots of saints and popes to come on the rest of C3, haven't you?

If you'll let me.

Yeah. Tune in in 2028 for the next appearance of a medieval saint, or if Tom has his way.

Probably February. February. Yeah.

We will see you all next time. Thank you for listening. Thank you very much, Tom. Tour de force. Goodbye.

Bye-bye.