Familier esclaircissement de la question Si une Femme a esté assise au Siege Papal de Rome entre Leon IV, & Benoist III. Par David Blondel. Seconde edition, plus correcte que la premiere

About this book

8vo. pp. 109, [1] (blank). Signatures: A-G8. Contemporary limp vellum. With a woodcut printer's device on title page. Armorial bookplate on pastedown. Second edition in French of a work questioning the existence of the female pope Joan, who supposedly reigned from 855 to 857, written by the French Protestant historian David Blondel (1591-1655) and first published in 1647. According to the legend, originating from the 13th century, pope Leo IV was succeeded by a talented woman, Joan (or Joannes Anglicus), disguised as a man, who, in 855-857 (or later, in some accounts) reigned as a pope before her true identity was discovered after she gave birth to a child. The story was first raised as a true episode by Jean de Mailly, the chronicler of Metz, in the mid-thirteenth century, and held dear as a mark of Romanist folly by anti-Catholic controversialists during the late middle ages and Renaissance. Its status as a myth was reasserted by Pope Clement VIII in 1601, and Blondel’s analysis of 1647, stating that there is no contemporary evidence supporting a female pope and that the chronology of 9th-century popes doesn't leave any room for a female pope reigning between Leo IV and his successor Benedict III, might have demolished the tradition and ‘annihilated’ Pope Joan herself (Gibbon), were it not for persistent revivals. See STCN 089131320. Click here to view the Johns Hopkins University catalog record.