La papesse Jeanne

Résumé

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LA PAPESSE JEANNE.

FORMES ET FONCTIONS D'UNE LÉGENDE AU MOYEN ÂGE, PAR M. ALAIN BOUREAU

Au cœur du Moyen Âge, une fable étrange et scandaleuse circule en Europe : au ixe siècle, une femme aurait occupé le trône pontifical ; déguisée en homme, elle aurait acquis, çà et là, un savoir tel qu'à son arrivée à Rome, elle aurait gravi divers échelons de la hiérarchie cuiiale avant l'élection suprême. Seul un accouchement public aurait dévoilé l'imposture. La fable se colporte, se transcrit, se répand ; elle se conforte de preuves matérielles : depuis cet événement, on vérifie la virilité des futurs papes en usant d'une chaise percée en marbre ; une statue représente la papesse et son enfant, non loin du lieu de l'accouchement ; les papes, lors des processions publiques imposent un détour pour éviter cet emplacement scandaleux.

University of Chicago Press, 1 mai 2001 - 385 pages

In the ninth century, a brilliant young woman named Joan disguised herself as a man so that she could follow her lover into the then-exclusively male world of scholarship. She proved so successful that she ascended the Catholic hierarchy in Rome and was eventually elected pope. Her pontificate lasted two years, until she became pregnant and died after giving birth during a public procession from the Vatican.

Or so the legend goes—a legend that was fabricated sometime in the thirteenth century, according to Alain Boureau, and which has persisted in one form or another down to the present day. In this fascinating saga of belief and rhetoric, politics and religion, Boureau investigates the historical and ecclesiastical circumstances under which the myth of Pope Joan was constructed and the different uses to which it was put over the centuries. He shows, for instance, how Catholic clerics justified the exclusion of women from the papacy and the priesthood by employing the myth in misogynist moral tales, only to find the popess they had created turned against them in anti-Catholic propaganda during the Reformation.