JOAN  , a mythical

female pope, who is usually placed between Leo IV . (847–855) and Benedict III . (855–858) . One account has it that she was born in England, another in Germany of English parents . After an education at Cologne, she fell in love with a Benedictine monk and fled with him to Athens disguised as a man . On his death she went to Rome under the alias of Joannes Anglicus (John of England), and entered the priesthood, eventually receiving a cardinal's hat . She was elected pope under the title of John VIII., and died in child-birth during a papal procession . A French Dominican, Steven of Bourbon (d. c . 1261) gives the legend in his Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit . He is believed to have derived it from an earlier writer . More than a hundred authors between the 13th and 17th centuries gave circulation to the myth . Its explosion was first seriously undertaken by David Blonde], a French Calvinist, in his lclaircissement de la question si une femme a ete assise au siege papal de Rome (1647); and De Joanna Papissa (1657) .

The refutation was completed by Johann

Dollinger in his Papstfabeln des Mittelalters (1863; Eng. trans . 1872) .