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otes Introduction 1. The cardinal and ecclesiastical historian Cesare Baronius (1538–1607) seems to have introduced this conjecture. Eventually, other writers suggested that the weak, “womanish” prelate who inspired the popess legend might have been another pope, namely John VII, John X, John XI, John XII, or John XIII, or even the antipope Anastasius Bibliothecarius (Boureau, Myth 306; Patrides 163; Pardoe and Pardoe 54; Thurston 13–14). 2. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the term pornocracy to a discussion of the Theophylact women in a nineteenth-century church history (OED 12: 136). Several more of Marozia’s descendents occupied the Holy See: her grandson John XIII (reigning 965–72), her great-grandsons Benedict VIII (reigning 1012–24) and John XIX (reigning 1024–1032), and her great-great-grandson Benedict IX (reigning 1032–48, with breaks) (Pardoe and Pardoe 54). The nineteenth-century scholar Félix Vernet seems to have introduced this theory concerning the legend’s origins (Thurston 14–15; Boureau, Myth 306). Scholars have also suggested that the popess legend developed as an insult directed against still other women, particularly the ninth-century pseudoprophetess Thiota, or Giovanna, wife of the antipope Nicholas V (reigning 1328–30) (Boureau, Myth 306). 3. As Pardoe and Pardoe have noted, Leo IX somewhat misrepresents that ‹rst canon of the Council of Nicea, which bars from the clergy those who have castrated themselves but not those who, victimized perhaps by brutal barbarians, suffered castration at the hands of others (Pardoe and Pardoe 57–58). 4. Accounts of the female patriarch appear in the anonymous Chronicon Salernitanum (sometimes attributed to Radoald of Salerno) and in Erchempert’s Historia Langobardorum Beneventanorum (Pardoe and Pardoe 57). 5. Baronius seems to have introduced this hypothesis as well as the one concerning John VIII (Patrides 163). The English Jesuit Robert Persons (or Parsons, 1546–1610) and the Italian cardinal and polemicist Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) both cited Leo IX’s letter to Michael Cerularius not to explain the legend’s origins but rather to challenge its veracity. Persons argues, for example, that Leo IX would never have alluded to a female prelate if he had known that, due to Joan’s scandalous ponti‹cate, “the Patriarch of Constantinople might have returned the matter back upon him” (qtd. in Thurston 10, 15). 159 6. Rosemary Pardoe and Darroll Pardoe suggest that because the popess narrative in the Chronica minor seems unrelated to the contents of the surrounding paragraphs (which concern the deeds of popes and emperors reigning in the 890s), it is “evidently a slightly more recent addition” inserted “very soon after” the composition of the original text and perhaps “by the initial compiler himself” (18). Neither Boureau nor Patrides, who both have identi‹ed interpolations in other medieval texts addressing Pope Joan, has suggested that the popess narrative was absent from the original Chronica minor (Boureau, Myth 140; Patrides 158). Indeed, since thirteenth -century texts proposed several different dates for the popess’s ponti‹cate (855, 1099, 1100), and since the handwriting in the popess narrative evidently resembles that in the rest of the manuscript so closely that, Pardoe and Pardoe believe, it might belong to the original compiler, the evidence of interpolation seems slight. In any case, the Chronica minor account had certainly been written and circulated by 1304, when the priest Siegfried of Blahusen (or of Meissen) copied it before adding his own report of a marble statue in Rome that allegedly memorialized Joan (Boureau, Myth 140–41). 7. The phrase in the Chronica minor begins with “Papa” (O Pope) rather than “Petre” (O Peter). Also, this Franciscan report claims not that the phrase marked the popess’s grave but rather that it was pronounced by a demon who exposed her deception and pregnancy even before she gave birth (Pardoe and Pardoe 16–19). 8. By introducing a new imperative, parce (forbear), into the phrase, Etienne fashions an exhortation not to publish but rather to suppress the narrative: “Forbear, Father of Fathers, to betray the childbearing of the female pope” (Parce, Pater Patrum, Papisse Prodere Partum) (Pardoe and Pardoe 16–17). 9. I have used Morris’s helpfully literal translation of the Chronicon account, with a few small changes. 10. Vague references to the popess appear in rhymed chronicles composed in the 1280s (roughly twenty years after Jean de Mailly’s account), written not in Latin but in Old High German and Flemish and not by Dominicans or Franciscans but by lay burghers: Jacob van Maerlant’s...

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