Wrong. Her “story” tells us something important, whether it’s true or not. What exactly it tells us depends on when in history you’re looking at. During some times, it was likely a tale of the Evil Ways of Deceiving Women, possibly with some Satanic allusions and witchcraft thrown in for good measure. At other times, a warning tale about the need for the Church to maintain absolute power and control lest their ranks be defiled by women. Sometimes, that people are tittilated by the idea of a woman fooling learned men for all those years. Nowadays, it tell us that people value the idea that a woman can succeed where men can, and that the subjugation of women by the Catholic Church is arbitrary and stupid - if a woman was a good enough scholar and regligious person to be the infallible Pope (until they knew she was a woman) then why on earth shouldn’t women be Priests?
Stories tell more than their subjects. They often tell more about the people telling them. Whether or not the subject of the story is historically true is often irrelevant. That’s folklore.
> Thus we have to assume Joan:
>
> #1) Was so ambitious that she dressed consistently as a man, and spent
> presumably decades to become educated in the sciences, and then became a
> cleric in the RCC, eventually making it to the papacy.
>
> #2) Was sufficiently clever to make sure during this period of many years that
> nobody ever suspects that she was really a he.
>
> #3) After all this clever ambitiousnesses, she manages to get herself knocked
> up. Why if she wanted any sexual encounters with a man find one who could
> give good head, or a good butt fuck?
The only two popes who were elected under the age of 50 in the last 500 years were members of the Medici family. Presumably, during the Middle Ages one also either had to have connections or work one’s way up slowly to become Pope. So a further thing we would have to assume is that Joan, despite the lack of any family connections (who would have exposed her as a woman if they had existed), became Pope young enough that she still could have had children.
People have been seeking lovers who are beautiful, as they understood the term, since there have been people. The tiny minority of people who were nobility were inevitably forced into political marriages, but that had very little effect on whom they procreated with, after the cumpulsory heir was produced. Joan herself was, supposedly, the product of just such a union.
Really? most subsistance groups care about whether you will survive child birth, whether you can be a productive pair of hands, whether you can perform the tasks required to keep your land producing…It is nice if you actually like the person but in general women have had absolutely no say in the matter at all, and many men just want a reasonably willing hole to stick it into, for kids to pop out, and for the chores to get done, and looks are just not as important as physical abilities. Why do you think that matchmaking involved making sure the woman was healthy? Not if she was blond and comely [or brunette and comely] Even at the high end of the spectrum it all boiled down to what property she was going to bring to the marriage bed, and if she didnt pop kids out hubby would dump her for one that could pop out kids. Believe me, LUST isn’t why most royals divorced or annulled marriages, living progeny was. Believe me, even the ‘lesser nobles’ wives had to pop out kids, and perform - many households were run by the wives in their husbands absence, and running a large household including oveseeing the production end of things is a lot of detail work and very taxing physically. Not very many women in the middle ages got to sit on their asses and languish decoratively. Decorative languishing is pretty much renaissance and age of enlightenment, and very ‘citified’
I would imagine the test for that would be, “Did you actullay knock the woman up?” If the answer is yes (or you believe it is) then congratulations! You’re getting married!
I never said lust was why marriages were annulled. I said lust was why men who could maintained mistresses, and had illegitimate children with them.
If you read contemporary sources, say, Gregory of Tours describing the marriage of Chilperic and Fredegeund, you understand that people lusted just as they do now, and acted upon them.
in any case, it doesn’t make Pope Joan any more likely.
I think one of the more pressing reasons for the uglification of common-born and lower nobility women (and men, too!) was lack of hygiene and regular illness, including “pox”, “pustules”, “boils” and other yummy things you read about all the time. Add to that the sun and wind’s effects on unprotected skin, the fact that people were outdoors more, and when indoors were fighting off flea bites, wearing of scratchy wool, with the attendant lanolin allergies and irritation, and general fatigue due to nonstop back-breaking labor. Wrap it up with a lack of antibacterial ointement and scar minimizing surgical techniques for treating scrapes and cuts. Not the makings of a pretty people, really. Sure there were exceptions. “The skin of a dairy maid” we hear praised in verse probably was clearer and smoother than most others, because she was around moisturizing milkfat and working butter and most cows were milked indoors or in the shade, and the dairies were in cool areas of the manor. Some people you couldn’t uglify if you tried. But on the whole, by today’s standards, them’s some smelly, splotchy, zitty, crater faced, leather skinned fleamongers we’re talking about.
I suspect the Royals were ugly more due to inbreeding than anything else!
And saoirse, I think you’re going out on a shaky limb if you’re claiming men only lust after beautiful women, or if the presence of lust in a few cases means that Joan couldn’t have been uglier than day-old haggis.
> “The skin of a dairy maid” we hear praised in verse probably was clearer and
> smoother than most others, because she was around moisturizing milkfat and
> working butter and most cows were milked indoors or in the shade, and the
> dairies were in cool areas of the manor.
The reason that dairy maids were known for smooth skin was that they seldom got smallpox. Smallpox was so common in some places and times that not having smallpox scars was unusual. Being around cows meant that dairy maids would usually acquire cowpox, a mild form of the disease which prevented them from getting a major case of smallpox, so they had less smallpox scars.
Thank god I wasn’t. I was pointing out that our understanding of romantic love and glorified lust was not a modern invention, but has been around since there have been humans. What filled those humans with lust I can’t say, but they followed it just like we do.
In theory at least one could imagine the whole family would keep quiet. However, thinking about this some more it even seems more unlikely. Stop and think: why would any wealthy family want to pay a huge amount of bribe money to Cardinals to get a family member as pope? The answers can only be:
#1) They would expect their family member pope would use influence of the office to make them more money than they paid in bribes. And/or:
#2) Their family member pope would use the influence of the office to physically protect them, and their assets. The pope was in those days very powerful. If anyone tried to mess around with the pope’s kin, they could expect revenge.
Now think about the potential problems of bribing the Cardinals to make a woman family member pope. If somehow it became known that pope was really a she, she would lose the papacy. And if this was discovered quickly, the family would never recover its investment in bribes. (In fact the Pope Joan legend has it that after just 2 years as pope, she either is executed, or forced out of office and sent to a faraway convent.) Why not instead bribe the Cardinals to put a male family member on the papal throne, where there would be no secret the family would have to worry about getting out?
It also occurs to me that if their was a Pope Joan, presumably the family had to lie to the Cardinals about her gender. The Cardinals wouldn’t want to take the risk explaining how the hell they screwed up and made a woman pope. If the family did lie to the Cardinals, and Pope Joan was exposed, would it be expected that the Cardinals would want to seek revenge against the family? Given the power of the RCC at the time, the family members would have found themselves in deep shit.
