Lawrence Durrell's 'Pope Joan': A Greek classic full of good fun & bad taste!

Recently, the Church of England named Sarah Mullally as the first woman Archbishop of Canterbury — a historic first for that position, which is more than a millennium old. For those who have watched the movie Conclave (2024) or followed the election of Pope Leo, there might have been a small germ of a question emerging in their minds: Will we, in the near future, get a woman as a Pope?

Even if that’s unlikely to happen in real life anytime soon, there’s always an apocryphal tale to fall back on to serve as fodder for the imagination: that of the so-called Pope Joan, who supposedly reigned as Pope John VIII for two years in the Middle Ages. There’s no historical proof that a woman did indeed masquerade as the most powerful priest in Christendom. But that hasn’t stopped writers through history from tackling the story and rewriting it as their own.

According to Lawrence Durrell (brother of Gerald, author of the famed The Alexandria Quartet), none of these has the “interest and freshness” of Greek author Emmanuel Royidis’ Papissa Joanna. When it was first published in 1886, it was hugely controversial. The book was banned, and Royidis was excommunicated by the church. Proving that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, the book was a bestseller across Europe (it was translated into various languages).

It’s easy to see, reading Durrell’s English translation and adaptation — titled Pope Joan — why Royidis’ tale rubbed the authorities the wrong way. Bawdy and irreverent, Royidis uses his tale to satirise the power of the priests and clerics, but also, as Durrell noted,“…Pope Joan is a sort of brief record of the history and misfortunes of Eros after his transformation by Christianity from a God to an underground resistance movement.”

The narrator of the story is Royidis himself, witty and gossipy, winking at the reader as he talks about the years of research involved in writing his book. But soon enough, we get to know of Joanna’s humble (and not strictly legitimate) origins — her father was an English monk and her mother, Judith, “a goose-girl to a Baron”. The family are picked up along with others and sent as missionaries to the Continent. There, Joanna loses one parent after another. Orphaned, she has visions of saints. She is given messages about her destiny (to either go to a nunnery or get married) — and she chooses to go to a convent.

Joanna eventually reaches a convent where she bides her time for a while. She forms a deep romantic relationship with a monk, and they travel to Athens together with Joanna, disguised as a man. Miracles are sought and wrought: Joanna, as John the monk, makes a name for herself as a theological scholar. The happy times don’t last — as with any long relationship, there are fissures and jealousies, and soon “The sex and indiscretions of Joanna are no longer a secret. Perhaps some even began to look upon her as a monster sent by the Franks to swallow up the Orthodox Church.”

Joanna leaves her lover behind in Athens and goes to Rome (still in disguise as John the Monk) and, through her own ability and some twists of fate, ascends to become Pope. As Durrell and Royidis emphasise, in that era, it was the people of Rome who elected the Pope, not a group of Bishops.

It’s a short reign for Joanna, her fictional memory termed sacrilegious by the believers. It’s a pathetic end to a picaresque tale, a romp through the kingdoms and great cities of the European Middle Ages. Royidis himself argued with his critics, who insisted that Joanna was a fictional figure. But in the end, what’s true and what’s fiction doesn’t matter. The Greek intellectual George Katsimbalis brought Royidis’ novel to Durrell’s attention, calling it “a typical scamp of a book, a Greek book, full of good fun, bad taste, and laughter, and irreverence.” And there can’t be a higher recommendation to read Pope Joan than that.

That One Book is a monthly column that does exactly what it says — it takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great. 

The author is a writer and communications professional. She blogs at  saudha.substack.com