Meet Joan: The Female PopeStephen Guerra of the History of the Papacy Podcast

Published: June 5, 2018, 7:09 a.m.

According to medieval accounts, a woman named Joan reigned as pope, 855-857 A.D., by disguising herself as a man. The story is widely thought to be fiction, but almost everyone took it as fact in the Middle Ages, up to the point that the Siena...