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By Katharine Whittemore

May 26, 1999 | In the ninth century an English woman, desiring an education, disguised herself as a monk, traveled to Fulda and Athens, rose in esteem because of her scholarship, went to Rome and became pope for two years, five months and four days. As John VII, she reigned after Leo IV and before Benedict III. But then she blew her cover most dramatically. One day she dismounted from her horse and bore a child in the streets of Rome before a horrified crowd. Soon after, the story goes, she was put to death for her deception.

For decades this legend of a cross-dressing female pope has eluded the factual grip of historians but has flourished in the hands of artists and entertainment makers. Bertolt Brecht took a crack at her; so did Boccaccio. Not to mention G.K Chesterton, Stendahl and Lawrence Durrell. She's one of the historic personages in Caryl Churchill's cheeky 1982 play "Top Girls." And Liv Ullmann portrayed her in a 1972 film, "Pope Joan." It co-starred Olivia de Havilland and Keir Dullea and was positively fauve with proto-feminist posturing glazed by a tempera of sex and violence. The Motion Picture Guide doesn't hold back. "Boring trash," it opines.

"Boring trash" doesn't apply to Peter Stanford's "The Legend of Pope Joan," a nonfiction chronicling of his search for truth within the legend. I was leery, though, given the subject matter. Like Atlantis, say, or Bigfoot, Pope Joan has long attracted "the strange but true brigade," in Stanford's nice phrase. Mercifully, he's not in their ranks. A former editor of the Catholic Herald in London, a contributor to the BBC and the author of the engaging tour de force "The Devil: A Biography," Stanford has written a sly, easygoing historical detective story. Leading us with a conversational, first-person approach, we mosey along with him to Joan haunts in Rome and Fulda, once the German center of medieval learning. Dogged without being a bore, Sanford parses a millennium-plus worth of sources and he seems to know which ones matter.

In tracing the loose ends of the legend, Sanford often finds himself in odd positions. After the Pope Joan fiasco, the Vatican supposedly instituted a new ritual. Potential popes had to undergo a ceremonial examination to make sure they were male. How so? By sitting on the sedina stercoraria, literally the "pierced chair" or "dung chair" (it looks like an antique commode), whereby the papal anatomical jewels hung down through a hole in the seat, and were manually verified by a cardinal selected for the task. (Now there's a résumé-builder). Not only does Sanford provide a photo of said furniture, he prevails on the Vatican bureaucracy to view the holy artifact.

When no one was looking, "I plonked myself down," he confesses. "It felt like a desecration. The Vatican Museum has the aura of a church and all my childhood training revolved around not touching anything in God's house ... Pulse racing, white-faced, I leant back and back ... The keyhole shape, I noticed as I brought my spine vertical, was in precisely the right place for the test."

As Stanford continues his investigation, he learns that the Catholic hierarchy has long dismissed Joan's story as false, believing it to be the result of a Protestant smear campaign during the Reformation. It's true that Martin Luther himself promulgated Joan's tale in hopes of further blasting the theory of papal infallibility (i.e. God can't be involved in picking popes because he surely wouldn't have chosen a woman). Yet, the vengeance of Martin Luther can't fully explain the legend's origins. Interestingly, the she-pope narrative was most in vogue during the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation -- 600 years after Joan's presumptive reign. Some believe an unsavory Church of Rome "historian" named Anastasius quashed any mention of Joan back around the 900s, hence the subsequent centuries of silence.

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