“Public report asserts as an undeniable fact, that in defiance of the canons of the first council of Nice, you Greeks have raised to the pontifical throne, eunuchs, and even a woman.”
At this period Rome had not yet begun to occupy herself with the legend of Joan, which was scarcely spread abroad in Germany. If in the East there had been any idea of the scandal of the female Pope, which was afterwards so prevalent, the reproach of Leo IX. would undoubtedly have been turned against himself.
We give another explanation: “The strangest stories have always their foundation in some truth,” says Onuphrius Panvinius, in his notes upon Platina: “I think that this fable of the woman Joan takes its origin from the immoral life of Pope John XII., who had many concubines, and amongst others Joan, who exercised such an empire over him that for some time it might be said it was she who governed. Hence it is that she was surnamed “papesse,” and this saying, taken up by ignorant writers and amplified by time, has given birth to the story which has had such wide circulation.
We find in the history of the Bishop of Cremona, Luitprand,[21] that the love of John XII. for his concubine Joan went so far that he gave her entire cities, that he despoiled the church of St. Peter of crosses and of golden chalices in order to lay them at her feet; and we are told that she died in childbed.
This death is a remarkable circumstance. In it we may trace the source of the most striking event in the story of Pope Joan.
ABELARD AND ELOISA.
A. D. 1140.
We had already collected many notes with the intention of examining critically the celebrated history of these two lovers of the 12th century, when we read an article by Mr. F. W. Rowsell in the St. James’s Magazine for October 1864, in which he gives a sketch of the lives of both of them. The writer has succeeded in condensing into half a dozen very amusing pages a complete résumé of the leading events in their history; only he has followed the commonly received opinion held by many English and French historians who have taken up the subject, and he does not enter into a critical examination of several points at issue.
Everybody knows how great an attraction the monument erected to the memory of Eloisa and Abelard is to the crowds who visit the cemetery of Père la Chaise, recalling to their minds the letters full of love and passion written by Eloisa, which have elicited so many imitations both in prose and verse in England and in France.