Aimery du Peyrat, abbot of Moissac, who compiled a chronicle in 1399, puts "Johannes Anglicus" in the list of popes with the remark, "Some say that she was a woman."
In 1450, Martin le Franc, in his Champion des Dames, expresses surprise that Providence should have permitted such a scandal as to allow the church to be governed by a wicked woman.
"Comment endura Dieu, comment
Que femme ribaulde et prestresse
Eut l'Eglise en gouvernement?"
Hallam (Literature of Europe) mentions as among the most remarkable among the Fastnacht's Spiele (carnival plays) of Germany the apotheosis of Pope Joan, a tragic-comic legend, written about 1480. Bouterwek, in his History of German Poetry, also mentions it.
In 1481, "to swell the dose," as Bayle says, the stool feature of the story first comes in.
In the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493 (Astor Library copy) Joan is put down as Joannes Septimus, and the page ornamented (?) with a wood-cut of a woman with a child in her arms. It relates that she gained the pontificate by evil arts, "malis artibus."
In the beginning of the same century there was seen a bust of Joan among the collection of busts of the popes in the cathedral at Sienna. And, more astonishing still, the story was related in the Mirabilia urbis Roma, a sort of guide-book for strangers and pilgrims visiting Rome, editions of which were constantly reprinted for a period of eighty years down to 1550!
In the middle of the fifteenth century we find the story related at full length by Felix Hammerlein, and later by John Bale, then Bishop of Ossory, who afterward became a Protestant. He pretty well completes the tale.
According to Tolomeo di Lucca, the Joan story in 1312 was nowhere found but in some few copies of Polonus. Nevertheless, it is notorious that at that time countless lists and historical tables of popes were in existence, in none of which was there any trace of the popess.