A papisa mimética : mito político e rivalidades religiosas em Pope Ioan : a Dialogue between a Protestant and a Papist de Alexander Cooke (1610)

Abstract

One of the most frequent fronts of contention during the Religious Reforms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries revolved around the myth of the pope Joan. The story of a woman, who disguises herself as a man and, becoming pope, dies giving birth in public procession, thus revealing her secret, was fully accepted by the Church until the rise of the Protestant Reformation. In the sixteenth century, then, a fierce debate began about the existence of the woman-pope, with Protestant preachers on the one hand, claiming with "a cloud of witnesses" that it had existed and that this proved that the Church of Rome was the Antichrist, and Catholic scholars of another, claiming the popess to be a "vain fable." The purpose of this study is to examine the meaning of this myth and its relation to religious identities and political tensions in Jacobite England. To do so, we use the pamphlet Pope Ioan: a dialogue between the Protestant and the Papist, published by Alexander Cooke in 1610, the most extensive work available in defense of the myth of Joan in Early Modern England. For documentary analysis and its articulation with historiography, we use the Mimetic Theory of René Girard, a system that articulates desire, rivalry and identity through what he calls the scapegoat mechanism. The hypothesis we have constructed is that the power of myth in the early seventeenth century was political. It would respond to the crisis of differences, which the English Reformation inaugurated, especially by the means of Royal Supremacy, which made the monarch the Supreme Head of the Church. Such an experience was pushed to the limit when Elizabeth I ascended to power and is singled out by opposition Catholics as ‘the true popess’. Both the textual form chosen by Cooke, the dialogue, and the evidence called in favor of pope Joan, are based on scapegoat stereotypes whose main function is to reestablish the difference between a legitimate Protestantism and an illegitimate Catholicism. Thus, in Pope Ioane, the Protestant fragmentation that characterized the period would be eclipsed in favor of a polarization animated by anti-Catholicism in general, and the anti-Jesuit myth in particular.