De Joanna Papissa, sive Famosæ Quæstionis, An fœmina ulla inter Leonem IV, & Benedictum III, Romanos Pontifices, media sederit, A’ NA´ KPIΣΙΣ. Auctore Davide Blondello [...]

Full title: De Joanna Papissa, sive Famosæ Quæstionis, An fœmina ulla inter Leonem IV, & Benedictum III, Romanos Pontifices, media sederit, A’ NA´ KPIΣΙΣ. Auctore Davide Blondello, Catalaunensi, Historiæ Ecclesiasticæ in Illustri Schola Amstelædamensi nuper Professore.

8vo. pp. [104], 140, [30]. Signatures: */a8, b-f8, A-L8. Bound in 19th-century straight-grain morocco, richly gilt. With large folding table.

First edition in Latin of Blondel’s demolition of the legendary female papacy of Joan (or Joannes Anglicus), in 855-57 (or later, in some accounts), first raised as a true episode by the chronicler Jean de Mably in the mid-thirteenth century, and held dear as a mark of Romanist folly by anti-Catholic controversialists during the late middle ages and Renaissance. Its mythical status was asserted by Pope Clement VIII in 1601, but Blondel’s analysis of 1647 (in French, here rendered into standard Latin by Étienne de Courcelles, with a long apologetic preface), ‘effectively demolished’ the tradition, or as Edward Gibbon put it, ‘annihilated’ Pope Joan herself – indicating, incidentally, that Blondel (d. 1655) did not restrict his exposure of forgeries to those discreditable to the Roman Church. See A. Cioranescu, Bibliographie de la littérature française du dix-septième siècle. Paris, 1965, vol. I, 12491.

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