Was Pope Joan a real person?

Answer 1

In a word, no.

Pope Joan was said to have reigned from 855AD to 857AD, though a few modern accounts put her as late as 1099. The legend goes that she came from Athens to Rome with her paramour. Disguised as a man in order to climb in society, she used her extraordinary intellectual abilities and quickly ascended through the ranks of scholars and clergy until she was without equal. Elected pope, the legend states that her sex was only realized when she gave birth to a child while mounting a horse. Some accounts say she then expired from her travail, others say the enraged crowd dragged her behind the horse and killed her. Later versions had her spared, stripped of her office and retired to a convent where she died of old age while her newborn son lived to become a bishop.

The legend is highly discredited and is purely myth. Joan was said to rule after pope Leo IV died in 855, but Benedict III was pope from 855AD to 858AD and his reign is documented for his fight against the antipope Anastasius as well as his campaign to unite the powers against the Saracen threat. The only indication of a female pope from that time period is found in a single footnote written in Anastasius' Liber Pontificalis. The footnote itself is in the wrong sequence and written in a different hand from the rest and so is considered spurious, perhaps added even centuries later.

The legend started to be widely disseminated in the 13th century, so much so that ecclesiastics themselves believed it and held it as an example of scandal. It wasn't until the late 16th century, with the Protestant Reformation in full swing and using everything it could to discredit Rome, that the Church finally seriously addressed the rumour and sought to document its origin, finally declaring it fictitious. Nonetheless, the issue has often been brought up as anti-Catholic fodder though most respected publications today, due to the utter lack of historical proof of her existence, relate her as a myth. These publications include the Encyclopedia Brittanica, Chambers Encyclopedia, and even Gibbons in his "Decline and Fall, calls her a "palpable forgery".

Answer 2

No women are not allowed to be in the Roman Catholic church hierarchy but she was a legendary Pope in a book (Called Pope Joan)