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. Suddenly we find extraordinary industry exercised in multiplying and spreading the copies of Polonus containing the story, and in inserting it in other chronicles that did not contain it. As the editors of the _Histoire Littéraire e France_ aptly remark: "Nous ne saurions nous expliquer comment il se fait que ce soit précisëment dans les rangs de cette fidèle milice du saint-siège que se rencontrent les propagateurs les plus naïfs, et peut-être les inventeurs, d'une histoire si injurieuse à la papauté." [Footnote 4] [Footnote 4: "We cannot understand how it is that, precisely among the ranks of the faithful soldiers of the holy see, we find the most credulous propagators and, perhaps, inventors of a story so injurious to the papacy."] Dr. Döllinger answers this by stating that those who appeared to be most active in the matter were Dominicans and Minorites, particularly the former, (Sie waren es ja, besonders die ersten.) This is specially to be remarked under the primacy of Boniface VIII., who was no friend of either order. The Dominican historians were particularly severe in their judgments on Boniface in the matter of his difficulty with Philip the Fair, and appear to dwell with satisfaction upon this period of the weakened authority of the papal see. In 1610, Alexander Cooke published in London, "_Pope Ioane, a Dialogue Betweene a Protestant and a Papist, manifestly prouing that a woman called Ioane was Pope of Rome: against the surmises and objections made to the contrarie_," etc. Cooke has a preface, "To the Popish or Catholicke reader--chuse whether name thou hast a mind to;" which is very handsome indeed of Mr. Cooke. {8}