Legend regarding the "testicle test" for the papacy.

papabile perchè palpabile ? ? ?

Learned something new today.

Noooooo. This can't be true.

hmm...enbar, are you saying this is some kind of joke or fake information? It would help if someone could corroborate.

My gut feeling is that it's a legend, just the same as it's now well established that Pope Joan never existed. But it's just a hunch really.

A little more information here, but not much.

Actually, there's some really good information in that. I think it pretty effectively debunks the existence of a Pope Joan. Very interesting!

Note: I have changed the description of this to "Legend regarding the 'testicle test' for the papacy."

To me, the whole idea of a "testicle test" sounds too perfect to be true. It just has the ring of the kind of historical myth everybody wishes had actually happened. In the Middle Ages, anyhow, popes mostly got appointed through a whole series of family and/or financial connections. Unlikely that a woman would slip into the system undetected.

Actually, it sounds like there really was a testicle test. The story about the female nun, however, is completely unverified. Another theory is that the test was performed to eliminate eunuchs.