JOAN SAID NO: The True Story of Joan Leeds, The Nun Who Faked Her Death and Flipped Off the Church #MindOfMarlar
Joan of Leeds took one look at the vow of celibacy, faked her death, and said, ‘Yeah… I’m gonna go be literally anywhere else.
Let’s take a moment to appreciate something we don’t do often enough in modern life: bold, shameless medieval rebellion. Forget celebrity gossip, political scandals, or whatever TikTok drama is trending this week. I want to tell you about Joan of Leeds—a 14th-century nun who looked at her life choices, did the math, and decided to fake her own death using a homemade dummy and a pile of actual corpses.
Because why not?
Joan lived in St. Clement’s Nunnery in York—a place that, if we’re being honest, probably had all the charm and excitement of a brick wall covered in damp moss. In the 1300s, once you committed to the nun life, that was it. There was no “gap year.” No “finding yourself.” No “I’m just taking time to figure things out.” You were locked into a lifetime of fasting, chanting, and learning how to make eye contact with Jesus statues while suppressing the overwhelming urge to scream.
Unless, of course, you were Joan.
Instead of spending her life in the convent waiting for visions of sainthood or pestilence to take her out, Joan crafted what university archivists now call a “dummy in the likeness of her body.” Translation: she made a fake corpse, buried it, and ran like Hades to the town of Beverley about 30 miles away—because even medieval witnesses don’t check ID at funerals.
Now let’s be clear here. In modern terms, this would be like faking your death with a mannequin, forging your own death certificate, and then skipping town to start a new life as a yoga instructor in Sedona. Except this wasn’t 2023. This was 1318. Joan had no social media to delete, no phone to ditch, and no “new identity” app to download. She just had guts, probably a cloak, and a very real desire to never hear the phrase “vow of chastity” again.
Naturally, the Church lost its collective mind. Archbishop William Melton, the ecclesiastical fun police himself, documented her offense in what might be the most dramatic bureaucratic complaint ever filed. He accused her of being “seduced by indecency” and “impudently casting aside the propriety of religion and the modesty of her sex.” That’s medieval Catholic-speak for: “She got tired of being bored, broke, and celibate, and she did something about it.”
Melton didn’t just write her a sternly worded letter. He dispatched a church official to hunt her down and drag her back. You know you’ve struck a nerve when the most powerful religious leader in northern England treats you like a one-woman heretical manhunt. To be fair, Melton was probably just upset that someone outsmarted an entire convent using theater props and audacity.
And to this day, no one knows what happened to Joan next. Did the Church’s goon squad catch up with her? Did she reinvent herself as a tavern wench, a pirate, or a surprisingly literate wife of a blacksmith with a mysterious past? Or did she simply vanish into the fog of time, leaving behind only the memory of her Benedictine middle finger?
We don’t know. And honestly, that makes the story even better.
Now, let’s get philosophical for a minute. Because Joan’s story isn’t just a funny anecdote about a medieval prankster with a flair for the dramatic. It’s a story about how suffocating and insane the societal norms for women were at the time. Let’s say you’re a 14-year-old girl in 1300s England. Your options are:
- Marry a man twice your age and spend your life churning butter and burying children,
- Join a convent and get lectured about humility and hair coverings until the Black Death puts you out of your misery,
- Or… make your own corpse and escape.
Option three sounds less crazy now, doesn’t it?
Back then, becoming a nun wasn’t always a spiritual calling. It was often what happened when your family couldn’t afford a dowry or you were the fourth daughter in a village where the biggest career opportunity was “girl who doesn’t get the plague this year.” You took vows not out of religious devotion, but because the alternatives were even worse. It was basically the “You’ll eat your gruel and like it” career path of the 14th century.
And what makes Joan’s rebellion so satisfying is how creative it was. She didn’t just run away. She committed to the bit. She faked an illness. She built a dummy. She finessed a corpse swap. She staged a burial. This was less “lost soul” and more “medieval Ocean’s Eleven.” Somewhere in another dimension, George Clooney is giving her a slow clap.
But the icing on the sacrilegious cake is the Church’s outrage. Melton’s writings make it clear that what offended him most wasn’t just the escape—it was that a woman had dared to defy the institution. She had dared to question the rules, disobey the vow, and worse: she made the Church look foolish in the process. That’s the real heresy, isn’t it?
So what became of Joan? We don’t know. And that’s exactly the kind of ending that makes a woman like her legendary. She became a medieval ghost story with a side of feminist subversion. A reminder that even in an age where women were treated like walking loaves of bread with ovaries, there was still one who said “no thanks” to lifelong chastity, got creative, and left her mark—or didn’t, depending on how convincing that dummy was.
Whatever the case, here’s to Joan of Leeds: patron saint of fake funerals, religious noncompliance, and “I’m too pretty for this convent.” She didn’t just break the rules—she left them buried in a shallow grave with a straw wig and a borrowed habit. And really, isn’t that the kind of historical role model we all need?
Source: https://allthatsinteresting.com/joan-of-leeds-fake-death
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