Lull’s novel Blanquerna ends with its pope-hero resigning to become a hermit

Evidence

Blanquerna is a missionary romance, in which the eponymous hero decides as a young man to become a hermit. His dismayed parents try to use the daughter of a friend to lure him away from this austere path, but their encounter only results in his converting her to a religious vocation. She becomes a nun, while Blanquerna wanders through many strange lands looking for the right place to build his hermitage. Like Bunyan’s pilgrim, he faces all sorts of trials and has many encounters with allegorical personages. Eventually he elects instead for the monastic life and he rises to become first abbot of his monastery and then a bishop and finally pope. After years of presiding over the Church as a reforming pope, he resigns the Papacy and returns to his original goal and becomes a hermit. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 90

Categorization

• XREF: A medieval pope voluntarily resigning echoes the real-life resignation of Celestine V and later Benedict XVI.