But not women generally, nor any laywomen. Nor right to be elected.
The college of cardinals was defined in 11th...12th centuries.
It consists of:
- bishops, but not all bishops nor any archbishops - just the suburbicarian bishops
- priests, of specified churches all in Rome, but not of all churches of Rome
- deacons of Rome (just 7 for the big city).
So WI for some reasons (there was quite some dispute and many antipopes in 11th...12th century), College of Cardinals ends up including a fixed minority of women, all of them celibate while in office:
5. abbesses of a few specified nunneries in the city of Rome
as well as
4. abbots of a few specified monasteries in the city of Rome?
How likely might this be?
So before addressing the elephant in the room ( i.e. whether or not women can vote in the conclave ) I would like to make a small introduction on how the college of cardinals developed ( who usually had to assist the pontiff in the government of the church state / papal state, therefore they were mostly from the Roman aristocracy or promoted by the local hierarchy ( at least 2/3 of the curia, with the rest foreigners, at the time the college was made up of 20/30 cardinals ) furthermore we must not forget the obvious logistical problems for a non-Italian cardinal to reach Rome ) , technically although its official origins date back to 1059 ( i.e. at the Lateran Council held in that year ) where it was established that the election of the Pope should take place exclusively by the college of cardinals and should take place in Rome and that the elected person should possibly be chosen from among the local Roman clergy, so tried to exclude the active intervention of the Roman nobility in the election of the pontiffs ( which in the previous century led to pornocracy ), as well as placing limits on the direct influence of the emperor in the choice of the candidate, but already previously ( in the Lateran Council of 769 ), there was an agreement on the fact that the newly elected Pope could not be a lay person and that the lay people could not take part in the election, but only in the final acclamation of the candidate elected by the Roman clergy ( a method of very clear imperial derivation, very similar to the enthronement of a new Augustus ) taking another step forward in time we arrive at Roman Constitutio of 824, which provided that the newly elected Pontiff had to take an oath of loyalty to the emperor before enthroning himself and that the emperor had a right to confirm his election ( which technically had to act as a counterweight to the Pope's exclusive right to consecrate the Emperor ), then we have the concession made by Pope Clement II to Henry III, in case an election dragged on for a long time or was contested, the emperor had the right to nominate his own candidate to avoid the vacant seat continue, but it is very correct to say that the current method of the curia closed in the conclave to choose a pontiff was adopted only towards the 12th century ( but it still did not completely exclude imperial intervention or popular acclamation, which were finally considered universally invalid only after the Western Schism ), returning to the topic, it is correct to state that even today there is no clause in canon law that could officially prohibit a woman from entering the college of cardinals ( given that until the 11th century, there were women who held the position of deacon, even if they were extremely extraordinary cases ) but it is also true that even if they could not actively participate in the choice of the pontiff, many important ladies throughout history have intervened politically to change papal policy ( such as Christina of Sweden, who was founder and patron of the party of zealots in the curia, Catherine Sforza who in 1484 held the curia in check for a 12 days, threatening them from Castel Sant'Angelo, until a pontiff of his liking was elected, Matilde of Canossa herself, relative and protector of the Popes, as well as other important queens and saints of the epic ( such as Isabella of Castile or Catherine of Siena, who could afford to preach to the Pope, without any fear ) obviously to understand how strong female influence was really present for the Romans, albeit through backdoor ways in the curia, just think of the most famous legend of the Middle Ages, namely the existence of the elusive Popess Joan, who according to some new "research" based on studies on coins and papal seals of the 8th/9th century ( in particular regarding the pontificate of John VIII, in the years from 856 to 859 where there are discrepancies ) it can be deduced that this " Popess " reigned in that period, even if essentially the first chronicles about her date back to about 3 centuries after her alleged pontificate ( it's because the same authors of those chronicles took her story with a pinch of salt ) now technically in this legend, in reality there is a grain of truth is, given that the myth is probably based on events that actually happened in Rome, during the Saeculum Obscurum, concerning Marozia and her family ( i.e. the Tuscoli counts, the Crescenzi family and the Teophylatti ) and their puppet pontiffs, or on the fact that in that street, where legend has it that she gave birth (Joan), there actually existed a family called Papas, who worked for the Vatican and that the eldest daughter inherited her father's monthly payments directly from her employer ( the Papacy ), furthermore it was not at all strange that in Rome women were extremely influential in the curia, especially if they had the right contacts ( see Madonna Olimpia Pamphili or like Joan of Armoise, who served in the papal army for six years following the example of Joan of Arc ), as it is frequent that in Italy there were abbesses so rich and influential that they could decide on their own almost personally on the politics of a given region, the latter in particular was very widespread in Calabria ( even under the Habsburgs ) therefore it can be said that women in the past they were actually capable of remotely governing the papacy, but as regards a girl who actually became a cardinal, things are much more complicated, I believe that we would have to go far back in time, so much so that it could drastically change the very development of primitive Christianity / first centuries