The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages. Mary Dzon

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      In contrast, tales about the miracles that Christ supposedly worked as he was growing up, which were frowned upon by a number of medieval churchmen, were visually rendered much more rarely. In Chapter 3 I examine opposition to such legends on the part of the famous thirteenth-century Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas. Despite the reasonableness of Aquinas’s arguments against Jesus’ childhood miracles, stories about them were nevertheless popular since they appealed to both lay and clerical audiences, who regarded such material as both entertaining and devotional. In addition to providing diversion for their audiences, such legends would have been welcomed as sources of information about the unknown period of Jesus’ youth, even if this material were only piecemeal or hypothetical.

      Given the widespread popularity of such apocryphal stories, it is fair to suppose that late medieval writers were familiar with these accounts. The controversy surrounding the apocryphal legends may have actually drawn people’s attention to them, as well as impelled others to seek information from more reliable sources or to exercise their own creativity in dealing with Christ’s childhood. Chapter 4 considers the revelations of the fourteenth-century mystic Birgitta of Sweden concerning the Nativity and the family life of Jesus at Nazareth, some of which seem to respond to apocryphal traditions about Christ’s infancy and childhood (for example, by implicitly denying that midwives assisted Mary in attending to her newborn, a detail derived from early apocryphal narratives). Although this study could have focused on many other mystics from the later Middle Ages,⁸¹ I have chosen Birgitta since she provides an interesting perspective as a laywoman who gave birth to and cared for a number of children, and also because her revelations about the Virgin and Child are so numerous and frequently include the theme of Mary’s compassion, a common feature of late medieval piety. In addition, Birgitta was a popular saint throughout Europe and had a definite impact on late medieval English devotional culture, to which I give some priority in this study. Readers of this book who are interested in other mystics who had a special devotion to the Christ Child are invited to pursue some of my references and those of other scholars. Along similar lines, I do not explore representations of the child Jesus in a wide range of Middle English literary texts, but only mention (apart from the Middle English poems on Christ’s apocryphal childhood, which I examine in some detail) a sampling of Middle English works that deal with the beginning of Jesus’ life. These include a few Middle English lyrics, some late medieval biblical plays, and also Mandeville’s Travels. Elsewhere, I explore how Christ’s youth is handled in the well-known and highly regarded Middle English poem Piers Plowman, in which William Langland depicts the young Christ as a knight in training eager to fight against the devil in a tournament. By insisting on the Child’s having restrained himself from exercising his divine power for many years, and by exaggerating Jesus’ youthfulness at the wedding feast of Cana, Langland’s poem arguably addresses issues that are raised by the apocrypha.⁸²

      The interaction among the sources I examine in this book is complex, because we are not just dealing with the intertexuality of apocryphal and other written narratives; we must also consider the (in many cases mutual) influences wielded by oral tales, visual representations, and the popular traditions surrounding actual and imaginary places and objects. I move into less strictly textual domain in the latter part of Chapter 4, where I briefly deal with the legend that Mary made Jesus’ seamless tunic when he was still a boy and that it increased in size as he grew up. This legend was associated with a particular place, the Priory of Sainte-Marie in Argenteuil, which, from the middle of the twelfth century, claimed to have the relic of Jesus’ tunic. A distant yet important source for this legend was the apocryphal version of the Annunciation, which describes Mary as spinning thread when she conceived Jesus in her womb—a detail commonly depicted in Byzantine art.⁸³ Since the notion of Mary as a textile worker was probably transmitted in multiple ways and also broadly reflects the social conditions of women in the pre-modern world, I would not venture to propose only one source—the apocrypha—for the legend that the Virgin made the seamless tunic at the beginning of Christ’s life. Nevertheless, the apocrypha clearly played a role in the spinning of this pious yarn, so to speak.⁸⁴

      On the whole, my study indicates that the apocryphal infancy legends were sources of both information and inspiration for writers (and artists) of the later medieval period. There were a variety of possible responses to the apocryphal material: some people apparently took these legends seriously, while others seem to have regarded them lightheartedly, or at least tolerated them as pious fiction. Still others—we may infer—tried to counteract them by offering alternative views of Jesus’ childhood. Even when they met with disapproval, the apocryphal legends had the effect of drawing attention to the vexed questions of whether Jesus behaved in a normal fashion during his boyhood and whether he developed gradually like other human children.⁸⁵

      The Appeal of Jesus—a Real Child Who Is Nonetheless Divine

      As I have already suggested, one of the reasons why the Christ Child appealed to medieval Christians was that they perceived a surprising, inexplicable, and delightful conundrum resulting from God’s assumption of the form and characteristics of a little boy. Another ostensible reason was that, by becoming an infant and child, the deity became more approachable while still wielding a powerful influence upon people’s lives. The extremely popular Legenda aurea illustrates this principle in its chapter on Christmas, in which we hear that “a fallen woman, finally repenting of her sins, despaired of pardon. Thinking of the Last Judgment she considered herself worthy of hell; turning her mind to heaven she thought of herself as unclean; dwelling on the Lord’s passion, she knew she had been ungrateful. But then she thought to herself that children are more ready to be kind, so she appealed to Christ in the name of his childhood, and a voice told her that she had won forgiveness.”⁸⁶ Although Christ of course passed beyond childhood during his life on earth, he was regarded as, somehow, a perpetual child in heaven who was always willing to grant forgiveness and offer his love.⁸⁷ Bernard of Clairvaux went so far as to declare that “contact with [Jesus’] childhood is the only remedy for human sinfulness.”⁸⁸ This presupposes that Christ’s childhood is still a reality and within reach, an idea that complements Jesus’ stipulation in the Bible that, in order to enter into heaven, one must embrace childhood (Matt. 18:3). The fourteenth-century Englishman Henry of Lancaster, in fact, explicitly claims that Jesus continues to be a child in heaven, because Christ is always ready to forgive.⁸⁹ The underlying assumption that children are naturally forgiving (and, in a negative sense, inconstant, or—stated more neutrally—malleable in their interactions with other people) is reflected in a number of medieval sources. The thirteenth-century Franciscan encyclopedist Bartholomaeus Anglicus, for instance, notes (in the words of his fourteenth-century translator): “For mouynge of hete of fleisch and of humours þey ben eþeliche and sone wrooþ and sone iplesed and forȝeuen sone” (Because of the mobility of heat, of flesh, and of the humors, they are easily and quickly angered and readily pleased and quickly forgive).⁹⁰ In the same chapter, which is devoted to the characteristics of children, Bartholomaeus explains, citing the (folk) etymology given by Isidore of Seville, that the Latin word for children (pueri) comes from the Latin adjective “purus” (“pure”). This attribute obviously refers to children’s sexual inactivity (their being pristine) and is grounded in the tenderness of their newly molded flesh, but it also seems to encompass their simplicity of character and light-heartedness.⁹¹ Describing children as pure also speaks to their mental and moral status, specifically the belief that young children are not yet capable of willingly choosing evil.⁹² In the aforesaid chapter on children, Bartholmaeus goes on to say that, before puberty, “children ben neisch of fleisch, lethy and pliant of body, abel and liȝt to meuynge, witty to lerne caroles, and wiþoute busines, and þey lede here lif wiþoute care and business…. And þey loven an appil more þan gold” (children are tender of flesh, flexible and malleable in body, agile and nimble for movement, keen to learn carols [or dances], and do not engage СКАЧАТЬ