The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages
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Beginning in the twelfth century, clergy and laity alike started wondering with intensity about the historical and developmental details of Jesus' early life. Was the Christ Child like other children, whose characteristics and capabilities depended on their age? Was he sweet and tender, or formidable and powerful? Not finding sufficient information in the Gospels, which are almost completely silent about Jesus' childhood, medieval Christians turned to centuries-old apocryphal texts for answers. In The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages , Mary Dzon demonstrates how these apocryphal legends fostered a vibrant and creative medieval piety. Popular tales about the Christ Child entertained the laity and at the same time were reviled by some members of the intellectual elite of the church. In either case, such legends, so persistent, left their mark on theological, devotional, and literary texts. The Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx urged his monastic readers to imitate the Christ Child's development through spiritual growth; Francis of Assisi encouraged his followers to emulate the Christ Child's poverty and rusticity; Thomas Aquinas, for his part, believed that apocryphal stories about the Christ Child would encourage youths to be presumptuous, while Birgitta of Sweden provided pious alternatives in her many Marian revelations. Through close readings of such writings, Dzon explores the continued transmission and appeal of apocryphal legends throughout the Middle Ages and demonstrates the significant impact that the Christ Child had in shaping the medieval religious imagination.
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The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages
Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor
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The Appeal of Jesus—a Real Child Who Is Nonetheless Divine
Nostalgia of an escapist sort, rather than a healthy desire for personal reformation, may sometimes have instilled the urge to find a lost childhood. More specifically, medieval Christians may have chosen to reflect upon Jesus’ childhood in order to ignore, at least temporarily, the negative aspects of their own lives or to avoid thinking about the suffering Jesus endured as an adult. In the Life of Blessed Margaret of Faenza (d. 1330), a Vallombrosan nun, we learn that she spent a good deal of time, “perfecting her meditations on the childhood of the Savior.” She experienced such “marvelously sweet things (mirabiles dulcedines) during them” that “she did not care to pass onto Christ’s later life (ad altiora conscendere, literally, “to climb to higher things”).”96 Perhaps feeling somewhat offended by the way she ignored his adulthood, Jesus finally told her that it was “not right to wish to taste only the honey and not the gall (de melle meo … & non de felle).” Margaret henceforth concentrated completely on the Passion, with great intensity, apparently exchanging all the honey for gall (though Christ’s rhyming of words suggests that sweetness and bitterness may go hand in hand). Other evidence suggests that at least some medieval people perceived a danger in fascination with Christ’s childhood. Once Humiliana de’ Cerchi (d. 1246), a Franciscan tertiary, was subjected to an illusion by the devil, who, “understanding her desires, showed her the figure of Our Lady and the child Jesus, radiant of face and raiment,” yet the pious widow saw through this demonic trick, which interestingly reveals the imaginative seductiveness, for some, of the Mother-and-Child duo.97
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