of that basin in which our Savior was placed in his tender age and bathed in the manner of little ones.”123 Centuries earlier, Arculf, a Frankish bishop who visited the Holy Land, saw a stone that was hollowed out by the water “in which the little body of the Lord was first washed”—the bath-water that was poured over a wall after it had been used. According to Adomnán (d. 704), the abbot of Iona who wrote a description of the Holy Land based upon Arculf’s travels, this stone in Bethlehem “has ever since been full of the purest water, without any diminution”124—a wonder well-matched by the continuous stream of pilgrims who visited the places where Jesus himself had lived and died.125 Such passages referring to the bathing of the Christ Child indicate that, throughout the Middle Ages, Christians imaginatively harkened back to the milestone events and also the everyday occurrences of Jesus’ childhood.126
Whereas Herlihy offered an economic and social explanation for the new interest in the Christ Child, Marcus suggested that the new cult of the child Jesus was (in part) a European reaction against scholasticism—an effort to return to the simplicity of childhood.127 Rather than see the new devotion to the Christ Child as primarily stemming from social and economic conditions or as an inverse response to the highly intellectualized climate of the time—that is, mainly as a defensive measure—I prefer to view it as a natural outgrowth, to a large extent, of the increasing emphasis placed upon Christ’s humanity—on God’s having assumed the lowliness, deficiencies, and even miseries of the human condition, including the common characteristics of childhood. Numerous sources indicate that Christians in the later Middle Ages delighted in the paradox that ensued from having as their Lord a God who had become and, in some way, was still a child. Believers were probably drawn to their Savior even further, when they reflected that he began to save them from the very beginning of his life. The greater interest given to the Virgin, and the continual role she was believed to play in human salvation over the course of the centuries, undoubtedly also led medieval Christians to focus more intensely on the early stages of Jesus’ life, which he intimately shared with Mary (and also with Joseph, whose prerogatives had attracted the attention of the devout by the later Middle Ages).128
As I have argued above, there were a host of competing and overlapping images of the Christ Child in the later Middle Ages, a multiplicity that stemmed from a number of causes, most prominent of which was the difficulty of imagining the presence of divinity, the summation of perfection, adhering in a human child, which to medieval adults bespoke development and change. The apocryphal childhood legends explored this paradoxical situation in a dramatic manner, showing the tension that could arise when a young Jesus not shy about his divine lordship interacted with those around him. Raising a number of theological issues, such legends likely inspired medieval Christians to reflect more deeply upon Christ’s early years. Whatever approach they took, medieval Christians in search of the near but elusive child-God likely felt that the issue of Christ’s childhood, which the canonical gospel writers probably bypassed for a very good reason, was always open to further exploration.
Before turning to an examination of apocryphal infancy gospels and Birgittine materials pertaining to Mary’s relationship with her son Jesus, this study will consider well-known Cistercian and Franciscan treatments of Christ’s childhood,129 which create an important backdrop for the other (generally later) materials discussed below. The twelfth- and thirteenth-century religious figures with whom I begin strove to make the child Jesus, who for centuries had lurked in the background of European culture, come to the fore. The Bible rather than the apocrypha was their main inspiration, yet they did not completely ignore extra-scriptural details that seemed useful in promoting devotion to the Christ Child among their fellow Christians.
CHAPTER 2
The Christ Child in Two Treatises of Aelred of Rievaulx and in Early Franciscan Sources
In one of his numerous sermons on the Song of Songs, the renowned Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) invites his audience to imagine “how Mary’s husband Joseph would often take him [the Christ Child] on his knees and smile as he played with him.” This particular sermon, which momentarily turns to a scene of domestic intimacy, focuses on the verse “A bundle of Myrrh is my beloved to me, he shall abide between my breasts” (Sg. 1:12); it is specifically the word fasciculus (“little bundle”) that prompts Bernard to think of the infant Jesus. Myrrh, the bitter herb mentioned in the verse, recalls Jesus’ sufferings, which, according to Bernard, were manifest first in “the privations of his infancy,” and then in “the hardships he endured in preaching, the fatigues of his journeys, the long watches in prayer, the temptations when he fasted, his tears of compassion, the heckling when he addressed the people, and finally the dangers from traitors in the brotherhood, the insults, the spitting, the blows, the mockery, the scorn, the nails and similar torments that are multiplied in the Gospels.”1 Bernard mentions Christ’s infancy only briefly within this increasingly dramatic sequence,2 concentrating instead on the Passion, the climax of Christ’s life, which was recounted in the Gospels with considerable detail and elaborated even further in medieval devotional texts and images. Bernard advises his fellow monks to keep the recollection of Jesus’ life and death as a “delectable bunch” between their breasts; they are to have it before their mind’s eye, especially when they experience difficulties. It is near the end of this short sermon where Bernard introduces the aforementioned image of Joseph bouncing the infant Jesus on his knees.3 Yet he finally closes not with this charming vignette, but with a more abstract reference to Christ as the “Church’s bridegroom.” This implies that the members of the Church, especially the individual monk who hears or reads the sermon, are to seek mystical union with Christ—an intimate relationship with the Godman that is both fostered by and transcends meditation on the events of Jesus’ earthly existence.
Although it may seem strange that Bernard associates the infant Jesus with the bridegroom desired by the bride in the Song of Songs, other medieval Christians commonly thought of the Christ Child in this way. As Ann Astell remarks, in medieval texts in which the bride is interpreted as the Virgin Mary, the groom “assumes the striking form of an Infant Boy nursing at her breasts.”4 The Christ Child was not simply the beloved of the Virgin Mary, but also the spouse desired by Christians who sought a deeper spirituality. Such imagery is reflected in the vita for the Beguine Mary of Oignies (d. 1213) authored by Jacques de Vitry: “Sometimes it seemed to her that she held him [God] tightly between her breasts like a clinging baby for three or more days and she would hide him there lest he be seen by others and at other times she would play with him, kissing him (osculando ludebat) as if he were a child.” Mary’s biographer also notes that: “Once when she had lain continuously in bed for three days and had been sweetly resting with her Bridegroom, the days slipped by most stealthily because her joy was so great and so sweet.”5 In this chapter from Mary of Oignies’s vita, Jacques clearly has in mind the verse from the Song of Songs about the spouse having myrrh between her breasts, since he specifically says that the divine child who visited Mary and caused her such delight was nestled between her breasts (inter ubera commorantem; cf. Sg. 1:12).
Bernard’s disciple Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167), who served for twenty years as abbot of an influential Cistercian monastery in Yorkshire, Rievaulx Abbey, also uses language and imagery from the Song of Songs when speaking of the Christ Child, as we shall see in considering two of his devotional treatises that deal with Jesus’ youth. An examination of these works shows that the figure of the Christ Child was employed by Aelred not simply in a sentimental way, that is, with the single goal of having his reader meditate upon and delight in the lovableness of the young Jesus, imaginatively re-presented in the here and now. The Cistercian abbot’s agenda is rather more complex, at least in the case of the treatise directed at a male reader, the De Jesu puero duodenni (On Jesus at the Age of Twelve). Yet in both cases, Aelred seeks to capture his reader’s attention by focusing on the divine child, whom one could imaginatively see and touch. In differing degrees, Aelred
