as thy swete sone.”94 While not all medieval Christians intermingled erotic and maternal imagery so readily, the spousal connotation of the Christ Child, clearly present in Aelred’s anchoritic text, was in fact quite common, as already noted.
After Aelred tells his reader to meditate on the visit of the shepherds and that of the Magi, he instructs her to accompany the Christ Child to Egypt. He then recounts the story about how the Holy Family was held up by robbers as they fled there. It is important to note that Aelred is apparently the first writer in the West to relate this apocryphal legend, which is ultimately based on a tale included in the early medieval Arabic Infancy Gospel.95 A chapter from this apocryphal text tells how the Holy Family encountered two adult thieves on the Flight into Egypt, one of whom prevented the other from harming the Holy Family. Out of gratitude, the infant Jesus promised his mother that he would reward the good thief’s kindness, prophesying that the two men would be crucified with him, but that the one on his right, the good thief, would enter with him into Paradise. Mary vocalizes her prayer that God protect her son from such a fate, but we are not told whether the infant Jesus responds.96 This basic story was transmitted to the Greek-speaking world (and thence to Western Europe) through an interpolation made in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus.97 Background information about the good thief is provided right after the Greek writer mentions the exchange of words between the two thieves crucified beside Christ, as recorded in Scripture (Lk. 23:39–43).98 The apocryphal Greek text gives these thieves names: the bad one on the left is called “Gestas,” while the good one on the right is named “Dismas.”99 The name Dismas and the tale of his early encounter with the Holy Family became well known in the West by the later Middle Ages.100 This figure can be seen as one of many late medieval elaborations on the Passion story and, more specifically, as a part of the widespread devotional trend of the Proleptic Passion, which I explore in more detail below.
Whereas Mary plays a key role in both the Arabic and Greek redactions of this legend, in Aelred’s version the emphasis is on the interaction between the good thief and Jesus as they hung on the cross in close proximity. Struck by the beauty of the Lord hanging beside him, and far from being scandalized by Jesus’ execution as a criminal, the thief in Aelred’s account, who insists on Jesus’ innocence, reminds Christ of the good deed he himself had previously done for him, several years ago. It is worth quoting this passage from the De institutione inclusarum in full since, besides positing a close connection between Jesus’ infancy and Passion, it includes a number of important details, some of which resonate with sources discussed below. In addition, this is the only apocryphal infancy legend that Aelred relates here or elsewhere, so he must have had a good reason for its inclusion. Although the recluse is initially urged to accompany the Child on the Flight into Egypt, in this case, she is not at all told to intervene in the scene. Instead, she is meant to behold the miracle of a quasi death-bed conversion, which reveals Jesus’ lavish mercy:
Accept as true the legend that [Jesus] was captured by robbers on the way and owed his escape to a young man (adolescentulus) who is supposed to have been the son of the robber chief. After seizing his booty he looked at the Child in his Mother’s bosom and was so impressed by the majesty that radiated from his beautiful face as to be convinced that he was something more than man. Inflamed with love he embraced him and said: “O most blessed of children, if ever the occasion arises to take pity on me, then remember me and do not forget the present moment.” This is said to be the thief who was crucified at Christ’s right hand and rebuked the other thief when he blasphemed. “What,” he said, “have you no fear of God, when you are undergoing the same sentence? And we justly enough; we receive no more than the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing amiss.” Then, turning to the Lord and seeing in him that majesty which had distinguished him as a child, he remembered his agreement and said: “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” So, in order to kindle love I consider it worthwhile to accept this legend as true, without making any rash assertions as to its authority.101
In this story, emphasis is given to the striking appearance of Jesus when he was both an infant and an adult—in both cases, the majesty of his divinity shines through the humble human circumstances of Jesus’ childhood and his death as a criminal. Recall that in the De Jesu puero duodenni, the Christ Child’s face, along similar lines, was said to be speciossimus (most beautiful), a description which echoes Psalm 44:3. Significantly, in both treatises, light is said to gleam from Jesus’ face.102
Aware of its lack of certitude, Aelred still recounts this pious anecdote (in a sketchy fashion, as if he expects his reader to be already familiar with the tale), and then tells the recluse why he did so: it is useful in instilling love. He gives his reader freedom to believe it or not, though at the outset of his narration, he urges her to accept it as true: “Believe that what is said is true…. Therefore I judge it not at all useless for the enkindling of love to hold this opinion, with all boldness of affirming it far away.”103 In the De Jesu puero duodenni, as I noted above, Aelred makes a comparable statement.104 As we shall see in the following chapter, clerics similarly justified (or at least tolerated) the transmission of apocryphal material because of its perceived devotional utility, without worrying whether such legends were actually true. Along similar lines, medieval hagiographers customarily composed biographical narratives about holy people on the basis of what they considered appropriate behavior for those who came to be recognized as saints, rather than from what they knew to be the facts, or in the absence of biographical materials. In addition, they often knowingly used sources that were not completely reliable. For example, the thirteenth-century Dominican Jacobus de Voragine, who was essentially a compiler, repeatedly tells what we (and probably his learned readers) would consider farfetched tales and occasionally alerts his readers to the apocryphal nature of his accounts, saying that he himself regards them as doubtful. He explicitly leaves it up to his readers to judge for themselves whether such stories are worth retelling.105
Aelred similarly tells his anchoritic reader that the tale about the robber’s son is a pious “opinion.”106 He undoubtedly sees much value in the apocryphal legend about the Holy Family’s encounter with a good thief. For him, it is pious fiction worthy of attention, unlike, for example, the fictional romances about King Arthur that lay people and even monks were attracted to and took so seriously—worthless material as far as Aelred was concerned, especially when it became an inordinate drain on Christians’ emotions.107
We might wonder how Aelred became acquainted with the story about the good thief, which originated in the East. As I mention in the following chapter, a few legends about the Holy Family deriving from Eastern sources were, in the later Middle Ages, incorporated into apocryphal infancy narratives that circulated in Latin and the vernacular languages. Such tales were also added to the repertoire of Christian iconography.108 Yet given that the story about the good thief was generally not incorporated into the apocryphal infancy narratives circulating in Latin in the West, it is probably the case that the legend about the Holy Family’s encounter with thieves was originally transmitted orally. This was perhaps a result of Europeans’ greater contact with eastern Mediterranean cultures, due to their more frequent travel to and interest in that region. Oral transmission seems to account, at least in part, for the appearance in Europe of another tale about the Holy Family, namely their visit to the garden of Matariya near Cairo, which resulted, according to legend, in precious balm growing in that special location for centuries to come, on account of Mary’s washing of the baby Jesus and his clothes in that spot (fig. 18, upper register).109
The Christ Child in the Piety of St. Francis and St. Clare of Assisi
While it was by means of his writings that Aelred of Rievaulx, as far as we know, encouraged both monks and recluses to meditate on the early life of Jesus and to imitate his development by making spiritual progress, Francis of Assisi’s deep devotion to the child Jesus manifested itself very strongly through performance both on special occasions and day-to-day; without doubt, his dramatic words and deeds left a lasting impression upon his fellow Franciscans and
