The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Recovering Christ-Child Images
I will rise, and will go about the city: in the streets and the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, and I found him not. (Song of Songs 3:2)
Medieval Christians’ Desire to Know About Jesus’ Childhood
In The Book of Margery Kempe, the story of a fifteenth-century English woman who, desiring a more spiritual way of life, parted from her husband to go on pilgrimages, we learn about how she wandered along the streets of Rome in hopes of stumbling upon Jesus, come to earth again, as a handsome man or as a darling baby boy. Margery would apparently have been pleased just to find a male who resembled and thus reminded her of her divine beloved. While her rather frantic and unconventional search for Jesus attracted attention and in many cases scorn from her fellow Christians in England and abroad, she was nevertheless a product of the religiosity of her times, not least in her devotion to the baby Jesus.1
As many scholars have observed, in the high Middle Ages (basically, the period stretching from the eleventh century and into the thirteenth) a new emphasis was placed upon the humanity of Christ, particularly the sufferings he endured in his Passion. Men and women living under religious vows, as well as the laity, began to concentrate more closely on the historical life of Jesus, especially his dramatic death—a trend that intensified toward the end of the medieval period. Through meditation on the events of Christ’s human existence, often with the aid of devotional books and images, Christians sought to gain a deeper understanding of the God-man who came to earth to redeem sinful humanity. The liturgical year, like the Creeds, had for centuries called Christians’ attention to the two main events of Christ’s life—his birth (at Christmastime) and the sufferings that culminated in his salvific death (in Holy Week). Yet it took roughly a millennium (from the time of Christ) before Europeans sought a deeper, more intimate—and, in many cases, intense—relationship with the God of love who became a little baby, lived, worked, and pursued his ministry within a Jewish community, and then suffered a brutal and ignominious death.2 Even medieval religious writers who stressed that the ultimate goal of the spiritual life was union with the deity, a pure spirit, often encouraged Christians to become more familiar with Jesus in his sacred humanity; by virtue of his concreteness, God the Son was accessible to an array of people at different levels of the spiritual life.3 While reflection upon the life of Christ was intended to produce feelings of compassion, love, and gratitude, it also provided an exemplar that ideally guided Christians’ actions.4 The high Middle Ages witnessed new religious movements that strove to return to the vita apostolica practiced by Jesus’ first disciples, as described in the New Testament, and epitomized by Christ himself—a man detached from worldly things, who ministered to those in need and preached salvation, before suffering on the cross.5 By the later medieval period, Christ the Almighty, whose divine retribution at the Last Judgment traditionally instilled fear, became for Christians a human being to be imitated and loved, on account of his labors and sacrifices on their behalf, as well as his innate goodness. Nonetheless, believers did not lose sight of Jesus’ divinity, as we shall see when considering the figure of the Christ Child in the later Middle Ages (generally speaking, the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries).
A desire to know more about Christ’s humanity undoubtedly impelled medieval Christians to seek greater knowledge of the events that constituted his life, in its various stages. In other words, curiosity about Christ, linked with a desire to be like him and to share in his sufferings, was a factor in the development of christocentric piety. Significantly, biblical exegetes began to pay more attention to the series narrationis of the biblical text at about the same time that the literary form of the romance emerged in Western Europe—a genre that focuses on an individual’s experiences over time, or at least on the most exciting and memorable incidents.6 It was thus natural for Christians to desire a more detailed, if not fully sequential account of Jesus’ life. Scripture, however, says very little about Jesus’ birth, even less about the marriage of his parents, and almost nothing about his childhood and adolescence. Only two of the four Gospels tell us something about the beginning of Christ’s life. The Gospel of Luke (chapter 2) recounts Jesus’ birth, the visit of the shepherds, the Child’s circumcision, and his Presentation in the Temple; it then skips to the time when Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem at the age of twelve. The Gospel of Matthew, the only other canonical gospel that discusses Jesus’ early life, tells (in chapter 2) how the Magi visited the Christ Child and paid him homage, after which Herod ordered the slaughter of the Innocents. To avoid the mortal blow intended for the baby Jesus, the Holy Family fled into Egypt, where, according to Matthew, they lived for an unspecified duration of time, and then later returned to Judea after Herod’s death. The Gospels of Mark and John simply skip over Jesus’ infancy and childhood, basically beginning with Jesus’ public debut at his baptism (which John, for his part, recounts after his famous prologue about the Incarnation of the divine Word). The “hidden” years of Christ’s childhood, which remained a mystery to Christians due to the discontinuity of the Gospel narratives of Luke and Matthew and the complete silence of the other two, obviously posed a problem for Christians who wished to reflect upon the humanity of Christ in all of its stages and aspects.
This book will explore some of the ways in which medieval people tried to make inroads into the early period of Christ’s life, which encompasses his infancy, childhood, adolescence, and youth, prior to his public ministry (as presented in the canonical gospels). Although the highly influential early medieval encyclopedist Isidore of Seville demarcated and defined these first four ages of the human life cycle (the first two of which last seven years, the third fourteen years, and the fourth more than twenty years!), medieval authors were not always so precise and not always consistent in their use of terminology pertaining to the stages of human life.7 In this study I will focus on medieval depictions and discussions of the young and (more frequently) the very young Jesus; I will often refer to Christ’s hidden years as his “childhood,” broadly construed, though by the phrase “Christ Child” I usually have in mind a younger, preadolescent Jesus (which, in terms of the New Testament’s presentation of him, means Jesus before or during the Finding in the Temple episode).
How did medieval people deal with the difficult situation of wanting to know more about Christ’s childhood yet lacking ample information, it seemed, from the Bible as well as the liturgy? One approach was for Christians to turn to ancient apocryphal legends about the Christ Child and his family, or, if they were already familiar with some of them, to further their knowledge of such lore. Besides providing many interesting details, these legends laid claim to some authority, which stemmed from their supposedly being written by those who knew the Child (and his parents or the Jewish community in which they lived); at the very least, these stories derived credibility from purportedly being woven from the narratives of reliable witnesses.8 Crafted as historical accounts written by reputable authors, these narratives seem to have had a popular appeal. Yet as victims of their own success, it seems,
