The helplessness of the baby Jesus, lying in the manger, underscores the weakness of all human flesh, including that of monks who were supposed to discipline their body continually, in order to overcome pride and subdue fleshly desires.
Though Bernard approaches his subject rhetorically rather than scholastically, he shares a sentiment with high-medieval intellectuals who wondered at the tenderness of infants’ bodies. I refer here to how some scholars pondered why God, the author of nature, made it much easier for the babies of animals to move about on their own and seek food. The new Aristotelianism that partially prompted such questions may very well have led to greater reflection on the human nature of Jesus, who was thought to have truly passed through the early stages of the human life cycle. In other words, Jesus was believed to have experienced what other babies, children, and adolescents experienced—to be like us in all things but sin (Heb. 4:15).23 Another possibility was that Jesus simply gave the appearance that he was developing, as he non-dramatically bided his time until undertaking his adult mission.
Thus far, I have sketched out a broad picture of how Christians roughly in the first millennium and a half of the Christian era regarded the God-Man who, among other surprising things, had chosen to begin his earthly existence as a little child. The desire to know more about the Savior was probably always present among Christians. But as the centuries passed, believers felt a greater urge to delve into the human aspects of Christ’s existence, to imagine what it was like for Jesus to have been a helpless baby and then a growing boy. Although acknowledgement of the union of the two natures in Christ must have always been a cause of wonderment, Christians in the later Middle Ages seem to have approached this mystery on a more personal level, reflecting, for instance, on how the lowliness of their own humanity was willingly assumed by the Son of God. Yet as we shall see, though God became more approachable, especially in his childhood form, Christians continued to reverence his mighty power and mysterious transcendence, which were recognized even in the boy Jesus.
Previous Scholarship Pertaining to the Medieval Christ Child
Although scholars focusing on Mary or the adult Jesus occasionally mention the child Jesus, there has been no broad-reaching, single-authored study of this figure specifically in the medieval period, as William MacLehose has observed.24 This is the case, despite the fact that the Christ Child was the object of intense devotion in the later Middle Ages, and was a pervasive presence throughout medieval society. Scholars can find traces of the Christ Child’s influence even in areas where we might not expect to encounter evidence of the power and allure of Jesus as an infant or boy, such as papal politics, the crusade movement, intercultural relations, and the dynamics within local communities and domestic settings.25 While people looked for and esteemed the traces of Jesus’ early years on earth, often traveling great distances and enduring many hardships in order to make contact with the remnants of his historical past,26 medieval Christians acted as if Jesus still existed as a child and was accessible to them in their own settings—at home, in the convent, and in the nearby parish church. Writers and artists frequently spoke of and represented the Christ Child in their works, ostensibly with the goal of linking Christians with Jesus’ past and also of underscoring the living reality of Christ as a child with whom they could engage in the present. Ironically, the widespread presence of the Christ-Child figure within medieval culture may largely explain why he has not received a tremendous amount of critical attention from modern scholars, who may acknowledge his importance but consider it a constant and steady feature rather than a crucial factor within, or indication of, a particular medieval cultural setting.
The following brief overview of some of the scholarship on the medieval cult of the Christ Child will suggest further hypotheses as to why this area of research has not flourished more bountifully. To start with the more recent: The Christ Child in Medieval Culture, a 2012 essay collection I coedited with Theresa Kenney, focuses on later medieval sources, both textual and visual. In that book, which brought together scholars from a range of disciplines, Kenney and I sought to orient future scholarship in the field by exploring some of the key aspects of the Christ Child’s cult. The study was divided into three parts: “The Christ Child as Sacrifice,” “The Christ Child and Feminine Spirituality,” and, last, “The Question of the Christ Child’s Development.” Of these groupings, the third cluster of essays relates most closely to this current book, though the authors of those pieces did not intend to treat the issue of Christ’s childhood development systematically, with an eye to understanding the interrelationship of various sources. That part of the book simply offered three essays that dealt with the implications of medieval belief in Jesus as a real child, both physically and psychologically. From that section, Pamela Sheingorn’s chapter on two medieval Italian textual reworkings of the apocryphal legends about Jesus’ childhood, in my opinion, complements the present study particularly well. Sheingorn takes a microcosmic view of the apocryphal infancy tradition, focusing on two illustrated manuscripts (which contain related but substantially different narratives), whereas my approach to the apocryphal legends in this book is much more general. As I explain below, here I am interested in demonstrating the broad influence of the apocryphal tradition on later medieval culture. Hence it follows that although I mention (specifically in Chapter 3) some of the medieval manuscripts containing apocryphal infancy texts and illustrations, space does not permit me to focus on particular texts or manuscripts in great detail. In the Appendix, though, I offer a summary of the chapters in William Caxton’s Infantia salvatoris, which is fairly representative of the Latin narratives about Christ’s childhood circulating in the later Middle Ages.
Previous studies on the medieval Christ Child (that is, prior to the 2012 essay collection) tended to concentrate on two interrelated facets of the cult: first, the association of the child Jesus with the Eucharist, specifically the numerous cases in which he is said or shown to inhere in the consecrated host in a veiled manner, sometimes becoming visible to those who look upon the sacrament; and, second, his occasional appearance to and interaction with holy men and women generally considered mystics. The first approach is well illustrated by Leah Sinanoglou Marcus’s 1973 Speculum article “The Christ Child as Sacrifice: A Medieval Tradition and the Corpus Christi Plays,” which discusses conflations of the Eucharist and the Christ Child that we commonly find in late medieval drama and other sources, such as contemporaneous and earlier homilies. This classic essay has frequently been cited by medievalists and other scholars, not only because of its superb insights and impressive range, but also because other treatments of the child Jesus (in English and other languages) have been lacking.27 Caroline Walker Bynum’s numerous studies on medieval holy women constitute the prime example of the second, related category. Bynum frequently mentions the appearance of Jesus in the host, especially as he is savored by medieval holy women, who in a sense consume him, while denying themselves earthly food. Their gusto in relishing the baby Jesus may be summed up in an exclamation from a German nun whom Bynum quotes more than once: “If I had you, I’d eat you up, I love you so much!”28 Bynum also cites various instances of holy women enacting what were considered maternal roles and sentiments vis-à-vis the Christ Child, either meditatively, through the use of props, or with the Child himself, mystically reincarnated, so to speak, in their midst. Countering the pejorative view of some modern critics that such women were simply expressing their repressed femininity, for example, by naively playing with Christ-Child dolls or cradles, Bynum argues that such behavior, which was inextricably tied to the medieval discourse of women’s rootedness in the body, was consciously chosen and even enjoyed by women as an active mode of spirituality which they themselves could direct and excel at.
While the studies of both Bynum and Marcus are tremendously valuable, an accidental result of their successes has been that scholarship in the area of the medieval Christ Child has tended not to expand into other areas. In my view, when those of us whose work occasionally touches upon the medieval Christ Child cite such studies and then move on, without trying to learn more about medieval views of Jesus’ childhood, we run the risk of accepting a partial picture in place of a broader, more detailed landscape. A student of medieval culture in search of a summary of the medieval Christ Child prior to the 2012 collection
