The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages. Mary Dzon
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swaddling clothes, with their connotations of burial, foreshadow the adult Christ’s shroud and thus his future death, an association with perhaps more poignancy for medieval viewers, who dealt with deceased infants much more regularly than we do.48 To take another example, one from day-to-day life: knowledge that medieval mothers were often responsible for the education and formation of young children infuses greater realism into medieval images of Mary interacting with Jesus, as if to instill in him basic skills or knowledge about the world around him, if not also to confer with him regarding his future mission.49 Medieval sources probably had an even more powerful effect on their audiences when they involved a reversal of cultural norms; for example, some medieval texts and images suggest that the child Jesus actually instructed his mother about the suffering that lay ahead for both of them.
Other scholars have recognized the connection between medieval childhood and the medieval Christ Child as interrelated phenomena. In a wide-ranging essay on medieval childhood, originally published in 1978, David Herlihy argued that the urbanization of Western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the dangers posed to children’s lives from contemporary social upheavals resulted in a greater “willingness on the part of society to invest substantially in [children’s] welfare [and] education.”50 Herlihy provides some evidence for adults’ concern that their children acquire marketable skills within the new urban economy, and also some indication of adults’ (presumably new or newly reflected upon) understanding of the particular nature of children. While noting that monks in the earlier Middle Ages, according to the sources, tended to praise children’s virtues and treat them humanely, Herlihy claims that the Cistercians in the twelfth century started a new trend of idealizing childhood, which later appealed to the laity, who sometimes felt burdened by materialism—an idea that complements my suggestion below that medieval adults desired somehow to reappropriate the simplicity of childhood. Herlihy boldly proposes that the “widespread devotion to the Child Jesus,” which developed from the twelfth century onward, and was strongly promoted by the Cistercians and Franciscans, stemmed from the appeal of childhood itself—an intriguing hypothesis that, intuitively, seems to have a good deal of truth to it.51
While investigations that consider the synergy among ideas about and images of childhood on the one hand and of the Christ Child on the other are definitely valuable, I would stress the importance of keeping in mind the diversity that existed within the latter category—a multiplicity that reflects the inherent difficulty medieval people faced when pondering the deity’s having become a child. Not only was God challenging (indeed impossible) for medieval Christian adults to comprehend, but so, too, it appears, was the very nature of a child. Studying the medieval Christ Child sheds light on this mystery, as medieval people perceived it—something that the other sources examined by social historians do not often convey, even though they may indicate parents’ emotional investment in their offspring, for example.52
Adding More to the Mix: Appealing Images of the Child, Yet None Completely Authoritative or Fully Satisfactory
Herlihy’s hypotheses that the emergence of a new urban economy led to a greater concern for and awareness of children, and that the idealization of children helped to relieve the stresses of day-to-day life for medieval adults, are certainly plausible. Yet his explanation for the new European interest in the Christ Child seems reductionistic. In sum, Herlihy says that what lay and religious people of the later Middle Ages most admired about the Christ Child was his childlikeness.53 Although a number of medieval sources call attention to the ways in which Jesus embodies the positive, natural virtues of children,54 most of the texts and images examined in this present study do not have this emphasis. Herlihy rightfully draws our attention to the successful efforts of the Cistercians and Franciscans to promote devotion to the child Jesus, but the members of these two groups did not simply portray the boy Jesus as a sweet and charming child, worthy of love and emulation on a basic human level. There were other ways in which the Child was presented and regarded, by various groups and individuals, in the high and later Middle Ages.
As we shall see in Chapter 2, for the twelfth-century Cistercian Aelred of Rievaulx, the Christ Child is the mystical bridegroom for whom the soul yearns and toward whom it makes progress, especially by retracing the key events of Christ’s early life. While Aelred, in one section of his well-known treatise on the twelve-year-old Jesus, sketches a picture of Christ as a charming child, he clearly wants his reader to go beyond such a conceptualization and visualization by developing spiritually, specifically through the cultivation of the virtues. In this treatise, Aelred also speaks derogatorily of the Jews, ostensibly to present a stark alternative: allegorizing the story in Luke about the loss of the twelve-year-old Jesus, he says that the Jews (represented in this episode by Jesus’ parents) have great difficulty finding the Messiah. By implication, Aelred’s monastic reader should do what it takes to avoid losing Jesus, and thus avoid the grief experienced by Jesus’ parents and the other members of the Jewish community who knew him. So, while Aelred deserves credit for laying important groundwork for greater reflection on Christ’s childhood in the later medieval period, his main goal was clearly not to promote a fundamentally sentimental approach to the boy Jesus; his treatment of the Christ Child is definitely more complex. Such complexity exists among Franciscan sources as well. As I show in the latter part of Chapter 2, Francis of Assisi had, and promoted, a more affective response to the infant Jesus, whom he regarded as a poor boy worthy of tremendous compassion. Yet for the Italian saint and his Franciscan followers the Child was not merely a darling bambino who captured their hearts. Much of their attention focused on the suffering that Jesus embraced at birth and throughout his life, which revealed the heights of divine love and was worthy of radical reciprocation. Moreover, the love of the Father who gave his Son to the world to redeem humankind—long ago in Bethlehem and in the present, on the altar at every Mass—was considered a cause of great rejoicing and also a mystery to be profoundly revered.
While it is true that the Cistercians and Franciscans invigorated the cult of the Christ Child for the later medieval period, as Herlihy emphasized, there were many Christians not belonging to or affiliated with these groups who fostered greater attention and a more intense response to the child Jesus—numerous men and women who in varying ways contributed to the historical cult of the Christ Child but who, for lack of space, cannot be featured here in detail (or, in some cases, mentioned at all). In terms of iconography, there was a range of images of the Christ Child in circulation; the “new picture of the Child Jesus,” whose humility and gentleness were attractive to medieval adults, did not simply supplant the old apocryphal portrayal of an “all-knowing and all-powerful” Christ Child, as Herlihy’s brief comments about the apocrypha seem to imply.55 The two main types of images he speaks of should, instead, be thought of as having competed with each other and, in many cases, overlapped with each other, as well as with other images. To be sure, in the medieval period there were not simply two types of Christ-Child figures, which were basically diametrically opposed, though it may be helpful to think of broad categories.
When we consider medieval iconography, we certainly perceive a difference between, on the one hand, the older Romanesque depiction of a hieratic, stern-looking Christ Child seated upon his mother’s lap, like a priestly or regal figure wielding influence from a throne, and, on the other hand, the more human Virgin and Child of Gothic art, who tenderly and playfully interact with each other. On the basis of the emergence of the latter, more approachable image, Philippe Ariès claimed that the seeds of the discovery of childhood in Western culture were sown in the later Middle Ages, when artists began to portray the child Jesus more realistically. Although it took a long time for this trend of realism “to extend beyond the frontiers of religious iconography,” he considered it “nonetheless true that the group of the Virgin and Child changed in character and became more and more profane: the picture of a scene of everyday life.”56 Though Ariès’s unsubstantiated (and rather ambiguous) remark that medieval society lacked a “sentiment de l’enfance” has rightfully been dismissed,57 he should surely be given credit for noting that a discovery of the Christ Child, so to speak, occurred in the later Middle Ages. A new outlook and sensibility did indeed arise, in the sense that the boy Jesus became the object