The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages by Mary Dzon

Abstract

Religion & Literature 140 The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages Mary Dzon University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. x + 408 pp. $65 cloth. In this ambitious and impeccably well-researched book, Mary Dzon explores the emergence and later influence of apocryphal treatments of Christ’s childhood. Perhaps not surprisingly, medieval people wanted to know more about Christ’s early years, which receive only the scantest of treatment in the Gospels. In taking on this neglected stage in the life of Christ, Dzon sheds light on an aspect of medieval Christology that has been obscured by scholarly emphasis on the Passion, the Eucharist, and the life of Mary. The book takes up a huge range of Latin and vernacular texts and visual sources from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries (and beyond) across Western Europe and the Mediterranean, from Aelred and Aquinas to Birgitta of Sweden. Dzon’s work will have great appeal to medievalists working in a wide range of fields. Dzon’s introductory chapter locates Christian desire for and curiosity about the Christ child in the broader context of medieval incarnational theology, access to the divine, practices of reading, and attitudes toward children and childhood. The book aims for breadth, offering “a broad conceptual and categorical map” of “various types of religious literature pertaining to the Christ Child” (21). Intertexuality and comparison are the main goals of what Dzon refers to as a “wide-ranging yet focused picture that will help frame future studies” (21). This will surely be true. And yet the book does so much more than survey so that others can make arguments. The book’s second chapter focuses on twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts that aim to deepen the reader’s engagement with the divine through the practice of imagining and even reenacting the childhood of Christ. Dzon demonstrates how, in two texts offering extended treatment of Christ’s boyhood (De Jesu Pueri Duodenni and De Institutione Inclusarum), Aelred enlists readers’ imaginative and interpretive potential with “prompts” designed to foster prayerful, meditative intimacy with Christ (57). Aelred’s methods help us better understand the “demonstrative” piety of Francis, who, while typically associated with the Passion, was equally devoted to Christ’s infancy: as Dzon puts it, recounting Francis’s reenactment of the nativity at Greccio in 1223, “the saint strove to imitate Christ in the manger as well as Christ on the cross” (67). This image of the swaddled Francis reorients Franciscan imitatio Christi in exciting new ways. While Cistercians and Franciscans looked to Christ’s childhood for meditative inspiration, Thomas Aquinas took a much more critical view of infancy BOOK REVIEWS 141 narratives, dismissing and discrediting them as untrue and potentially harmful to the faith, as Dzon argues in the book’s third chapter. The status of these apocryphal narratives was central to ongoing debates about orthodoxy, canonicity, the place of the friars, the role of the Jews, and the nature of Christ’s humanity. This chapter illuminates a complex and competing range of approaches to the infancy narratives—they increased in popularity and circulation, on the one hand, but became the object of scholastic criticism on the other. In this learned and highly detailed chapter, Dzon’s attention to detail sometimes diffuses the argument: each new thread fascinates, but Dzon’s accretive style promotes a bit of distraction and fatigue, which she works to counteract with useful (if occasionally awkward) redirections back to the overall topic at hand. In the book’s fourth and final main chapter, Dzon offers a thoroughly compelling close reading of the Revelationes of Birgitta of Sweden that focuses on her more practical and domestic rendering of Christ’s childhood, vividly captured through the eyes of his careful and attentive mother. While Birgitta was clearly familiar with the apocryphal infancy narratives, her distinctly Marian emphasis marks a significant departure. A lengthy series of sections on Birgitta’s representations of clothing in relation to Franciscan poverty and contemporary theological debates offers fascinating insight into Birgitta’s engagement with material culture, but it is not always clear how or why this contributes to the book’s discussion of Christ’s childhood. This is a thoroughly enjoyable and interesting book...