9780802098948

0802098940

"The cult of the Christ Child flourished in late medieval Europe across lay and religious, as well as geographic and cultural boundaries. Depictions of Christ's boyhood are found throughout popular culture, visual art, and literature. The Christ Child in Medieval Culture is the first interdisciplinary investigation of how representations of the Christ Child were conceptualized and employed in this period.

The contributors to this unique volume analyse depictions of the Christ Child through a variety of frameworks, including the interplay of mortality and divinity, the medieval conceit of a suffering Christ Child, and the interrelationships between Christ and other figures, including saints and ordinary children. The Christ Child in Medieval Culture synthesizes various approaches to interpreting the cultural meaning of medieval religious imagery and illuminates the significance of its most central figure."--Pub. desc.

Introduction : the infancy of scholarship on the Medieval Christ child / Mary Dzon and Theresa M. Kenney

The Christ child as a sacrifice : a medieval tradition and the English cycle plays / Leah S. Marcus

The manger as Calvary and altar in the Middle English nativity lyric / Theresa Kenney

Signs of death : the sacrificial Christ child in late-medieval art / Elina Gertsman

The Christ child in the tree : the motif in the thirteenth-century wood-of-the-cross legends and Arthurian romances / Nicole Fallon

Birgitta of Sweden and Christ's clothing / Mary Dzon

Women wielding knives : the circumcision of Christ by his mother in an illustrated manuscript of the Meditationes vitae Christi (Paris, Bibliotheque national de France ital. 115) / Holly Flora

Ihusus is unser! : the Christ child in the German sister books / Richard Keickhefer

The holy tooth : dentition, childhood development, and the cult of the Christ child / William MacLehose

'The ink of our mortality' : the late-medieval image of the writing Christ child / Mary McDevitt

Reshapings of the childhood miracles of Jesus / Pamela Sheingorn

Epilogue / Miri Rubin.

Jesus Christ > Childhood and youth > Art.

Jesus Christ > Childhood and youth > In literature.

Christian art and symbolism > Medieval, 500-1500.

Religious thought > Middle Ages, 600-1500.