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

For Anglophone historians of Europe, the picture of late medieval piety as developing from an emphasis on a regal Christ to an affective focus on the human and suffering Jesus was set by the last chapter of R. W. Southern’s influential The Making of the Middle Ages (1953) and later given elaboration and nuance by many other scholars, most recently Rachel Fulton in her prize-winning From Judgment to Passion (2002). In The Quest for the Christ Child, Mary Dzon usefully expands our understanding of this affective piety, arguing that the absence of material on Jesus’s childhood in the synoptic gospels made possible both conceptions of the boy Jesus as a real human child to be sentimentally adored and yet, paradoxically, a sense of him as an impish and occasionally vengeful figure inflected by folk material. Dzon focuses on well-known authors (Aelred of Rievaulx, Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, and Birgitta of Sweden), although the originality and extent of her own research might have been clearer had she organized her account around basic themes and given more prominence to the less well-known texts she has studied with care and about which she has published learned articles. Her prose, while serviceable, is repetitious and plodding. As is often true of first books, the value of The Quest for the Christ Child lies in its details rather than in any startling overall interpretation. But there are nuggets of important insight here—such as the charming section on the theological and devotional significance of clothing for Birgitta and the concern with the child Jesus as magician in middle English literature—and they both testify to Professor Dzon’s breadth as a researcher and add detail to our understanding of late medieval Christianity.