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The sacra infantia in Medieval Hagiography*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

István P. Bejczy
István P. Bejczy*
Affiliation:
Catholic University of Nijmegan
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Extract

In his De civitate Dei, Augustine stated that anyone who wants to lead a good and Christian life must necessarily have lived in sin in his life up to then. It is quite conceivable that Augustine had his own course of life in mind when writing these words; he never made a secret of his own sinful youth, as is clear from the Confessiones. None the less, his statement is expressed in the form of a general rule.

Many medieval saints’ lives seem to accord with Augustine’s statement. The saint repents after a life of sin and henceforth leads a model Christian life until the day of his death. Thus the eventual victory of Christianity over the forces of evil was demonstrated.

However, there are also many vitae that follow a different pattern. The saint is sometimes supposed to have been perfect in every respect from childhood onward. He was born a saint rather than becoming one through a process of ‘spiritual maturation’. Stories about such precocious saints have not escaped notice in modern scholarship. Following E. R. Curtius, the phrase puer senex is sometimes used to denote the topos; in hagiography, expressions such as as quasi senex and cor gerens senile are used.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 31: The Church and Childhood , 1994 , pp. 143 - 151
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1994

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Footnotes

*

I should like to thank Mayke de Jong, Rob Meens, Shulamith Shahar. and, especially, Rosamond McKitterick for their comments on this paper.

References

1 De civitate Dei, xv, i. Opera omnia, CChr.SL, 14, 2 (1960), pp. 453-4; cf. Confessiones, I, vii, il, Opera omnia, CChr.SL, 27 (1981), p. 6.

2 Cf. Dom, Ehrhard, Der sünàige Heilige in der Legende des Mitteialters = Medium Aevum, Philologische Studien, 10 (Munich, 1967).Google Scholar

3 Weinstein, Donald and Bell, Rudolph M., Saints and Soáety. The Two Worlds of Western Christendom (Chicago and London, 1982), pp. 19–47 Google Scholar; Goodich, Michael, ‘Childhood and adolescence among thirteenth-century saints’, History of Childhood Quarterly, I (1973-4), pp. 285–309 Google Scholar, reiterated almost verbatim in Vita perfecta: the Ideal of Sainthood in the Thirteenth Century = Monographien zur Geschichte des Mitteialters, 25 (Stuttgart, 1982), pp. 82-99. On the role of the child in medieval hagiography, see also Shulamith Shahar, ‘Infants, infant care and attitudes towards infancy in the medieval lives of saints’, Journal of Psychohistory, 10 (1983), pp. 281-309.

4 Curtius, Ernst Robert. Europãische Uteratur und lateinisches Mitielalter (Bern and Munich, 1948), pp. 108ff Google Scholar. On the ancient, especially Greek origins of the topos, see Elena Giannarelli, ‘II paida-riogeron nella biografìa cristiana antica’, Prometheus, 14 (1988), pp. 279-84.

5 The phrase quasi senex in the vita of Anthony Pilgrim Manzoni (AnBoll, 13, p. 417); cor gerens senile in Gregory the Great (Vita Benedicti = Dialogi 2, ed. Moricca, Umberto (Rome, 1924), p. 71)Google Scholar, and the vitae of Louis of Toulouse (AnBoll, 9, p. 283) and Hedwig of Poland (ActaSS, Oct. viii, p. 225). The Christ-child, however, ‘est puer atque senex’, according to Fulcoius Beluacensis, (Vtriusque) De nuptiis Christi et Eulesiae libri septem, ed. Mary Isaac Jogues Rousseau (Washington, DC, 1960), vi, 353. p. 115*.

6 Weinstein, and Bell, , Saints and Society, p. 26.Google Scholar

7 The term sacra injantia appears in the vita of Louis of Toulouse (AnBoll, 9, p. 283). The term infans sanctus was probably unknown in the Middle Ages: see André Vauchez, La Sainteté en occident aux derniers siècles du moyen âge, d’après les procès de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques (Rome, 1981), p. 595, n. 67.

8 Johannes Diaconus of Naples, [Vita Nicolai], ed. Mai, Angelo, Spicilegium Romanum (Rome, 1840), 4, p. 326 Google Scholar. For the Greek text, see Gustav Anrich, Hagios Nikolaos. Der heilige Nikolaos in der griechisehen Kirche, 2 vols (Leipsig, 1913–17).

9 Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historíate (Douai, 1624; repr. Graz, 1965), xiii, p. 67.

10 James of Voragine, Legenda aurea vulgo Historia Lombardia dicta, ed. Th. Graesse (Breslau, 1890; repr. Osnabrück, 1965), p. 22.

11 For the sources mentioned here I am partly indebted to Loomis, C. Grant, White Magic: an introduction to the Folklore of Christian Legend (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), p. 141 Google Scholar n. 102, referred to by Charles Jones, W., Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari and Manhattan (Chicago and London, 1978), p. 383, n. 6, as well as to Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, pp. 24-5.Google Scholar

12 Weinstein and Bell mention Nicholas of Tolentino (Saints and Society, p. 24); however, there is no such story about him. Perhaps they have, by mistake, merged Nicholas of Myra and Catervus of Tolentino into one saint?

13 Les petits Bollandistes. Vies des saints, 15 vols (Paris, 1866-9), [hereafter PB].

14 The vita of Bcrachius is slightly out of tune. He is reputed to have been suckled in the convent, where he was brought when a baby, although not on a breast but on his patron’s right ear-lobe, yet, for all that, growing like any other baby (ActaSS, Feb. ii, p. 834).

15 Thus, e.g., in the vitae of Veronique of Mercatello (seventeenth century, PB, 8, p. 220), and of Posadas (eighteenth century, PB, il, p. 274).

16 The vita of Robert dates from the twelfth century, just as the Greek version of Nicander’s life; the Latin version inserted in the ActaSS was written in the seventeenth century. The vitae of Catervus, Juliana, and Stephen date from the thirteenth century, that of Leo from the fourteenth or fifteenth, those of Ursuline 1472 (sources from the first half of the century), Cunegond 1475 (‘ex antiquo manuscripto’), Roche 1478 (older sources), and Catharine from the fifteenth. In 1586, the presumably contemporary life of Gonçalvo was printed; the life of George, ‘ex antiquo manuscripto’, in I 597. An Italian version of Albert’s life, originally from the fourteenth century or before, was published in 1600 (the ActaSS cite it in Latin). The information given on Raymund is drawn from a Spanish sermon printed in 1676. The data concerning Canid’s life were translated from the Greek Menaia. I have been unable to data Procula’s vita (see ActaSS Supplementum, Auctuaria Octobris, 127*-8*).

17 Arnold, Klaus, Kind una Gesellschaft in Mittelalter una Renaissance = Beitrãge una Texte zur Geschichte derKindheit (Paderborn and Munich, 1980); Pierre Riché, ‘L’Enfant dans la société chrétienne aux XIe-XIIe siècles’, in La cristianità dei secoli XI e XII in occidente: coscienza e strutture di una società = Miscellanea del Centro di Studi Medioevali io (Milan, 1983), pp. 281-302; Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, p. 20. A more circumspect view is expressed in Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London, 1990).Google Scholar

18 ActaSS, Sept. II, p. 434.

19 De Militate credenti, PL 42, col. 90.

20 Summa Theologiae, ed. iussu impensaque Leonis XIII [hereafter: ed. Leon.], I, cv, 7.

21 Ibid., I.II, lxxix, 4; ibid., II, i, 3 ad 3; In IVlibros Sententiarum, Opera omnia, 1, ed. Busa, Robertus (Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt, 1980), III, i, 1, 3 ad 5, p. 260.Google Scholar

22 Bonaventura, , Soliloquium, Opera omnia, 8 (Quaracchi, 1898), i, 27.Google Scholar

23 Summa Theologiae, ed. Leon., I, lxiii, 1. Robert Wace, La Vie de Saint Nicholas par Wace, poème religieux au XIIe siècle = Etudes Romanes de

24 Lunà, 5, ed. Ronsjõ, Einar; (Lund and Copenhagen, 1942), 1. 67.Google Scholar

25 Hilbert of Le Mans, In dedicatione Ecclesiae Sancii Nicolai sermo 6, PL 171, col. 751.

26 Gurevich, Aron J., MtttetalterlUhe Volkskultur (Munich. 1987; originally Russian, Moscow, 1981), pp. 68–124.Google Scholar

27 Peter of Celle, Sermo 79, PL 202, col. 880.