7 - Apocryphal Romance in the London Thornton Manuscript

Summary

‘Here Bigynnys the Romance of the childhode / of Ihesu Criste þat clerkes callys Ipokrephum’. So begins the Childhood of Christ found in London, BL, MS Additional 31042 (see Figure 1). Robert Thornton’s incipit, unique to this attestation of the Middle English stanzaic Childhood, flaunts the romance and apocryphal status of a poem that is in other manuscripts treated as a more authentic rendering of Jesus’s life on earth. It is instructive to note the contrast between Thornton’s presentation and the two other extant redactions of this poem, also found in fifteenth-century manuscripts. Those renditions gird the poem with Latin and thereby maintain an illusion of verity for the narrative. The poem in London, BL, MS Harley 3954 includes both a Latin incipit – ‘Hic incipit infancia saluatoris’ – and explicit – ‘Explicit infancia saluatoris’; in addition, Latin subtitles appear throughout the poem, introducing episodes. The version found in London, BL, MS Harley 2399 is also framed by a Latin incipit – ‘Pueritia vel Infancia Christi’ – and explicit – ‘Et sic finitur pueritia domini nostri Jesu Cristi’.

In this chapter I consider the function of the Childhood poem and its remarkable incipit in the context of the London Thornton manuscript. A story of Jesus’s childhood is already present as part of the Cursor Mundi text that appears as the first item in London (arts. 1–3). In that verse narrative, the divine childhood folds into a greater sacred history, one that commences the spiritual and historical focus of the London anthology. With Childhood (art. 33), Thornton returns to the subject of Jesus’s childhood, this time as a separate entity – outside historical time and space – presenting it explicitly as an apocryphal narrative through the use of the narrative structures and fabulous content of romance.

Thornton’s admission of the poem’s apocryphal status is not meant to subtract from its spiritual authority. While structuring the divine childhood as a romance, Childhood also amplifies the role of Mary and explicitly ties events in the childhood to Christ’s Passion. These emphases, I contend, reveal an intentional correlation with the manuscript’s preoccupation with the Passion and Mary. Additionally, I will show that the poem’s vengeance-and-conversion mentality ties it to the particular romance world found in the manuscript, where the enemy is always an enemy of Christ and the hero is always Christ’s special avenger.