Circumdederunt Me Canes Multi: Christ's Tormentors in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance

Abstract

One of the best-known aspects of the piety of the late Middle Ages is the rise of devotion to the suffering Christ.1 The desire of pious men and women to approach the divine through intimate knowledge and empathic experience of Christ's humanity and Passion led to profound developments in religious literature and art: content and style underwent evolutionary changes mirroring the humanized and emotional religiosity of the period, and entirely new genres were created, for example, Passion Plays, and the visual representations known as Andachtsbilder, or devotional images. Interest in the specifics of Christ's life and sufferings produced analogous transformations in literature and art. In both we find a growth and popularization of narrative treatments of Christ's life and Passion, particularly those that supplement the meager accounts of the Gospels by introducing descriptive details and anecdotes not reported by the four Evangelists. Literary evidence for this development first appears in concerted form during the thirteenth century in anonymous Latin works that circulated under the names of distinguished devotional authors.2 Most important are Pseudo-Bernard, Liber de Passione Christi et Doloribus et Planctibus Matris Ejus,3 Pseudo-Anselm, Dialogus Beatae Mariae et Anselmi de Passione Domini,4 Pseudo-Bernard, Meditatio in Passionem et Resurrectionem Domini,5 and Pseudo-Bede, De Meditatione Passionis Christi per Septem Diei Horas Libellus.6 The success of these brief and pseudonymous thirteenth-century tracts was such that they were expanded, and in part recast, into monumental form. The Meditationes Vitae Christi of Pseudo-Bonaventure7 of the late thirteenth century and the great early fourteenth-century Vita Christi of Ludolph of Saxony8 are the first comprehensive biographies of Christ containing regular and extensive interpolations of extra-Gospel narration. These texts, in turn, were excerpted and elaborated upon in German vernacular Passion tracts of the latter half of the fourteenth century,9 and the German tracts, together with their Latin antecedents, were drawn upon for the creation of even more detailed and elaborate accounts of Christ's Passion in Netherlandish devotional literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.10

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 24 citations exist upstream.