Suffering and Innocence in Latin Sermons for the Feast of the Holy Innocents, c. 400-800

Abstract

It has long been recognized that medieval representations of the Holy Innocents are much concerned with the horrendous cruelty of their passion. They are often cited as evidence that the Church, putting a high priority on loving parenthood, attempted to raise the standard of Christian child-care, and it is indeed clear that their rhetoric depends upon a degree of sympathy for suffering children. This paper aims to suggest, however, that the history of this theme shows how the construction of their sanctity was influenced by the changing place of childhood in matters of theology and spirituality. It will show, I hope, that the emphasis on the Innocents’ suffering needs to be seen in the context of the Origenist controversy, that there was an erosion of this theme’s importance in later representations of the infants, and that this shift reflected a desire on the part of monastic authors to adapt the now established cult of the Innocents to new-found spiritual needs.

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 — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.