Abstract
Focusing on the ‘Magi’ and ‘Innocents’ plays from the Chester Mystery Cycle, Rose Alice Sawyer examines the insults directed at children by Herod and his soldiers and argues that the use of derogatory language that draws upon the discourse surrounding changelings and child substitution constructs the bodies of the infant Christ and the Innocents as suitable sites of violence. The chapter addresses the particular impact that changeling insults had when used against the figure of a child, while also drawing attention to the way in which medieval concerns about cuckoldry, the paternal bond and infant malleability could be interrogated, not only through the child substitution motif, but also through the story of the Nativity. Herod’s construction of Christ as a changeling allowed a medieval audience to acknowledge Christ as a supernatural interloper into a family unit; however, the plays’ reference to changelings highlight the substitutions both symbolic and actual occurring on stage. Not only is Herod the changeling king and Christ the true king claiming his rightful throne, but the Innocents, including Herod’s son, take Jesus’ place beneath the soldiers’ swords. In this chapter, Sawyer contributes to the ongoing development of medieval childhood studies towards an understanding of the figure of the child that is culturally specific rather than ‘panhistorical and essentialist’. By interrogating the references to changelings, perhaps the ultimate ‘problem children’, Sawyer demonstrates that child substitution was a potent site upon which negative constructions of childhood could be built.
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Notes
- 1.
Kuuliala; and James Craigie Robertson, 204.
- 2.
Diensberg, 459 and Hutton, n. 48 question this; however, they appear to be unaware of the Becket miracle.
- 3.
Goodey and Stainton; Kuuliala; Schmitt.
- 4.
Unlike many previous studies—Haffter; Schmitt; Eberly; Ashliman;—this chapter examines discourses about child substitution rather than trying to uncover the ritual practices of those who believed in the reality of changelings or those supposed changelings exact state of health.
- 5.
- 6.
All references to these texts from Lumiansky et al.; and Macrae-Gibson; all quotations from these plays will be cited by title and line # in the text. A discussion of the manuscript tradition is in Lumansky and Mills’ edition and in their companion text: Lumiansky, Mills, and Rastall (1983).
- 7.
Stevens, 260; The Chester Cycle in Context (2016).
- 8.
Lumiansky et al. use square brackets to indicate where they have used a manuscript source other than Huntington 2.
- 9.
The child substitution motif is an important element in several accounts of the early lives of three saints: Stephen, Bartholomew and Lawrence. While not found in The Golden Legend, the story was popular enough to be included in roughly ten surviving manuscripts, and visual references appear in many church wall paintings and altarpieces, particularly in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth century, see: De Gaiffier and de Tervarent; and Kaftal.
- 10.
Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS Lat Z 158 (= 1779), fols. 327–8.
- 11.
Full details of the manuscript versions in Macrae-Gibson eds. Auchinleck MS was probably produced in London, c. 1330 and is the oldest extant version. Lincoln’s Inn MS is from c. 1450 and the Much Wenlock region of Shropshire. All quotations from this source will be cited by manuscript name and line # in the text.
- 12.
Although Herod attempts to construct the infant Christ as the changeling in order to de-legitimize him, it is his own son that, along with the other boys in Bethlehem, takes the place of Jesus and receives the violent death intended for him.
- 13.
Doucet; and Coletti.
- 14.
This ties the Chester Joseph to the alternate portrayal of that saint as a “hard-working, vigorous provider” to his foster-son and wife. Cynthia Hahn relates that this “more dignified, yet still humble image” was initially popular with the mendicant Franciscans before becoming more widely popular in the fifteenth-century: Hahn.
- 15.
As my study has focused in large part on the text rather than the performance, I can only note that the playwright’s exploitation of the vulnerability of the infants may well have tapped into what MacLehose describes as “an almost obsessive concern for and high degree of emotion about children”; whether ridiculous or horrifying, the response must surely have been visceral. MacLehose, 213.
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Sawyer, R.A. (2019). Changeling Stories: The Child Substitution Motif in the Chester Mystery Cycle. In: Miller, N.J., Purkiss, D. (eds) Literary Cultures and Medieval and Early Modern Childhoods. Literary Cultures and Childhoods. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14211-7_6
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