{"id":1645,"date":"2017-12-17T04:14:14","date_gmt":"2017-12-17T09:14:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/yvonneseale.org\/?p=1645"},"modified":"2019-03-19T07:16:19","modified_gmt":"2019-03-19T11:16:19","slug":"joseph-medieval-fatherhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yvonneseale.org\/blog\/2017\/12\/17\/joseph-medieval-fatherhood\/","title":{"rendered":"Saint Joseph and Medieval Fatherhood"},"content":{"rendered":"

The broad outline of the Christmas story is probably familiar to most people, regardless of religious background: Joseph and his heavily pregnant wife, Mary, travelled from their home in Nazareth to the town of Bethlehem. There, unable to find a proper place to stay, they sought shelter with the livestock and Mary gave birth to a son whom she named Jesus.<\/p>\n

Throughout the Middle Ages, artists, writers, and scholars frequently returned to the Nativity and its subsequent events\u2014the adoration of the shepherds, the arrival of the Magi from the East\u2014for inspiration and contemplation. Yet the ways in which they explored this story, and the subsequent life of this little family, changed over the course of the Middle Ages. This is particularly true in the case of Joseph, who in the early medieval period was almost ignored in the Latin West, if not treated as an object of ridicule, but who by the mid-sixteenth century was one of the region’s most popular and respected saints. The change in how Joseph was depicted\u2014turning from an elderly quasi-cuckold into a younger, dignified head of household\u2014reflects a shift in how medieval people thought about family life.<\/p>\n

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Relief of the Holy Family. Possibly n. France, ca. 1160\u201380. [The Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Joseph didn’t figure large in the religious imagination of early medieval Christians. When he appeared in artworks, he was mostly a minor figure, and often quite isolated spatially from Mary and the infant Jesus<\/a>: huddled in a corner of the stable and appearing almost unaware of what was going on. He was a human accessory to the triumvirate of Mary, Jesus, and God the Father; mentioned in the Nativity story, but not really of significance beyond that. After all, he faded out of the Gospels while Jesus is still a boy\u2014perhaps having died\u2014and with no specific place associated with Joseph’s burial, there was nothing to spur pilgrimage and the creation of a saintly cult. Moreover, apocryphal texts like the second-century Gospel of James and the possibly fifth-century Pseudo-Matthew depicted Joseph as an elderly widower who was already a father when he married Mary (thereby “solving” the problem of Jesus’ siblings<\/a>), and was something of an incompetent.<\/p>\n

But as contemporary theology and spiritual practice throughout the High and Late Middle Ages put more emphasis on Christ’s suffering humanity, so too did medieval Christians come to be more interested in Joseph in his role as step-father. In his Commentary on Matthew<\/em>, the Benedictine monk Rupert of Deutz (ca. 1075-1129) wrote that<\/a> Joseph, “who, although he was not Christ’s father by flesh, but in faith […] was the greatest of the patriarchs of the Old Covenant and yet in a sense a saint of the New Covenant, because Joseph alone is so close to Jesus, as the husband of Mary and therefore the father of Jesus.” Joseph could function as a bridge between the Old Testament and the New, between the human and the sacred.<\/p>\n

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Illuminated letter from a late 15th-century Book of Hours, usage of Paris. BM Moulins, MS 79, f.32<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This could raise some troubling questions. Several highly influential theologians of the High Middle Ages\u2014like the Italian-born bishop of Paris Peter Lombard (ca. 1096-1160) and the Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)\u2014agreed with the early Church Father, Augustine of Hippo that there were three elements intrinsic to a legitimate Christian marriage\u2014fides<\/em>, sacramentum<\/em>, and proles<\/em>. This led to worries that Mary and Joseph’s marriage was invalid\u2014faith (fides<\/em>) was surely present, as was sacramentum<\/em> (a marriage invested with grace), but what about the lack of offspring (proles<\/em>)? If, as many believed, Mary and Joseph remained virgins for the entirety of their marriage, was their union legitimate? And just as worryingly, how could a man with no biological heirs, and implicitly no virility, be a proper pater familias<\/em> (male head of the household)?<\/p>\n

The Dominican friar and bishop Albertus Magnus (ca. 1200-1280) countered this by arguing<\/a> that Joseph had named Jesus\u2014a father’s prerogative\u2014and had cared for him, allowing him to be be considered a true father, and thus his marriage to Mary a whole one. Joseph’s participation in Jesus’ circumcision and in the Presentation in the Temple also functioned as public acknowledgement of paternity. This put a brand new emphasis on fatherhood as something you practised<\/em>, not just something you were<\/em>.<\/p>\n