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Kevin Madigan, Mary Dzon. The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 5, December 2018, Pages 1726–1727, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy286
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The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages is a profoundly researched book. As Mary Dzon observes, the absence of a thoroughgoing, or even very detailed, picture of the Christ Child in the canonical gospels left Christians who wished to know more about their savior’s life dependent upon a body of apocryphal literature. In the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, a profusion of such sources filled the literary gap, and so richly, that “the variety of Christ-Child images circulating in the later medieval period arguably offered something for everyone” (249). Some clerics, like Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1224–1274), objected to apocryphal narratives both because of what we might call issues of dubious provenance—that is, the unknown origins of the legends—and because of their authors’ predilection for contradicting the claims of the canonical scriptures. Other clerics feared that such legends expressed heretical doctrine. Still, clerical opposition hardly prevented these legends from becoming extremely popular, even among those who suspected their unverified or bogus origins.
