Listmembers interested in this thread may find useful Rosemary Drage Hale's
article, "Joseph as Mother: Adaptation and Appropriation in the Construction
of Male Virtue," in _Medieval Mothering_, eds J.C. Parsons and B. Wheeler (New
York: Garland, 1996), pp. 101-16. Hale examines the transition from an aged,
doddering Joseph to a vigorous, economically productive paterfamilias, which
she attributes in part to the emergence of a thriving urban artisanate. A
younger, virile Joseph was better able to protect his wife and her Son, and
gave greater point to belief in his chaste marriage with Mary, which was less
remarkable when an elderly, feeble husband was depicted.
Oh, yes--plenty of footnotes too.
John Parsons
On Tue, 1 Dec 1998, Willis Johnson wrote:
> I think his point is that this was part of the growing tendency to
> distinguish between the worthy poor and the unworthy poor. While formerly
> all of the poor had been seen as the embodiment of the suffering Christ,
> sometime around 1400 people came to see the WORKING POOR as the embodiment
> of the suffering Christ--i.e., not those at the very bottom of the economic
> ladder. The indigent and vagrant poor, in contrast, were seen as
> predisposed by their circumstances to a life of sin. They were no longer
> Christlike, having become instead a potentially socially destabilizing
> menace.
>
> This seems to be his claim. But I'd like some detail about the Christ the
> worker and Joseph the worker iconography. Mollat is full of great ideas and
> seductive generalizations but I want FOOTNOTES!
>
> Willis
> _____________________________________________________________________
> Willis Johnson . Divinity School . Swift Hall . 1025 East 58th Street
> University of Chicago . Chicago, IL 60637-1577 . [log in to unmask]
>
>
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