The Heroic Lamb: Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ

Nicholas Love’s early fifteenth-century Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ brings diverse theological metaphors and tropes into dialogic tension: Jesus appears heroic king and traitor, Mary’s lover and the soul’s spouse, meek sacrificial lamb, and God setting a mousetrap for the devil. Love’s almighty Jesus enacts redemption by battling with and defeating the devil, and by suffering and dying, a human sacrifice for sin. Love’s work is often read as exemplary of affective devotion to Christ’s humanity, but it may also be understood as disrupting our ideas about devotional affects in the fifteenth century. Love calls readers to feel compassion and love for Jesus, but also to recognize his divine power, and to experience awe and wonder in the face of miracles that show him to be the Son of God. Like the works studied in Chap. 3 , Mirror amplifies the story of Jesus’s torture, shaping a polemical narrative that condemns the Jewish agents of his suffering. Jews appear as bestial tormentors allied with the devil; they reject Jesus as their king and call him a traitor. Jesus’s suffering is heightened by the narrative’s focus on the executioners’ brutality, connecting readers’ anticipated compassion for Jesus with enmity toward Jews, a troubling conjunction apparent in many devotional works.