3 - ‘He who has seen me has seen the father’: The Veronica in Medieval England

Summary

A litell biside went Marye,

And herde me so lowde crye;

Anoon þe clooth from me she klypte

[And] þerwith Jesus visage wipte,

Soo harde swetande þan was he

For the burthen of þe tree.

I sewede aftur, also he ȝede,

And handlede a litell of his wede;

I knelede wepand, and kyste his fete.

He blessed me and þere me lete.

Mary bekenede me, soo gode,

Als she went under þe rode;

My cloth me toke, and I hit kyste.

Anoon I felde me hool and tryste

And in my cloth, þurgh his grace,

Lefte þe ymage of his face.

One of the many medieval accounts of the apocryphal Veronica legend, the late fourteenth-century romance Titus and Vespasian tells of how the Virgin Mary supported St Veronica in approaching Christ at the Crucifixion. Taking a cloth from the saint, the romance relates that the Virgin wiped her son's face to produce a miraculous imprint. ‘þe ymage of his face’ described is the relic venerated as the Veronica in Western Christianity. For the modern reader, this account of the relic's generation is unusual: St Veronica is commonly understood today as the woman who wiped Christ's face on the road to Calvary, miraculously taking its imprint on cloth. Her image as such is ubiquitous; one of the most frequently depicted women in Catholic culture, she is celebrated holding her cloth to Christ's face in churches across the world in the Via Crucis (Stations of the Cross). As the romance variation suggests,however, this was not her original role. The history of St Veronica and her relic is one of complex flux and change, and it is an evolution punctuated and driven by the symbolic significance of cloth. Saint and cloth are integral to the story of textile hermeneutics in medieval English devotional culture, an important episode in the progression of a devotional tradition which looked to fabric as a means of contemplating and understanding Christ's presence and Incarnation.

Veronica's sacred cloth interacted with and garnered significance as a corporeal vestige of Christ's presence from a wide and various tradition of imago Christi, both painted and miraculously imprinted, which proliferated throughout both Eastern and Western Christian cultures from the Late Antique period and throughout the Middle Ages.