Once, in the words of a late thirteenth-century song,

There lived a good man who had a little son whom he loved as his own life. This child caught a fever and died on the third day. The father, with grief for him, smote his cheeks

and pulled out his hair and made great mourning for him, saying 'Woe is me, my son, how lonely I am without you. I wish that you could see me as I saw your grandfather, my father, who did many generous favors for me'.

So begins the tale of one of the Cantigas de Santa María, a widely recorded song-cycle produced at the court of Alfonso X, el Sabio, who ruled the Spanish kingdoms of Castile and León between 1252 and 1284 (see the late Kathleen Kulp Hill's translation Songs of Holy Mary, 2000). King Alfonso was one of the most reflective and cultured of all medieval rulers, and appears to have written a number of the songs himself. In the tranquility of the NYPL's Allen Room, I have been writing and carrying out research for a book on Alfonso, provisionally entitled The Wise King (Basic Books, NY): a biography interweaving his life story with his thoughts on themes ranging from table manners, sexuality, the intellectual responsibility of rulers, hunting, laughter, friendship, healing, and anger… to fatherhood, a subject that is only now beginning to gain the attention it deserves from historians.

Fatherhood is being constantly re-invented. "The meaning of manhood and fatherhood can no longer be taken for granted," Robert Griswold writes in Fatherhood in America: A History (1993). "Fatherhood is talked about more, but understood less. It has lost cultural coherence". But some trends are clear. One recent study suggests that the number of stay-at-home fathers has nearly doubled in the last generation—although as some have been quick to point out, the number of stay-at-home mothers continues to be far higher. Sometimes we think of this as a 'modernizing' trend: a break with centuries of patriarchy. But as we all wing it through the early twenty-first century, it may be instructive to take a quick glance in the 'distant mirror' of medieval Europe. Building on the earlier work of historians such as Nicholas Orme (Medieval Children , 2001) and Barbara Hanawalt (Growing Up in Medieval London , 1993) new studies on the role of men within medieval family show that the emotional investment of fathers in their children is not new. As Rachel Moss indicates in her groundbreaking book Fatherhood and its Representations in Middle English Texts (2013), even medieval fathers, who we might imagine to have been distant disciplinarians, felt profound affection for their daughters and sons, and acted upon it.

The malleable minds of children "resemble white wax," Alfonso wrote in his vast law code, the Siete Partidas. The king should love his children, he explained, "first, according to nature, because they are derived from him; second, from morality, by desiring that they be good." Every man, he wrote, gladly nurtures his children "through the great affection he entertains," an affection granted by nature, and increased in the process of looking after them. Of course, parents must supply food, clothes, shoes, housing, and everything else the child needs. The mother should be the primary caregiver until the child reaches the age of three, but thereafter the father should take major responsibility.

One of the many threads I have been pursuing at the NYPL is the nature of Alfonso's relationships with his own children. It is clear that the king was deeply attached to his eldest son, Fernando "de la Cerda" (b. 1255), who would die suddenly of natural causes at the age of 19 (a younger son, Sancho, would bring nothing but trouble…). He was actively involved in the prince's education and his apprenticeship in ruling. Equally compelling is Alfonso's relationship with his first-born child Beatriz (b. circa 1244), who was the fruit of a long-term pre-marital relationship. Despite the fact that Beatriz was not born within wedlock—and partly because of it—this father-daughter relationship would prove the strongest of all in Alfonso's life. Beatriz was married very young indeed to the king of Portugal. It's tempting for us to see the marriage as a case of political exploitation, but Alfonso maintained close personal contact with Beatriz, who became a prominent intermediary between Portugal and Castile and enjoyed considerable influence at the Portuguese court. His devotion to her suggests a salutary approach to those children who are still sometimes described with the moralistic term 'illegitimate'.

An illustration from the Cantigas de Santa María (CSM 139) shows a father delightedly taking a child into his arms. Another depicts the Wise King during one of his many bouts of illness, lying on a bed surrounded by courtiers and monks, some crying and holding their robes to their eyes to stem the flood of tears. A beautiful Virgin—dressed in bridal white—appears before him as he lies in his chamber, carrying the baby Jesus. The little boy, who is supported gently by his mother, crawls playfully over his prostrate father's chest, reaching towards his face in an intimate scene that sublimates Alfonso's ideals of family.

And what of the poor man of Coria whose son had just died? The song of the grieving father (CSM 323) probably written in the late 1270s, was set in the extremely recent past, against the backdrop of an Islamic incursion into southern Spain in 1275. He flees the village as the Muslims attack, but when he returns to bury his son, he has a miraculous surprise:

The man went away, and the Moors invaded the whole place, but they did not enter nor touch the man's house. Although all the others lost all they had there, the good man did not lose so much as three dineros' worth.

For at once the Lady Full of Grace had entered that house, and so quickly gave the boy life and protected the other things, that later the man found nothing missing in his house, and the doors were not even broken down.

He found his son alive and asked him what had happened, when and how he had revived, for he had thought he was dead. The boy told him that a Lady had been with him …

For medieval fathers, as for their twenty-first century equivalents, there was no greater trauma than the loss of a child (see Ronald Finucane's study of children in medieval miracles, The Rescue of the Innocents, 1997). For King Alfonso, who experienced this trauma more than once, the act of writing and musical composition was a necessary form of therapy.

Images : University of Pennsylvania SCETI Cantigas de Santa Marias Project. These images are from the 1974 Las Cantigas de Santa María: edición facsímil, el «Codices Rico» del Escorial (Manuscrito escurialense T-I-1), Madrid: Edilán, 1979, 2 vols. to escurialense T-I-1), Madrid: Edilán, 1979, 2 vols.