The Massacre of the Innocents: The illustration comes from an historiated initial in a late thirteenth-century Burgundian breviary associated with the abbey of St.-Bénigne in Dijon. The massacre often appeared in painted and sculpted cycles of the Infancy of Christ, especially from the twelfth century onward. This particular image portrays the brutality and extreme emotion of the scene in a compact format. The scene is reduced to four characters, King Herod ordering the massacre, a soldier committing the atrocity, an infant being impaled, and a mother crying over the event. It illustrates a sermon for the Feast of the Innocents.

From "A tender age": cultural anxieties over the child in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by William F. MacLehose