Puppet

Abstract

This chapter opens with a movable image of a dove, representing the Holy Spirit, that was made into a plaything in sixteenth century Germany. It relates this specific object to a wider range of articulated and jointed figures involved in late medieval piety that were often attacked as empty puppets by reformers. It uses these objects to think not about puppets per se but rather about the jointedness or constitutive brokenness of holy things more broadly, particularly relics poised between the sacred and the disgusting. These objects are related to the unstable place of playfulness and the material in Erasmus’s writings, and to the wider place of creative breaking and the disgusting in modern art.