{"title":"Puppets, Manuscripts, and Gendered Reading in the Hortus deliciarum","authors":"A. Sand","doi":"10.1086/715454","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"An oft-referenced but little scrutinized depiction of a puppet performance in Herrad of Hohenbourg’s Hortus deliciarum (ca. 1185, destroyed 1870) provides an opening into the study of the relationship between two types of performative objects—books and puppets. From the twelfth century onward, puppetry was an increasingly popular and widely practiced public art in Western Europe, associated with the lowest class of entertainer but present in settings from the urban marketplace to the courts of both secular and ecclesiastical princes, and in the case of Hohenbourg Germany, princesses. Puppetry intersected with both secular literature and the liturgy in the form of enactments of chansons de geste and liturgical drama. The puppet show in the Hortus deliciarum has often been cited as a literal illustration of medieval puppetry, but here I am concerned rather with its moral dimensions and the way it participates in the framing of gender and performance within the trope of vanitas vanitatum (vanity of vanities). The collective reading, viewing, and singing, in short, the performance of the Hortus deliciarum as a book is imagined in contrast to the worldly undertakings of the canonesses’ male relations, namely knights and nobles, framing the monastic life of the women as the more spiritually worthy. Valuable as early evidence of puppetry in Western Europe, the Hortus deliciarum’s representation of a puppet show is yet more significant as an indicator of the sophisticated interpretive skills of its original audience of female monastics.","PeriodicalId":43922,"journal":{"name":"GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8000,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1086/715454","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"ART","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
An oft-referenced but little scrutinized depiction of a puppet performance in Herrad of Hohenbourg’s Hortus deliciarum (ca. 1185, destroyed 1870) provides an opening into the study of the relationship between two types of performative objects—books and puppets. From the twelfth century onward, puppetry was an increasingly popular and widely practiced public art in Western Europe, associated with the lowest class of entertainer but present in settings from the urban marketplace to the courts of both secular and ecclesiastical princes, and in the case of Hohenbourg Germany, princesses. Puppetry intersected with both secular literature and the liturgy in the form of enactments of chansons de geste and liturgical drama. The puppet show in the Hortus deliciarum has often been cited as a literal illustration of medieval puppetry, but here I am concerned rather with its moral dimensions and the way it participates in the framing of gender and performance within the trope of vanitas vanitatum (vanity of vanities). The collective reading, viewing, and singing, in short, the performance of the Hortus deliciarum as a book is imagined in contrast to the worldly undertakings of the canonesses’ male relations, namely knights and nobles, framing the monastic life of the women as the more spiritually worthy. Valuable as early evidence of puppetry in Western Europe, the Hortus deliciarum’s representation of a puppet show is yet more significant as an indicator of the sophisticated interpretive skills of its original audience of female monastics.
期刊介绍:
The Newsletter, published three times a year, includes notices of ICMA elections and other important votes of the membership, notices of ICMA meetings, conference and exhibition announcements, some employment and fellowship listings, and topical news items related to the discovery, conservation, research, teaching, publication, and exhibition of medieval art and architecture. The movement of some material traditionally included in the newsletter to the ICMA website, such as the Census of Dissertations in Medieval Art, has provided the opportunity for new features in the Newsletter, such as reports on issues of broad concern to our membership.