Puppets, Manuscripts, and Gendered Reading in the Hortus deliciarum

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.