Encounter: Holy Beds

I first encountered the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s beguine cradle in 1960, when I was a junior at the University of Michigan and went to Detroit to see the highly touted exhibition “Flanders in the Fifteenth Century: Art and Civilization.” Although I had visited the medieval collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, this was the first special exhibit devoted to the art of the Middle Ages I had ever seen. Because my trip to Detroit occurred fifty-six years ago, I can be forgiven, I think, for having only a vague memory of this encounter. I remember wondering why a doll’s bed, even one for the baby Jesus, figured in such a show, but, like the curators themselves, I was interested primarily in the paintings, especially those of Rogier van der Weyden, Jan van Eyck, and Hieronymus Bosch. In contrast, when I take students to the Met today, encounter with the beguine cradle is one of the high points of the tour (Fig. 1). The questions it raises now bear almost no relation to what curators and viewers experienced in 1960, when the crib visited Detroit, and it draws me and my students to another, much less-studied crib that is displayed quite close to the beguine cradle. The difference between what I and others thought we saw in 1960 and what we see today provides a window onto changes in the field of art history over the past half century. The catalogue for the Detroit exhibit was organized, like the exhibit itself, according to medium or some sort of understanding of type, with “paintings” the largest group by far.1 Next in numerical importance came “sculpture,” which seems to have meant carvings in wood, for the categories “metalwork” and “goldsmith’s work” included figures we would today call sculpture. The beguine cradle was located in “furniture.” The category of “devotional object,” which was put on the art historical map in a way that fired popular imagination by Henk van Os in the exhibit “The Art of Devotion” in Amsterdam in 1994–95, was in no way thought of.2 Throughout the Detroit catalogue, material trumps use or form as a principle of organization. But the matter described is not the matter of the recent “material turn” or “thing theory.” It is acted upon, not actor, not even a participant in its own shaping. It is striking to read, from this distance, the description in the Detroit catalogue of the cradle itself. The entry opens by relating it to cribs for actual babies in the fifteenth century and cites a surviving cradle perhaps used by the house of Burgundy. Although the Grand Béguinage in Louvain is mentioned as the provenance, there is no explanation of who the religious women known as beguines were, although we are given details about the musical instruments played by the angels on the bedposts. The only specific reference to women is the note that cribs were “sometimes given to nuns at the time they took their vows.”3 Such—to put it a little baldly—were the days before women’s history!4 But today, the significance for women is the first question my students raise. And pointing them toward answers is easy, however confusing the answers themselves may be. Since the 1980s we have had the work of Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Ulinka Rublack, Jeffrey Hamburger, Thomas Lentes, Peter Keller, and Amy Powell, among others, who have explored the lives of religious women through the study of devotional objects, sometimes placing the extraordinary prominence of such objects and the visions they often