Puppets in the Margins: Puppetry, Play, and Representation in the 14th c.

Puppetry is an ephemeral genre of performance; medieval puppetry even more so. As a form of “popular” entertainment using fragile materials and unrecorded scripts, its traces are few and far between. It is perhaps surprising, then, that MS Bodley 264, a luxury fourteenth-century Flemish manuscript, should contain not one, but two depictions of puppetry. A compilation of texts related to the Romance of Alexander, the manuscript’s pages are enlivened with miniatures depicting Alexander’s exploits. Amongst its numerous marginal illustrations, which include depictions of mumming, musicians, and bear-baiting, are two puppet shows.This talk explores how these two “marginal” puppet shows are, in fact, not marginal at all, but rather serve as key moments in a manuscript program intent on interrogating the nature and limits of representation. Turning next to a discussion of puppetry as a practice in medieval Europe, I demonstrate how the binary-bending puppet thematizes a widespread medieval attitude towards representation, as a liminal place of play, discovery, and negotiation.

Host or Publisher Yale Institute of Sacred Music