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.
This event is free, but registration is required. Lunch will be provided.
Open to Yale Community only.
Speaker bio:
Michelle K. Oing is a scholar of late medieval art, focusing on the affective and performative aspects of viewing and using art objects. After receiving her Ph.D. in the History of Art and Architecture from Yale University, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and Lecturer in the Stanford Art & Art History Department from 2020-2024. She is currently a Lecturer in Religion and Visual Culture at the ISM. Her current book project, Puppet Potential: Late Medieval Sculpture and the Aesthetics of Play, examines the role of moveable sculpture in Northern Europe through the conceptual framework of puppetry, paying particular attention to notions of play. She is also the co-editor of the interdisciplinary volume Early European Puppetry: Materiality, Animacy, and Performance (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). Her current and forthcoming publications cover topics including articulated sculptures of Christ, bust reliquaries, carnival masking, global medieval puppetry, and the medieval history and contemporary historiography of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage.