Holy Beds and Holy Families: Encounters with Devotional Objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art At an exhibit in Detroit fifty-five years ago, a much loved beguine cradle on loan from New York's Metropolitan Museum was treated simply as a piece of furniture. But the cradle, which once held a Christ child laid in it by the religious women in whose beguinage it stood, points the viewer toward another depiction of an empty cradle and toward various sculptures of the holy family, all on display nearby in the museum but not usually considered together. Interpreting these devotional objects in their social and devotional context, Prof. Bynum will argue that medieval images—both literary and material—evoked, even compelled, a far more complex, nuanced, and even contradictory sense of the holy than much recent work on materiality suggests.