The Bayeux Tapestry and its Contexts

In this volume, an art historian (Elizabeth Carson Pastan) and a historian (Stephen D. White) have joined forces to re-evaluate one of the most celebrated textiles surviving from the Middle Ages. In eleven essays they have set out to challenge key assumptions about its provenance, patronage and audience. In brief, they argue that the community at St Augustine’s abbey, Canterbury initiated the work; that its message was neither pro-Norman nor particularly sympathetic to the English, but rather equivocal and multi-layered; and that it was intended to be displayed in the monks’ choir of the new abbey church at St Augustine’s. The essays are single-authored; they cover not only the more recent publications but also the historiography of the Tapestry; they are extensively referenced, and amply illustrated. The result is thought-provoking in the extreme, and no one with an interest in the subject will be able to ignore the volume. In the first three chapters the questions of provenance and patronage are addressed. The authors are happy to accept that St Augustine’s abbey, not Saint-Florent-de-Saumur as was suggested recently, was the milieu in which the Tapestry was conceived. Pastan (ch. 1) discusses the length of time that might have been needed to create the work, strictly speaking not a tapestry but an embroidery. In Chapter Three, she draws attention to difficulties with the idea that Bishop Odo was the patron who commissioned the work, pointing out that the work could have been commissioned by the monks themselves. White’s chapters focus on content. He argues persuasively that, if it had been commissioned as a celebration of Norman victory, its message is opaque at the points when clarity was most needed, notably the nature of the oath sworn by Harold in Normandy and the place where it was taken, exactly what King Edward said on his deathbed and the circumstances of Harold’s accession. He points out that, if the Tapestry was intended to reinforce the legitimacy of the Norman Conquest, what it did not show were the kind of rituals which in contemporary eyes would have established that King Edward had indeed conveyed the succession to Duke William

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