Richard de Fournival,
a learned French author of the fourteenth century, says in the preface to one of his
works that there are two ways of teaching and learning, by word (parole) and by image (painture). Certainly one of the most engaging aspects of many medieval
books is the relationship between their words and their images. Another way of thinking about the relationship is that of text and context--what goes "with the text". My own doctoral dissertation studied
that relationship in scores of manuscripts of the Roman de la Rose—a book read by practically everybody in the Middle
Ages, and by practically nobody today.
I have been thinking
about the marriage of parole and painture for a somewhat whimsical
reason. In the past couple of
weeks as I return to a new and more intensive routine of research and writing,
I have moved out of my home study and back into the library, where I still have
an office. There are gains and
there are losses in this move.
I’ve had to give up the leisurely spousal sharing of coffee and
newspaper, and the pleasing option of being able step away from my desk at will
and out into the beautiful autumn landscape forty yards away. On the other hand I am now surrounded
by millions rather than mere hundreds of books, and since there is nothing else
to do than read or write, I tend to get more accomplished.
Still one has to get
up now and again for calls of nature or simply to move the molecules a
bit. Throughout the day I take
five-minute mini-walks through the miles of open stacks in the Firestone
Library, sometimes plucking from a shelf some random book that catches my
eye. Last week I found myself
reading up in odd moments on the Klondike Gold Rush and the British naval
action against the French fleet at Mers el Kebir in 1940. Those are two different subjects in case you are groping for the elusive
connection.
ISTI MIRANT STELLAM : "These guys are looking at the star"
On Monday the book I picked up from some oversize shelves was more along my beaten path: the elaborate coffee table edition of the Bayeux Tapestry by David M. Wilson (New York: Knopf, 1985). This book has very large color photographs of every inch of the tapestry, which is many inches (it is sixty eight meters long). As you undoubtedly know the tapestry, which is named for the Norman town in which it has been preserved, is a huge eleventh-century embroidery that delineates in image and in word the background and history of the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the triumph of the Norman Duke William, the death of the English King Harold. I perhaps should say it provides a version of these events as determined by a Norman propagandist. History is written by the victors, and in this instance the victors have needled the vanquished in a particularly brilliant way.
The glory of the tapestry is
undoubtedly its pictorial wealth, particularly in the many scenes dealing with
battle and seafaring. The
astronomical phenomenon now known as Halley’s Comet appeared in the skies of
1066, and it was of course later taken as the presage of some great disaster or
triumph, depending upon the side of the Channel from which it had been
viewed. It is recorded in the
tapestry. But there is also a
running written text. The large
majuscules of its simple sentences suggest the Dick and Jane genre—or in this instance the Ricardus et Joanna, as it is in very easy Latin.
It’s a Man’s World
that the tapestry depicts, but it is to women that we are indebted for
possessing it. There is elegance
in the union of pictorial and narrative meaning in this textile, for the word text, like textile, derives from the Latin word texere, to weave (past participle textus). A story is a
cloth of words. We still talk
about spinning a yarn, and there are
other verbal memories of the connection. We may lose the thread
of some complicated story. The
literal meaning of clew (clue) is thread, a filament to be
followed from confusion to resolution, as Theseus followed Ariadne’s thread out
of the labyrinth, or as Sherlock Holmes follows it to the solution of the
crime.
Weaving was women’s work, and there
are many literary examples of female textual/textile cleverness. A famous classical instance will
readily come to mind: the ruse devised by Penelope, wife of Ulysses,
long-absent and presumed dead by many, to keep her suitors at bay. Penelope has no desire to remarry, but under
pressure she promises to become available when she finishes weaving the
elaborate tapestry on which she is engaged. After hours, and out of sight of the slavering aspirants, however,
she picks apart each day’s work, so that the project never advances. Eventually her long-absent husband
Ulysses returns and deals harshly with his would-be successors to the conjugal
bed.
A second
example, much gorier, is the legend of Philomela (the nightingale) from Ovid. Philomela was brutally raped by King
Tereus, the husband of her sister Procne.
He was supposed to be fetching her home by sea for a family reunion. Attempting to cover up the crime, Tereus then has Philomela’s tongue
ripped from her mouth so that she will not be able to report the crime to her
sister. However Philomela is able
to convey the necessary information to Procne in a wordless text, an X-rated, historiated
tapestry. Procne wrought a revenge
upon her husband too hideous to report in a family blog—and of course way
beyond my own weaving skills.
Philomela's Loom of Doom : Sir Edward Burne-Jones
But the great weavers of the late Middle Ages, I take some pride in reporting, were the Flemings. Most people’s favorite character in Chaucer is probably the Wife of Bath, than whom a more textual lady would be hard to find, as she is made up, quilt-like, of brilliantly recycled and recombined squares from the Bible, Ovid, and Jean de Meun. One of the first things we learn about her is her textile prowess:
Of
clooth-makyng she hadde swich an haunt [talent]
She
passed hem of Ypres and of Gaunt.
Ypres and Ghent were two of the
great wool centers of the Flemish heartland.
