Woven Stories:
Tapestry and Text in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance

Tina Kane, Ph.D.

In the Fall of 2002 I team-taught a course at Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, New York with
Nancy Willard, an English professor, author and poet, and specialist in medieval literature.
The tapestries were from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, and many of the texts, such
as Le Roman de la Rose and Gawain and the Green Knight were drawn from around the same
period. We also looked at film and drama, as well as poetry, both medieval and contemporary.
The students—mainly juniors and seniors—were also asked to learn to weave simple tapestry
samplers and to construct their own visual narratives. It was a complex and various course
and it provoked a number of ideas, some of which I would like to present here.

Initially, the students expected to study tapestries as more or less woven illustrations.
Illustration that is auxiliary to text clarifies or explains the text by means of decorative images
or diagrams. Although there are some instances where tapestries do indeed function in this
way, most tapestries from this period have a more complicated relationship with the text or
texts that inspired them and require a more complex narrative decipherment. For our study,
we found ourselves in need of both a framework and terms to describe the relationships
between tapestry and text. Out of this inquiry came two central concepts.

The first falls under the general heading of narratology and is a classification or taxonomy of
tapestry and narrative. It is based on how the designer organized the iconographic program in
the three dimensional format of tapestry. The second of these concepts is a consideration of
what is technically referred to as poetics. How does the tapestry tell its story? How does the
viewer actually decode the story? I will begin with the first concept, taxonomy.

 

Tapestry-makers: Artists or Craftsmen?

Press communiqué n. 6, 22 October 2008

Tapestry weaving is a noble art form, yet one whose deepest roots lie in the craftsman's world. The
medieval English word for tapestry was arras, undoubtedly a reference to the northern French city of Arras
where the most celebrated medieval tapestries were manufactured. Technically an arras, or tapestry, is a
textile woven on a loom using wool, cotton, linen or silk (and metal thread). The process is known as weftfaced
weaving because all of the warp size with extremely detailed imagery.

People have been weaving tapestries in the Mediterranean area, in Japan and in pre-Colombian
America from time immemorial. The oldest examples go back to Ancient Egypt and late Hellenic Greece.
Designed to be hung on large walls for decorative and/or narrative display, tapestries also performed a useful
insulating function in the large halls and chambers of the time. Their success may also be partially explained
by their portability from one residence to the next. A fresco stayed put, while a tapestry could simply be
rolled up and loaded onto a cart.

Tapestry weaving in Europe goes back to the early 14th century in Germany and Switzerland, and
then in France and the Low Countries. The Renaissance marked the high point of this art form, particularly
in Flanders and in France. Some of the world's greatest painters produced cartoons for tapestries: Raphael,
Rubens, Goya, and more recently Picasso, Matisse and Mirò. Tapestries take so long to manufacture,
however, that the cost soon became prohibitive. The bankruptcy of many noble families even caused the
Gobelins manufacture to shut down for a while. With the start of the industrial revolution and rising labor
costs in the late 18th century, tapestries started to go out of fashion. The mob put them to the torch in the
French Revolution, both to recover the gold thread used in weaving them and to destroy a symbol of the
hated aristocracy.