Yale Bulletin and Calendar

December 6, 2002|Volume 31, Number 13

A detail from the Bayeux Tapestry, which chronicles the Norman conquest of England. The tapestry was the subject of an "In the Company of Scholars" talk by French professor Howard Bloch.

Scholar's talk illustrates how art
can 'unlock the world around it'

The intertwining of fact and fable on a medieval tapestry was the focus of the "In the Company of Scholars" talk sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Howard Bloch, the Augustus R. Street Professor of French, spoke on the topic "Animal Fables, the Bayeux Tapestry and the Making of the Anglo-Norman World."

The Bayeux Tapestry -- a strip of embroidered linen that is 230 feet long and 20 inches wide -- chronicles the Norman conquest of England, including the death of Edward the Confessor, the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and the victory of William the Conqueror over Harold the Saxon. It is believed to have been created soon after the events it depicts.

Speaking on Nov. 20 in the Hall of Graduate Studies before an audience of about 100 students and faculty members, Bloch invited his listeners to join with him in "understanding the ways in which a work of art might not only reflect but unlock the world around it, the ways in which a great work like the Bayeux Tapestry might not only capture a cultural moment, but might actually anticipate historical change; the ways in which art might embody and even shape institutions at a critical time in the formation of Anglo-Norman or English culture out of the disparate threads of the Saxon, Viking, Celtic and Gallic world ..."

Along the top and bottom borders of the tapestry are fables depicting animals engaged in human-like power struggles or "some form of drama pitting bodily appetite against the logical faculties," said Bloch.

The Yale scholar analyzed several inches of that border, providing historical and political context as well as literary analysis. He said the margins of the Bayeux Tapestry provide an "interpretive space" that provides visual commentary on "the events of the conquest, which they frame, and about the process of framing itself."

The fables embroidered onto the borders of the Bayeux Tapestry have been interpreted in a variety of ways, said Bloch. Some scholars believe they are purely decorative and have "no relation to the central narrative whatsoever," while others contend the fables illuminate the character and motivation of the main protagonists in the historic drama or that they are "a satire of the Norman point of view from the English side and thus a form of immediate resistance to invasion," he noted.

"Amidst the scholarly disagreement one thing at least seems clear -- that fables, used throughout the Middle Ages to teach rhetoric to young boys who absorb at the same time right conduct, and which for this reason have traditionally served as a mirror of princes, are, in the context of the struggle for succession, necessarily political," said Bloch.

The Yale professor is among those who contend that there are connections between the body of the tapestry and the border fables. He noted that certain fables -- such as "The Crow and the Fox" and "The Wolf and the Crane," which deal with themes of duplicity and a reversal of fortunes -- are grouped together and seem to relate to the scenes from history portrayed in the tapestry. "The figures which are set below the main narrative in their first appearance are set above it in the second, which can be no accident in fables that are precisely about being on the bottom and coming out on top," said the scholar.

Bloch also suggested that the fables reflect and comment on the profound social changes of the period. For instance, a fable that shows animals changing their habitat or altering their bodily features "is a thinly veiled metaphor for the principle of social mobility within the Anglo-Norman world," he argued, and relates to the question of "replacement of Saxons by Normans, as well as with state and court formation."

At the time the tapestry was made, he notes, Anglo-Normandy was evolving from a land of small, independent, provincial land-holders into an "administratively efficient state in which individuals might -- to some degree and in exceptional cases -- distinguish or extinguish themselves according to unique merit rather than birth....

"I am not, of course, proposing that 12th-century Anglo-Normandy knew anything on the order of what we think of as the bureaucratic meritocracies that arose in the wake of the democratic revolutions of the 18th century," said Bloch, "rather, that the possibility of changing one's status, even when the numbers are relatively small, produced an uneasiness to which the animal fable lends itself in a particularly powerful way."

-- By Gila Reinstein

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