New approaches to what is arguably the most famous artefact from the Middle Ages. In the past two decades, scholarly assessment of the Bayeux Tapestry has moved beyond studies of its sources and analogues, dating, origin and purpose, and site of display. This volume demonstrates the value of more recent interpretive approaches to this famous and iconic artefact, by examining the textile's materiality, visuality, reception and historiography, and its constructions of gender, territory and cultural memory. The essays it contains frame discussions vital to the future of Tapestry scholarship and are complemented by a bibliography covering three centuries of critical writings. Martin K. Foys is Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Madison; KarenEileen Overbey is Associate Professor of Art History at Tufts University; Dan Terkla is Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University. Contributors: Valerie Allen, Richard Brilliant, Shirley Ann Brown, Elizabeth Carson Pastan, Madeline H. Cavines, Martin K. Foys, Michael John Lewis, Karen Eileen Overbey, Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Dan Terkla, Stephen D. White.

First full collection on the seven most significant English mappae mundi from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Mappae mundi (maps of the world), beautiful objects in themselves, offer huge insights into how medieval scholars conceived the world and their place within it. They are a fusion of "real" geographical locations with fantastical, geographic, historical, legendary and theological material. Their production reached its height in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with such well-known examples as the Hereford map, the maps of Matthew Paris, and the Vercelli map. This volume provides a comprehensive Companion to the seven most significant English mappae mundi. It begins with a survey of the maps' materials, types, shapes, sources, contents, conventions,idiosyncrasies, commissioners and users, moving on to locate the maps' creation and use in the realms of medieval rhetoric, Victorine memory theory and clerical pedagogy. It also establishes the shared history of map and book making, and demonstrates how pre-and post-Conquest monastic libraries in Britain fostered and fed their complementary relationship. A chapter is then devoted to each individual map. An annotated bibliography of multilingual resourcescompletes the volume. DAN TERKLA is Emeritus Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University; NICK MILLEA is Map Librarian, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Contributors: Nathalie Bouloux, Michelle Brown. Daniel Connolly, Helen Davies, Gregory Heyworth, Alfred Hiatt, Marcia Kupfer, Nick Millea, Asa Simon Mittman, Dan Terkla, Chet Van Duzer.

New approaches to what is arguably the most famous artefact from the Middle Ages. In the past two decades, scholarly assessment of the Bayeux Tapestry has moved beyond studies of its sources and analogues, dating, origin and purpose, and site of display. This volume demonstrates the value of more recent interpretive approaches to this famous and iconic artefact, by examining the textile's materiality, visuality, reception and historiography, and its constructions of gender, territory and cultural memory. The essays it contains frame discussions vital to the future of Tapestry scholarship and are complemented by a bibliography covering three centuries of critical writings. Contributors: Valerie Allen, Richard Brilliant, Shirley Ann Brown, Elizabeth Carson Pastan, Madeline H. Cavines, Martin K. Foys, Michael John Lewis, Karen Eileen Overbey, Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Dan Terkla, Stephen D. White.

The Bayeux Tapestry, perhaps the most famous, yet enigmatic, of medieval artworks, was the subject of an international conference at the British Museum in July 2008. This volume publishes 19 of 26 papers delivered at that conference. The physical nature of the tapestry is examined, including an outline of the artefact's current display and the latest conservation and research work done on it, as well as a review of the many repairs and alterations that have been made to the Tapestry over its long history. Also examined is the social history of the tapestry, including Shirley Ann Brown's paper on the Nazis' interest in it as a record of northern European superiority and Pierre Bouet and Francois Neveux's suggestion that it is a source for understanding the succession crisis of 1066. Among those papers focusing on the detail of the Tapestry, Gale Owen-Crocker examines the Tapestry's faces, Carol Neuman de Vegvar investigates the Tapestry's drinking vessels and explores differences in its feast scenes and Michael Lewis compares objects depicted in the Tapestry and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11. The book also includes a resume of four papers given at the conference published elsewhere and a full black and white facsimile of the Tapestry, with its figures numbered for ease of referencing.