The Rhetoric of Power in the Bayeux Tapestry

The Bayeux Tapestry has long been appreciated as one of the most important historical documents relating the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. Renowned in its own day, viewers in the late twentieth-century are still awed by this dramatic and compelling account of events leading up to the Battle of Hastings and its aftermath. But how objective is the story depicted in the Tapestry? In this study, Suzanne Lewis argues that the Bayeux Tapestry is one of the first large-scale visual narratives of the Middle Ages that, moreover, clearly conveys medieval conceptions regarding the pictorialized text. More than a reinterpretation of the historical evidence related to the Tapestry, Lewis’s study explores the strategies and conventions that have made this work such a powerful statement for audiences over the centuries.