Academic literature on the topic 'Medieval Needlework'

Taking up the question of whether Frances Norton’s apparent religious orthodoxy is at odds with a feminist consciousness, this chapter argues that her literary works are parts of an ongoing project to memorialize her daughter, Grace Gethin, whose death interrupts participation in gendered spheres of marriage and motherhood. Norton’s commemorative project challenges conventional gender roles by generating an identity for Gethin as a woman of letters and spiritual authority, albeit through the tolerated feminine activities of needlework and devotional writing. Paying special attention to Norton’s published needlework poetry, this chapter argues that Norton foregrounds women’s grief and domestic labour.

Abstract Strictly speaking, the Bayeux Tapestry, which provides the most vivid pictorial record of the events leading up to the conquest of England by the Normans, is not a tapestry at all. The 70-metre long embroidery, known in the Norman cathedral city of Bayeux as ‘the tapestry of Queen Matilda’, is equally unlikely to be the painstaking work of the wife of William the Conqueror. Long before the Conquest, and long after it, England was famed for the intricacy and brilliance of its needlework. The great narrative hanging was probably the result of a celebratory, and possibly enforced, commission to English needle women to mark both the Norman victory of rn66 and the consecration of the cathedral at Bayeux in 1077 by its bishop, William’s half-brother Odo. After the conquest Odo had been rewarded by William with large estates in England and with the title Earl of Kent. He later acted, with some ruthlessness, as the King’s viceroy in the north of England. Odo’s periodic and prominent appearances on the tapestry as William’s counsellor, as the blesser of food at a banquet on English soil before the battle of Hastings, and as the armed wielder of a great wooden staff in the battle itself (clerics were forbidden to carry swords), suggest that he at least would not have found it inappropriate to decorate his new cathedral with an embroidered commemoration of his brother’s famous victory.