Weaving Sacred Stories

"Thanks to Laura Weigert, the interior of medieval cathedrals is no longer the large bare space-empty, cold, and silent-that it has become today. During the polyphony of feast days, the sanctuary and above all the choir are arrayed with immense tapestries that streak the walls with bright colors and express through their inscriptions the holy history that resonates in the voices of the cantors. The canons, situated in the choir stalls, are entirely enveloped by these images and by the stories of miracle and martyrdom in which they find the justification for their privileges. The warp and woof of the fabric do more than weave together the wool threads of the tapestry: at the same time they embrace, in a unique performance, the clerics dressed in their heavy vestments embroidered with gold, the sacred vessels, and the slow processions that wend their way around the choir. This book sets forth a total social history that reevaluates in a decisive manner objects that are too important to be left solely to historians of art or technology."-Jean-Claude Schmitt, Directeur d'etudes, l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris "Laura Weigert's well-researched and clearly written book sets out interesting claims about how art served to bridge the sacred past to the present and to affirm contemporary ecclesiastic institutions. In so doing, it offers important new evidence of the ways words and material images supported the liturgy and how gift-giving realized individual donors' hopes for salvation."-Herbert Kessler, Department of the History of Art, The Johns Hopkins University, and author of The Poetry and Paintings of the First Bible of Charles the Bald (Recentiores: Later Latin Texts and Contexts) and Seeing Medieval Art "Reading tapestries is more than just gleaning stories from them. In this book, it is reading the performance of reading the tapestries as well. Thus, reading becomes a historically specific performance, a response to the woven stories' performativity. Weigert demonstrates how much can be gained from approaches that remain historical without shunning the concepts and methods of a new, vital cultural analysis."-Mieke Bal, Professor of Theory of Literature, University of Amsterdam and Andrew D. White Professor, Cornell University "In Weaving Sacred Stories, Laura Weigert goes far to redress the lack of attention granted the fabrics and especially the tapestries that were a featured and highly valued adornment of churches in the later Middle Ages. Exploiting precious surviving evidence identifying patrons, narrators, and audiences as well as other circumstances of manufacture and reception, Weigert is able both to explicate narratives with wonderful precision and to give a vivid sense of the environment of the Gothic cathedral choirs in which the tapestries were hung."-Cynthia Hahn, Florida State University