By R. Howard Bloch
The Bayeux Tapestry is the world’s most renowned textile–an beautiful 230-foot-long embroidered landscape depicting the occasions surrounding the Norman Conquest of 1066. it's also one in all history’s so much mysterious and compelling artistic endeavors. This haunting stitched account of the conflict that redrew the map of medieval Europe has encouraged goals of robbery, waves of nationalism, visions of unlimited strength, and esthetic rapture. In his attention-grabbing new e-book, Yale professor R. Howard Bloch unearths the historical past, the hidden which means, the deep good looks, and the long-lasting attract of this striking piece of cloth.
Bloch opens with a gripping account of the development that encouraged the Tapestry: the fast, bloody conflict of Hastings, during which the Norman bastard William defeated the Anglo-Saxon king, Harold, and laid declare to England less than his new name, William the Conqueror. yet to really comprehend the relationship among conflict and embroidery, one needs to retrace the net of overseas intrigue and scandal that climaxed at Hastings. Bloch demonstrates how, with incredible intimacy and immediacy, the artisans who shaped this paintings of fabric artwork dropped at existence a second that modified the process British tradition and historical past.
Every age has adored the Tapestry for various purposes and skim new which means into its enigmatic phrases and photographs. French nationalists within the mid-nineteenth century, fired by way of Tapestry’s evocation of army glory, unearthed the misplaced French epic “The track of Roland,” which Norman troops sang as they marched to victory in 1066. because the Nazis tightened their grip on Europe, Hitler
sent a staff to France to review the Tapestry, decode its Nordic parts, and, on the finish of the conflict, with Paris below siege, deliver the valuable textile to Berlin. The richest horde of buried Anglo-Saxon treasure, the matchless great thing about Byzantine silk, Aesop’s unusual myth “The Swallow and the Linseed,” the colony that Anglo-Saxon nobles based within the heart East following their defeat at Hastings–all are brilliantly woven into Bloch’s riveting narrative.
Seamlessly integrating Norman, Anglo-Saxon, Viking, and Byzantine components, the Bayeux Tapestry ranks with Chartres and the Tower of London as a crowning fulfillment of medieval Europe. And but, greater than a piece of artwork, the Tapestry served because the suture that sure up the injuries of 1066.
Enhanced through a beautiful full-color insert that incorporates reproductions of the entire Tapestry, A Needle within the correct Hand of God will stand with The Professor and the Madman and How the Irish stored Civilization as a triumph of well known background.