Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World by Katharine Scarfe Backett (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 190 these were the choices of William’s wife, Matilda, as it was she who commissioned the ship. It is a fascinating article and an enlightening study of William’s family and its dynamics. In her essay “The Coronation of Harold in the Bayeux Tapestry,” Barbara English studies the coronation scene and compares it to earlier and contemporary coronation and enthronement scenes in other works of art. Other essays treat the Tapestry as history, fiction and/or propaganda. One of the most intriguing of these essays is Pierre Bouet’s “Is the Bayeux Tapestry Pro-English?” It is a deliberately provocative title, given the Tapestry’s French provenance and its importance in French history. Bouet does not entirely prove that the tapestry has strongly pro-English subtexts, but he argues convincingly that the Tapestry’s portrayal of the English, and of the Anglo-Saxon king Harold in particular, is respectful and even admiring at times, making it difficult to argue that the piece is a distinctly and stridently French piece of propaganda. Instead, Bouet argues, we should see the Tapestry as meaning different things to different viewers. It is as though the artists had two separate audiences in mind, and catered to both by including images that would be read differently by each. Likewise, in “The Bayeux Tapestry as Original Source,” François Neveux proposes an innovative solution to certain apparent inconsistencies in how events are presented in the Tapestry—the fact that King Edward the Confessor ’s funeral is shown before his death, for instance. Rather than treating these scenes as isolated stops on a constantly-moving narrative strip, Neveux demonstrates that certain scenes must be looked at in groups: a scene such as the death of Edward will be placed centrally, flanked by scenes representing the events it caused to transpire. It is a novel approach to the Tapestry and a tremendous contribution to the study of its narrative logic and flow. Other studies attempt to place the Tapestry in its temporal context, particularly in relation to other works of art: Brian Levy argues that the repetition of groupings of three—individuals, divisions in the Tapestry’s narrative, important locations, and so on—give the Tapestry a structure and balance not unlike that of epic poetry. Maylis Baylé discusses the Tapestry in its artistic context, analyzing similar imagery in northwestern European art of the time and tracing the development of certain motifs across time and space. Ultimately the book suffers from the same drawbacks that many such collections of papers would: some ideas are repeated in multiple papers; other papers make contradictory assertions. Ultimately, however, there is much work here that is of merit and worth considering. Many of the essays are not for the layperson , but the volume overall makes a tremendous contribution to studies of the Bayeux Tapestry. The complexities the book presents are perhaps appropriate to the Tapestry itself, a work both unique and ideally representative of a developing Anglo-Norman Romanesque culture. EMILY MORGAN, Art History, University of Arizona Katharine Scarfe Backett, Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World, vol. 33, Cambridge Series in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Simon Keynes and Andy Orchard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003) viii + 276 pp. REVIEWS 191 The title of this book is somewhat misleading, in that Scarfe Beckett spends much more time on Anglo-Saxon perceptions of groups that could be considered pre-Islamic, although all of these groups end up under one specific rubric, that of the Saracen. After first giving evidence that Anglo-Saxon England was aware of the lands of the Middle East, she then turns to their understanding of those lands. The territory is somewhat familiar, as she goes over the various ways in which the term Saracen could be used for both early awareness of an exotic group “to the east” and a more pointed term for the Islamic warriors who swept across the north of Africa and into Spain. However, she also covers the less familiar territory of earlier writers, notably Jerome, Augustine, and Isidore of Seville. All three present images of Arabs and Arabia, but not of Saracens as being specifically Arab. The peoples of Arabia, of whom the...