Reconstructing Medieval Pictorial Narrative

Abstract

Restoring tapestries was part of a broad movement from the mid to the end of the nineteenth century that was intended to retrieve and to renew the heritage of the French medieval past. Large-scale restorations of churches, of which those led by Eugene Viollet-le-Duc are the most well known, codified medieval architecture and isolated these monuments from their surrounding communities.2 Authoritative editions of medieval texts were published that effaced variations between individual manuscripts.3 In many cases projects reconstructed their objects of study by denying the diversity that existed in the time of their making and that occurred over the history of their use, and by imposing an organization and meaning that was often inconsistent with their significance and function in the Middle Ages.