Benutzerspezifische Werkzeuge

Descriptions of interiors from medieval romance, verse poetry, and historical chronicles emphasize lordly halls as environments where the material trappings of wealth and power—precious metals, fine furnishings, culinary abundance—combine with dense, vibrant, and sometimes magical image programs that engulf the visitor in a multi-sensory experience of courtly space. Within these ideal spaces, textiles in particular take on multiple function; they serve as luxury furnishings and pictorial representations of the very kinds of narratives that describe them, forming a reciprocal and recursive relationship between the verbal and visual story-worlds of romance. Material evidence for such hangings from before 1400 exists in the form of monumental embroideries depicting the stories of Arthurian heroes like Tristan, Gawain, and Iwein, most famously those at Wienhausen in Lower Saxony. However, their connection to secular courtly environments is less clear. Most of the surviving embroideries are executed in a technique that is almost exclusively associated with convent production, and many still live in the convents where they were likely produced or have entered museum collections from them. This has caused speculation among scholars about the provenance, production, and original function of such hangings, and whether their subject matter precluded them from use in conventual life. In this workshop, which corresponds to case studies from my dissertation, I explore the evidence for the convergence of secular and spiritual ritual in the space of the convent, during which the subjects and trappings of courtly life played an important role. I also consider the tradition of comparisons between “text” and “textile” which found voice in the poetry of the day, in order to better understand the embroideries as media through which women materialized both the rhetorical processes and imaginative content of popular poetic genres, taking an active role in the production of courtly literary culture.