Despite scholarly engagements drawing attention to its complexity as a narrative, the Bayeux Embroidery is still routinely framed as a triumphal monument attesting to its putative patron’s greatness. Scholars who seek to come up with alternative explanations for its meaning and purpose are challenged not just by the weight of tradition surrounding it, but also by the fact that it is quite literally a work of art that is without a context. There are few extant medieval textiles with which to compare it – and certainly none on this scale – and no incontrovertible references to the embroidery from the first four centuries of its existence, leaving us without any contemporaneous evidence for its medieval setting and reception.

This chapter will analyze the methods by which scholars have traditionally sought to understand the textile and provide a context for it. Accordingly, several key works in the art history of the Bayeux Embroidery will be examined. As we shall see, while inquiry into the patronage of the Bayeux Embroidery may initially have given rise to fruitful speculations, the identification with a particular patron has since become a limitation to be accommodated. This reappraisal of the literature, along with the re-examination of the earliest extant evidence for the textile’s use in the fifteenth-century inventory from Bayeux Cathedral and attention to use of medieval textiles in ecclesiastical settings, suggests different models for thinking about how and why the hanging came about.

Montfaucon and the First Publication of the Bayeux Embroidery

The modern history of the Bayeux Embroidery began with its discovery in Bayeux Cathedral by Bernard de Montfaucon, who, in his Monumens de la Monarchie françoise of 1729, was the first to publish the textile (Fig. 40). Montfaucon thoroughly reviewed the history of the Norman Conquest of England, primarily using the textual accounts of Norman authors. Montfaucon’s view that the Bayeux Embroidery was a Norman victory monument was shored up by his comparison of it to Roman triumphal columns, a now-standard analogy that Montfaucon, who had previously published a popular multivolume work on the monuments of antiquity, was the first to make. To the extent that Montfaucon considered issues of patronage, it was to repeat without apology the local legend that William the Conqueror’s wife Matilda oversaw the hanging’s production, thereby reinforcing his implicit assumption that it was a Norman undertaking.