What I would like to offer in this chapter, with two cases briefly put, is the sketch of the contours of an object world – a manner of producing, using and thinking about things in twelfth-century Palermo, which cuts across the boundaries of media in a performative sense, in the sense of reaching out across space to create a form of enchainment. I have come to see this phenomenon as profoundly and synthetically visual in the multifariousness of its operations, in which one might discern the impress of reception in the very act of production on the part of a community of makers and users. As such it sets itself against our conventional modes of discourse, which are logocentric and rather dis-aggregating in orientation. Thus I believe they must be revised. The key is to go beyond the comfort zone of the parameters set by modes of analysis to which we have become inured.

My first case is one of the greatest works of the textile arts to have survived from the Middle Ages. It now graces the Treasury of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, having arrived there by means of a circuitous route of imperial inheritance (Fig. 2.1). Dürer even depicted it being worn, quite anachronistically, by Charlemagne himself. But its origin was actually in twelfth-century Palermo, with the first of the Norman kings to rule the island, Roger II. The textile was the king’s Mantle, a magnificent expanse of scarlet samite, embroidered with pearls and enlivened with gold thread. The Mantle was created in 1133–34, as is laid out in an inscription in Arabic along its hem, which reads:

Insofar as I have been able to determine, the concept of intermedial performance has never been entertained by scholarship in the study of the Mantle, which has proceeded along essentially two lines.