Weaving Sacred Stories: Narratives of Saints in French Choir Tapestry 1400-1530

Choir tapestry provides a rich source with which to explore the construction and reception of pictorial narrative in the Middle Ages. During the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, ecclesiastical officials in Northern France and Flanders commissioned tapestries for their churches. These lengthy scrolls of fabric, which allowed up to sixty meters of continuous narrative, spanned the walls within the choir with monumental lives of saints in text and image. Because these tapestries were displayed only on prescribed feast days and in conjunction with highly regulated ceremonies, it is possible to reconstruct the circumstances under which they were viewed. How choir tapestries, with their accompanying ceremonies, visualized the lives of saints is the subject of the dissertation. I argue that these large-scale stories, by combining elements from narratives associated with the laity or the clergy, constituted a site of intersection between these two cultures. The dissertation begins with a discussion of choir tapestry as a type of artistic production. Drawing from a survey of existing examples, I establish the characteristics of this art form that contributed to its function in late medieval communities. All choir tapestries combined both liturgical and hagiographical texts and included descriptive tituli in the vernacular, insuring their accessibility to the laity and the clergy. The following chapters focus on three extant choir tapestries chosen for their completeness and the existing documentation on their ceremonial setting: the Lives of Saints Piat and Eleutherius (Notre-Dame, Tournai, 1402) the Life of Saints Gervasius and Protasius (Saint-Julien, Le Mans, 1509), and the Life of Saint Stephen (originally Saint-Stephen, Auxerre, now Cluny Museum, Paris, ca. 1500). I show how these three tapestries in conjunction with the liturgy integrated clerical and lay religious cultures in distinctive ways. I conclude with a discussion of the techniques of story telling shared by the three examples. Despite its worth and artistic status in the Middle Ages, tapestry has been omitted from most art historical literature about this period. The few existing studies on choir tapestry are insufficient to understand the medium. In all cases, authors either discuss a fragment of the whole or divide the tapestries into individual panels. Moreover they fail to acknowledge that choir tapestries were one element within a ceremonial system. Through a detailed analysis of three tapestries and their liturgical context, I make two points about the nature of pictorial narrative in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: first, images were constructed as narratives through the active process of viewing within a ritual setting and second, visual narratives integrate different models of story telling into a single text. By demonstrating how complex visual stories were constructed in specific cases, this dissertation contributes to the broader study of pictorial narrative.