This volume publishes the proceedings of a conference at the British Museum in 2008 which attracted coverage in the national media and an audience of more than 180, testimony to the Tapestry's continuing hold over scholars and public alike. Nineteen of twenty-six papers read at the conference are printed here, along with abstracts of four others that have appeared in a rival collection (Foys, Overbey and Terkla Reference Foys, Overbey and Terkla2009). The authors range from specialists to neophytes in the world of tapestry studies, in an array of art historians, historians and archaeologists drawn almost equally from the UK and North America, with three French colleagues and one Japanese.

The volume is well and appropriately illustrated, in colour where needed, and includes at the end a complete black-and-white reproduction of the Tapestry, numbering every single human figure, animal, item of vegetation, building and ship that it depicts, as well as marking up the Tapestry's fifty-eight conventional ‘Scenes’ and the nine pieces of linen on which the action is embroidered. The numbering system was devised by one of the editors for an earlier publication (Lewis Reference Lewis2006) and deserves to be adopted universally: not all the essays even here do so, but the ones that do are at a great advantage.

Lewis's introduction provides brief but useful summaries of all the papers, grouping them under five headings not used in the body of the book: Patronage (two papers), History (two), Materiality (three), Figures (six) and Detail (six). History here means History of the Tapestry; Materiality, the Tapestry as a physical object; and Figures, individuals who are depicted. Detail is a miscellaneous section. None of the papers is longer than eleven pages and several occupy as few as four or five.

For new light on the Tapestry, the two outstanding offerings both come from the editorial team. Owen-Crocker catalogues the different ways in which human faces are drawn and stitched, and shows that several artist-designers must have been at work. Lewis demonstrates the likelihood that one of their sources was the well-known British Library illustrated manuscript, BL, Cotton ms Junius 11. Both papers really needed more space to tease out the implications. There are other good things. David Spear is spot-on in wanting to amend the name e[…]tivs (restored in the nineteenth century) above a crucial figure in the narrative to robertvs, making him Bishop Odo's brother Robert, count of Mortain. We also learn interesting and worthwhile (if not necessarily as conclusive) things from Derek Renn about the strips of linen used to make the Tapestry and from Carol Neuman de Vegvar about drinking from animal horns as against palm-cups. Jane Geddes shows that the Tapestry's picture of the inside face of a door is in its constructional details so like a surviving contemporary door (Hadstock, Essex) that the designer of this scene must have had an informed interest in English carpentry techniques. Ann Williams and Hiro Tsurushima use the Tapestry as a launch pad for discussing the material cultural of wealthy English noblemen and the careers of Norman knights of baronial status. Shirley Ann Brown gives a fascinating preliminary account of Nazi research on the Tapestry in occupied Normandy.

A conference of this kind was bound to involve some weaker papers, and in truth there are too many here which it is hard to believe that a refereed journal would have taken. Two or three are just so meagre that a reader who blinks will have missed their point. Two or three more suggest points of interpretation which do not stand up to a moment's scrutiny: they variously involve wresting the scene ‘Where a clerk and Ælfgifu …’ from its plain chronological and geographical context, and heavy-handed over-interpretation of the eels that wriggle under Earl Harold's feet as he rescues men from the sands at Mont Saint-Michel, and of the arched openings (‘portals’) shown here and there. One paper, with a fashionably opaque title and an irritatingly knowing tone, is frankly unintelligible. Both papers about patronage repeat arguments already in print by the same authors.

The volume uses Harvard references and has a complete list of works cited; more than half the papers also have endnotes. Persons and places are indexed but not subjects (except where indexed in connection with a name).