So much is written about the Bayeux Tapestry that offering new interpretations seems to invite hubris. The editors of this collection of ten essays and a ‘selective’ up-to-date bibliography seek to incorporate the ‘explosion of new approaches and interpretations with a bevy of new methodologies and arguments’ and to stress the ‘value of applying current theoretical modes’ to the Bayeux Tapestry (p xiv). Yet post-colonialism, post-structuralism and gender analysis are not exactly new, and the book includes some tired old jargon like (New-)historical, (Re)producing, (dis)placement and imag(in)ed. Mercifully, the Tapestry’s back (though itself shamefully neglected) is broad enough to bear such a weight of expectation. Some of the papers originated in a Yale seminar of 2005, others in the 2006 Leeds International Medieval Congress.

The topics range in length and theme from minute analyses of the fabric and its stitching to wide explorations of power and propaganda, nationality, religion and material culture. The two papers that seem to demonstrate genuinely fresh approaches use simple good sense and observation rather than any ostentatiously new methodology. Owen-Crocker casts a much-needed spotlight on the back of the Tapestry, which should provide vital information about the sequence of design and manufacture, but has suffered from a scandalous lack of research and publication. Before the Tapestry was installed in its new home in 1983, conservators had just ten days to examine the back; they did not publish these results until 2004, and then all too briefly; the existence of the collection of the photographs they took was not made public until 2008. Owen-Crocker renders an invaluable service by teasing out the discrepancies and ambiguities in the conservators’ short report, and lays a genuine foundation for further scholarship. She reminds us that the hanging has been repaired with 518 subsequent patches, that it was made of nine (not eight) strips of linen, and that there were ten (not eight) basic colours of embroidery wool.

On the hoary old question of who commissioned and made the Tapestry, Paston and White provide a lucid defence of Odo/St Augustine’s, Canterbury, by redefining the nature of earlier medieval patronage so deceptively established by Panofsky in relation to Abbot Suger. The powerful individual supervising all stages of a project is, they argue, a Renaissance concept, whereas Odo was more of a benevolent backer with no input as author or designer. It was the abbey that had all the facilities for authoring, designing and overseeing the project, and it produced a truly Anglo-Norman work, which could only have been achieved by the community during its post-Conquest survival under Abbot Scolland. Underpinning the Tapestry’s genuinely even-handed approach was the historical fact that his monks prayed both for the English and for the Norman dead at Hastings, who are shown so graphically in the borders.

Other useful attempts to set the work in its wider context are made by Brown, on its images of power and authority, and Overbey, on the relics and reliquaries in the oath scene; she suggests that the depiction of God’s hand at Edward’s funeral was a way of sanctioning William’s actions for the English viewers. Terkla takes a very broad perspective indeed: interpreting the appeal the Tapestry held for Napoleon and then for the Nazis, she suggests that the Normans themselves were proto-fascists who drew on a vast range of imperialist imagery to define their expansionist policies. Allen discusses ‘the Tapestry’s delight in things’ in modern philosophical terms, and suggests that the many objects so carefully shown had both symbolic and utilitarian significance and foreshadowed twelfth-century debates on the nature of reality. Brilliant expands an earlier paper to explore how artists make sound visible, with particular regard to the din of battle in the Tapestry. He finds parallels for the ‘jagged linear energies’ of the confused and complex Hastings sequence not only in medieval manuscripts but also in the work of the Futurists.

Using the Montfaucon and Stothard drawings, now so easily accessible on Foys’s ground-breaking CD, to make a close analysis of the fabric itself, Lewis identifies at least seven original ‘errors’ in the embroidery (though he does not mention the clumsy join of the first and second lengths), caused, perhaps, by pressures of time, inexperienced embroiderers and the absence of the designer at the sewing stage. Foys himself plausibly deconstructs the ‘arrow in the eye’ legend, arguing that the Tapestry itself has been hijacked to prove the case: the eye-pierced ‘Harold’ character is in fact based on Stothard’s nineteenth-century reconstruction of a soldier who was originally throwing a spear, while the ‘reliable’ Italian documentary source of c 1080 only survives in a fourteenth-century version with interpolations.

Inordinately long and not remotely new is Caviness on the ‘representations of sex/gender arrangements’ in the Tapestry. This is actually a revised version of a chapter from her 2001 ebook, Reframing Medieval Art, itself a product of a 1990s ‘post-modern framework of gender studies’. This means prolific citation of Derrida and Irigaray to define heterosexual normativity, binary masculinities and latent homoeroticism. She celebrates the ‘phallic signifiers’ of Norman swords, spears and arrows but denies the masculinity of Anglo-Saxon axes. Even poor Harold’s hawk becomes ‘a polysemic symbol of foppish pastimes’ (Brown, in her paper, sensibly accepts it as an aristocratic hunting accessory).

Ranging from the minutely specific to the sometimes alarmingly general, this is a slightly unbalanced, though never dull, collection of articles that will be succeeded, though not necessarily superseded, by more works in the seemingly incessant flow of Tapestry publications. The book includes some post-modern inconsistencies: two contributors insist on calling it the ‘Bayeux Embroidery’; its measurements are given as metric in one article and imperial in another; the abbot of St Augustine’s is Scolland for one contributor and Scotland for another. There is a generous range of colour plates and an excellent jacket image, which compares a section of the original with the versions by Montfaucon, Stothard and the Leek embroiderers.