Foreword

Summary

Several years ago I saw what proved to be one of the most popular exhibits ever shown at the Ann Arbor Public Library in Michigan. For forty years one of the librarians had been collecting the items people had used as bookmarks and forgotten to remove before returning the books. They included snapshots, ration stamps, grocery lists, letters, a prayer card, a hastily scrawled map with directions to somebody's house—the detritus of everyday life, items to be used but not preserved. How fortunate we are when, by accident or design, such things are saved. They are primary sources, unfiltered and uninterpreted, that give us a direct connection to what earlier people ate, wore, grieved over, and admired. For an eloquent defense of this approach, you have only to look at Eileen Power's introduction to Medieval People , published in 1924:

Social history sometimes suffers from the reproach that it is vague and general, unable to compete with the attractions of political history either for the student or for the general reader, because of its lack of outstanding personalities. In point of fact there is often as much material for reconstructing the life of some quite ordinary person as there is for writing a history of Robert of Normandy or of Philippa of Hainault; and the lives of ordinary people so reconstructed are, if less spectacular, certainly not less interesting.

A remarkable document of this kind is the Troyes Mémoire , a set of detailed instructions written in the fifteenth century for the artists who would paint the cartoons from which a series of six tapestry panels were to be woven. The tapestries would show the legends of St. Urban and St. Cecilia. Giving both saints their due would not be a simple matter. Since the tapestries themselves were never woven, how fortunate for us that a copy of these instructions survived and that Tina Kane has made this previously untranslated work available to us. Her gracefully rendered translation was made from the original manuscript, and it goes without saying that social historians, medievalists, and art historians all will find her work invaluable.

Less obvious but no less important is what the Troyes Mémoire offers to writers and critics concerned with the art of narrative itself.