THE TROYES MÉMOIRE

At the end of the fifteenth century, in the cathedral town of Troyes, in the Champagne region of France not far from Paris, the Church of Saint-Urbain of Troyes commissioned a group of painters to design a set of tapestries depicting the legends of St. Urban and St. Cecilia. A scholar was brought in to write a detailed set of instructions for the artists, who were to produce cartoons for six tapestry panels which, when viewed together, would constitute a single continuous narrative of two famous martyrdoms. It was an ambitious project and entailed a complicated interweaving of the lives of several saints and martyrs. The tapestry panels were to hang on special occasions around the choir stalls in the church, to honor St. Urban and the family of the donor who paid for them. But, for reasons unknown, the tapestries were apparently never woven. That is as much as we know of the story, and that little is partly conjecture, pieced together from the evidence that survives.

The Troyes Mémoire is that evidence, consisting of the written instructions by the author who imagined quite precisely what these tapestries were to look like, and what they were to convey. (See Plate 1 for an image of folio 2r.) It is also the only known surviving full set of directives of this length and detail, for tapestry or any other comparable work of art from the period. The Mémoire is a complete and finely tuned account of how image and text are to work together, providing a unique look at the complex and sophisticated world of iconography exemplified by the narrative and artistic productions of the Middle Ages. At the same time, it also provides insight into the way patrons and advisers communicated with artists. That this manuscript survived at all is a cause for wonder, or—as is said frequently in the Troyes Mémoire—admiracion.

This book, The Troyes Mémoire: The Making of a Medieval Tapestry , offers, for the first time in English, the Troyes manuscript (or Mémoire). The original document is in the holdings of the Archives Départementales de l’Aube in Troyes (MS 10 G 8). It consists of a 46-folio manuscript.