Book review: 'A Needle in the Right Hand of God: The Norman Conquest of 1066 and the Making and Meaning of the Bayeux Tapestry'

Author: R. Howard Bloch

Publisher: Random House

Pages: 230 pages

Price: $25.95

A shining example of the growing scholarly interest in art history, this fascinating study of a famous tapestry and its impact on culture is written with the average reader in mind. The piece of cloth, all 230 feet of it, is filled with words and dramatic images, including animals in the margins. Bloch has studied it closely and brought his own expertise in language and history to bear with positive results. He also convincingly demonstrates that modern scholars should not be smug, as both art and history were practiced on a very high level in the Middle Ages. The tapestry master, at this point still unknown, probably had a much greater understanding of distant cultures than any modern student has realized.