TAXONOMY OF NARRATIVE
Scholarly writing about tapestry often organizes the material by period and provenance. As our main purpose was not to study the history of tapestry, but rather tapestry and text, we needed a different system of classification. The designers of the tapestries drew on many different literary sources: scripture, legend, myth, chronicle, romance, and drama. From these diverse texts they constructed visual narratives and iconographic representations. Narrative usually consists of characters and events aligned sequentially in time and space. Although there are exceptions, narrative is fundamentally a linear mode. So the question we asked was: How are characters, events, time and space represented in tapestry? This, we discovered, is done primarily in three different ways.
THREE NARRATIVE STYLES
- A/ Linear
- B/ Non-Linear
- C/ Iconographic

Figure 1 Bayeux Embroidery Scenes 57 and 58: Harold’s death, William conquers England
1 Wolfgang Grape, The Bayeux Tapestry, (Munich, New York, 1994), Prestel, pp. 79-80.