Read the Excerpts From Upcoming Books

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So who are some of the better examples of a hero than Hector, Alexander the Great, Joshua, David, Judas Maccabeus, Charlemagne, Arthur, and Godfrey de Bouillon, otherwise known as the Nine Worthies? Catalogs of various heroes, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar, for example, had been written about throughout the Middle Ages. But these nine men were brought together at some point, which will be reviewed. Their combination continued for many centuries in plays, literature, sculpture, wall paintings, tapestries, and many other visual arts. We will review some of these older works in order to understand better their relationship to Nine Worthies tapestries. Newer published works will be included, often now from the invaluable internet, both in text and image. Often now, more and more knowledge about the Nine Worthies is being published -it's hard to keep up! So maybe, at some point, there will need to be another supplement, as Schroeder wrote.

Literature about the Nine Worthies exists; the most comprehensive being the work of Horst Schroeder, Die Topos der Nine Worthies in Literatur und Bildenden Kunst, 1971.

However, he is not comprehensive as it concerns tapestries, giving no detail as to its technique, for instance. Holtgen, previous to him, discusses one tapestry in relation to a manuscript he has found, while Stratton, in the Ashland Shakespeare Quarterly, surveys them in a cursory way. Robert Wyss, who was the Head of the Berne Museum, Switzerland, also gives a survey of the Nine Worthies and has worked on tapestries in depth, i.e., History of the Trojan War, but not the Nine Worthies. Other records, earlier and in French, are outdated in terms of provenance and limited in content. More recently, the works of Van Anrooij and Schmidt on the importance of the Netherlands literature and images have been published. Articles have been written in French about the lives of individual heroes and heroines. However, there has been no comprehensive work or "catalog raisonne" about just the Nine Worthies (NW) tapestries. This will be the first comprehensive study written for an English reading public. It will be updating previous works with an emphasis on tapestries.