The Power of Women Topos on a Fourteenth-Century Embroidery

"The Power of Women Topos on a Fourteenth-Century Embroidery." One of the best-known examples of the Power of Women topos in late medieval art is the so-called "Malterer Embroidery," an early fourteenth-century German work which depicts the amorous entanglements of Samson, Aristotle, Virgil, and Iwein, followed by the unicorn captured by the virgin. Analysis of the image choices and their sequencing shows that the artist employed a dyadic structure based on the polarities of strength and wisdom and strength and chastity in order to propound a specific thesis: that the power of women to inspire love and desire in the strongest and wisest of men finds its proper outlet in Christian marriage, in which love between the sexes transcends merely carnal desire. The ingenuity with which the artist deployed stock imagery, leading the viewer from one idea to another as through steps in an argument, reveals a level of artistic self-consciousness which is not normally conceded to the "decorative" arts, and suggests that the apparent simplicity and conventional quality of many works of this kind may be deceiving.