The exhibition at the Museum of Antiquities and Fine Arts in Rouen (Seine-Maritime) highlights the complexity and richness of the links that have developed between Normandy and the rest of the world since the Middle Ages, the 9th to the 12th centuries. Until August 13, 2023.

More than 250 works are thus presented as milestones in the great epic of the Normans, builders of a Europe before their time, who once settled in different countries, from England to Sicily.

The aim of this exhibition is to offer a new look at an entire period of Normandy’s history, taking into account new historical readings but also the new current migratory dynamics.

A work that is anthropological, archaeological and historical at the same time, but it is definitely placed in the field of art, since it is the works – images, texts, objects – that serve as points of reference in the contemplation of this long period around the year 1000. Some works seem like real treasures, like the Lambeth Bible illuminating all that never left England.

Manuscripts testifying to a community of tastes between distant places are brought together, while ancient texts elucidate the uniqueness of Eastern and Western approaches, as well as the Norman adoption of rhetoric of power, or the place accorded to women in the various existing cultures. The objects bear the traces of these borrowings, shifts, hybridizations, testimonies from which we walk through the exhibition.

Each section evokes, through maps and genealogies, the political events or population movements that marked that period. For the contours of the great historical milestones, as well as of the great figures, while more permeable than the great dates found by the national novel would suggest, do not reflect very well the ever-slow, hesitant, progressive movement through which history shapes territories and bodies.

Normans. Migrants, conquerors, innovators
Until August 13th
Antique Museum
198, rue Beauvoisine or rue Louis Ricard
76,000 rouen
Such. : 02 76 30 39 50
Email: info@musees-rouen-normandie.fr