The cult of images in light of pictorial graffiti at Doué‐la‐Fontaine

In the late 1960s the archeologist Michel de Boüard excavated a motte at Doué‐la‐Fontaine, near Saumur. Buried within the earthen mound was a stone edifice that, between the mid‐tenth and early eleventh centuries, had been transformed from a single‐storey aristocratic residence to a multi‐storey tower better suited to new military needs. De Boüard there discovered pictorial graffiti, incised in rough plaster across a wall in the blinded ground storey; among them were several unusually elaborate compositions. Building on his perspicacious analysis of the physical evidence, I situate the graffiti, dating from c.1000, in the wider matrix of contemporary visual and religious culture. The material enriches our understanding of a major historical phenomenon for which the millennial era is a watershed, namely the emergence and proliferation of cult images.