ABSTRACT
One critique of postcolonial interrogations of medieval artefacts is that such objects, by their very nature, comprise products of affluence and influence what survives of medieval visual culture resides primarily in the realm of works commissioned by the hegemony rather than the subaltern. A resistant site can find its origin in a subject, object, or place but can be more broadly understood as a concept or space in which authority is both 'deformed and subverted'. Like postcolonialism, medieval applications of frontier studies seek to deconstruct monolithic understandings of the Christian medieval west through exploration of specific, localised, geographic areas in which divergent political, military, social, and cultural institutions interacted. The network of familial and contextual connections linking Bishop Guillaume de Beaumont to Thomas Becket might in itself offer a satisfactory justification for Guillaume's inclusion of a window dedicated to the saint in Angers cathedral.
