Much remains to be said about the contribution of the texts to the history of the veneration of images in the Middle Ages. The paper contains the first results of a study based on the written sources in England just before the Conquest and under the Norman and the first Angevin kings. The impressive corpus collected by Lehmann-Brockhaus has been used as a starting point, but the heuristics has been updated and widened. This documentation, which is mainly hagiographical and liturgical, enables the historian to reveal a set of little known facts concerning the Virgin's and the various saints' images (a later study will be devoted to Christ's images, in particular to the crucifix). Most of these generally three-dimensional images were located in churches. Not only were they meant to attest to the saint's presence and to transmit the virtus contained in corporal relies or sometimes in the empty tomb nearby, but, from the 11th century onwards, some of them were even considered to work autonomously as cult figures and sacred mediators. To ensure the prototype 's effective intercession at the place where the image stands and to control the cult, the bishops resorted to benedictiones, which originally consisted in real consecrations. The paper examines for the first time these surprising liturgical compositions, from which extensive extracts, including some previously unpublished material, are quoted. The inquiry also proved interesting because of its unveiling of the multiple ways of conceiving, suggesting, or, less often, of expressing the relationships between the image and the heavenly prototype, without considering the confusion between the model and the representation as a risk of major importance. Finally, this research leads to a questioning of the originality of certain aspects of the cult of the images in England and calls for the creation of a database for « l'espace français ».