Seals and their Context in the Middle Ages offers an extensive overview of approaches to and the potential of sigillography, as well as introducing a wider readership to the range, interest and artistry of medieval seals. Seals were used throughout medieval society in a wide range of contexts: royal, governmental, ecclesiastical, legal, in trade and commerce and on an individual and personal level. The fourteen papers presented here, which originate from a conference held in Aberystwyth in April 2012, focus primarily on British material but there is also useful reference to continental Europe. The volume is divided into three sections looking at the history and use of seals as symbols and representations of power and prestige in a variety of institutional, dynastic and individual contexts, their role in law and legal practice, and aspects of their manufacture, sources and artistic attributes. Importantly and distinctively, the volume moves beyond the study of high status seals to consider such themes as the social and economic status of seal-makers, the nature and meaning – including reflections of deliberate wit and boastfulness – of specific motifs employed at various levels of society, and the distribution of seals in relation to the location of, for instance, religious institutions and along major routeways. In so doing, it sets out ways in which sigillography can open new pathways into the study of non-elites and their cultures in medieval society.

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction Phillipp R. Schofield
• List of Contributors
• 1. This is a seal
• I. Seals, Status and Power
  • 2. The seals of King Henry II and his court
  • 3. The declaration on the Norman Church (1205): a study in Norman sigillography
  • 4. Making an impression: seals as signifiers of individual and collective rank in the upper aristocracy in England and the Empire in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
  • 5. Making a mark in medieval London: the social and economic status of seal-makers
• II. Seals, Law and Practice
  • 6. Seals and stars. Law, magic, and the bureaucratic process (twelfth–thirteenth centuries)
  • 7. Governmental seals of Richard I
  • 8. Seals and the law in thirteenth century England
  • 9. Iustitia, notaries and lawyers: the law and seals in late medieval Italy
  • 10. Family identity: the seals of the Longespées
• III. Seals, Sources and Their Context
  • 11. (Un)conventional images. A case-study of radial motifs on personal seals
  • 12. Memorialising the Glorious Past. Thirteenth-century seals from English cathedral priories and their artistic contexts
  • 13. Putting seals on the map: Francis Blomefield’s Plan of the City of Norwich, 1746, and the constitution of civic history
  • 14. Seal finds in Wales