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Medieval seals, modern science. An overview of recent developments
by Dr Elizabeth New FSA & Professor Philippa Hoskin FSA
In medieval Britain, seals acted in a similar way to modern signatures, credit cards, and logos, and were as familiar a part of everyday life as these things are to us. Seals conveyed far more than signing your name or swiping a card, however, for these little packages of image and text identified and represented individual men and women from kings and prelates to artisans and peasants, as well as offices, institutions, and groups in varied ways. They provide carefully constructed messages about status, power, wealth, occupation, family, humour, piety, location, and connections from the very local to the international.
Seals are also physical objects. The matrices (stamps or dies) were made of a hard material, usually metal but sometimes set with stones, the latter believed to certain amuletic properties. Impressions from these matrices were made in true sealing wax – beeswax, usually mixed with resin and with colour added. This talk will focus particularly on the ‘active’ role of this wax in the process of sealing, both as it was perceived and experienced by men and women in the Middle Ages, and as it transmits information from them to modern scholars. The materiality of the substance, in terms of its composition and physical properties (especially as these changed during the process of appending an impression of a seal matrix to a document), will be considered, with attention paid to the message conveyed through the medium. Drawing on the recent Arts & Humanities Research Council Imprint project and ongoing investigations into the inorganic elements present in wax, this talk will highlight the ways in which cutting-edge scientific techniques can add to our understanding of the past – and how medievalists can on occasion make a contribution to scientific research.
Dr Elizabeth New is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her research interests focus on high and later medieval England and Wales, especially its social, cultural and religious history; the visual and material culture of medieval Britain; medieval seals and sealing practices; and heritage studies. Elizabeth recently completed a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship (2020-23), and currently is working on a monograph which emerges from this and previous research, Impressing People: Identity, interaction and exchange in medieval England. She was Co-Investigator for the AHRC Imprint: a forensic and historical investigation of fingerprints on medieval seals project, and is past Chair of Sigillvm, the international association for the study of seals.
Professor Philippa Hoskin became a fellow of Corpus in 2019, joining the college from the University of Lincoln, where she had been Professor of Medieval Studies in the Department of History and Heritage and School Director of Research. She was previously at the University of York in research, teaching and archival roles. Philippa’s research focuses strongly on the English medieval written record with a particular interest in using information about the structure and creation of formal administrative records to answer new research questions. She was Principal Investigator for the recent AHRC Imprint: a forensic and historical investigation of fingerprints on medieval seals project and is Principal Investigator and general editor for the British Academy English Episcopal Acta Project. She is also vice president of the Canterbury and York Society.
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