Brigitte Bedos–Rezak – författare

By the early 13th century the use of seals in Northern Europe was a generalized phenomenon which involved society as a whole, crossing boundaries of gender, age, religion, and social and professional status. The function traditionally ascribed to seals is the validation of the documents to which they were affixed, but the phenomenon has far wider implications, as is brought out in this collection of studies by Brigitte Bedos-Rezak. In itself a seal could serve as a quasi-amuletic object or a personal adornment, the image impressed from it functioned as a sign conveying identity and power, and the ritual of sealing provided an occasion for the affirmation of status. In her work the author has aimed to use the approaches of statistics, cultural and women’s history and semiotics, as well as the ’traditional’ skills of art history, law and diplomatics, to show the numerous surviving seals can be used to reach into the history of the Middle Ages, and at the same time to explore and test the interpretative models suggested by semiotics and postmodern theories on symbols, representation and meaning.

By placing medieval sealing practices in a global and comparative perspective, the essays gathered in this volume challenge the traditional understanding of seals as tools of closure and validation in use since the dawn of civilization. Far from being a universal technique, sealing is revealed as a flexible idiom, selectively deployed to mediate entangled identities: the introduction of Buddhism in early medieval China; the Islamization of Sasanian and Byzantine cultures; the balancing of Christian orthodoxy against classical and Muslim science; the development of civic consciousness in Byzantium; the efforts of tradesmen to brand merchandise for export; and the advancement of diplomacy from northern Europe to Indonesia. This examination of documentary seals, archaeologically recovered seal dies, and commercial and conceptual seals from cultures across the medieval world shows how skillful manipulation of their iconography, inscriptions, technology, and metaphorical meanings disseminated information, negotiated influences, asserted hegemony, and forged connections.