John Cherry – författare

Made in gold and enamel and decorated with precious stones, the Holy Thorn Reliquary depicts the salvation of mankind through the sacrifice of Christ. It was commissioned around 1400–10 by Jean duc de Berry, a member of the French royal family, to house a single thorn from the relic of Christ’s Crown of Thorns. Having left the duke’s possession, it was recorded in Vienna from around 1544 until the 1860s, eventually being acquired by a member of the wealthy Rothschild family, with its true identity remaining undiscovered until the twentieth century. This book explores the meaning and history of this fascinating object, and tells the tale of its remarkable survival and eventual passage to the British Museum.

This volume represents a pioneering examination of the nature and identities of Aegean prehistory as a discipline. Emerging from a workshop that generated lively debate among a wide cross-section of scholars, it offers one of the first published attempts to situate Aegean prehistory within a modern self-critical and reflexive context. The chapters and commentaries together yield a multidisciplinary discourse, covering such topics as the current health and academic status of the field, the political and social parameters of the discipline, the relationship between Aegean prehistory and Hellenism, and the discovery of the "Aegean" by Greek modernists.

The Rawlinson collection of seal matrices in the University of Oxford is the most important early collection of European seal matrices to survive. Created by Dr Richard Rawlinson (1690-1755) in the first half of the eighteenth century, it consists of 830 matrices ranging in date from the 13th to the early 18th century. It includes the collection of seal matrices formed by Giovanni Andrea Lorenzani, a Roman bronze caster, which Rawlinson acquired in Rome together with a catalogue written in 1708. This collection is primarily Italian, but the Rawlinson collection also includes examples from many other countries England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany Spain, and Scandinavia as well as Italy. The study of seals was much neglected in the middle of the twentieth century, but the study now attracts greater interest. This is due to their visual appeal, sense of identity and their representation of symbols. This book will appeal to a wide variety of readers from those interested in collecting, Jacobitism, history of the early eighteenth century, the Grand Tour, antiquaries, and seals and seal matrices. This book has four introductory chapters which set the scene for the collecting of seal matrices, tell the life of Richard Rawlinson and Giovanni Andrea Lorenzani, analyse their collections and relate the history of the collection after Rawlinson's death in 1755. One hundred seals, all illustrated, are described in detail, with much unpublished data, and an indication is given of the contribution they make to the sigillography of the different countries.