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Item Number: 109452
Title: Image and Authority : English Seals of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries
Author: Heslop, T.A
Price: Not Available
ISBN: 9781872501857
Description: London: Harvey Miller, 2010. 28cm., hardcover, 360pp. Publisher's summary : This publication examines the eleventh- and twelfth-century English seal as evidence of the authenticity of a document and demonstrates how the visual impact of the seal was used to convey ideas about its owner´s status and authority. This book explores the dramatic growth in popularity of seals and sealed documents in England. At the beginning of the eleventh century few people had need of seals, but by 1200 their ownership was widespread. Seals are the only medieval art form which can be associated with individuals across the social orders from kings to free peasants. As marks of personal identification, they occupy a position somewhere between the signature and the portrait, and they allow a unique insight into the fashioning of public images for widespread consumption. Functioning as signs of authority, they were closely scrutinised for their authenticity and the claims they made about the status of their owners. To an extent, the visual language which they used to communicate these ideas was part of the larger vocabulary of ‘romanesque’ art, but seals also operate as a genre in themselves. Motifs are adopted and adapted from within the corpus, subtly shifting in significance with each new context, and in the process changing the meanings of their sources. As well as individuals, corporations such as monasteries and cathedral chapters commissioned seals, in this case indicative of an institutional persona. Many among the wealthiest and most learned owned two or more seals, one of which was often a small seal for use on private letters. We can thus distinguish to a degree between the different images people chose to present to different audiences. Thus the rise of the seal registers, and indeed perhaps encourages, the emergence of complex identities in a world which is all too often regarded as homogeneous. Perhaps paradoxically, it also marks a major staging post in the emergence of bureaucratic government and legal professionalism. (Studies in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art History. ^Publication delayed to December 2014^)

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