Literacy without Letters: Pilgrim Badges and Late Medieval Literate Ideology

This study assesses the corpus of late medieval pilgrim badges (chiefly from the Low Countries) that feature “pseudo-text” inscriptions. Such inscriptions either have sequences of well-formed letters that cannot be construed or sequences of unreadable letter-like characters. Rather than suggesting that such texts are cryptic or magical, this study argues that pilgrim badge “pseudo-texts” functioned iconographically as signs of text. The conclusion that “textual communities” (as per Brian Stock) functioned around such inscriptions follows directly, and thus this study suggests that we can understand these inscriptions as revealing attitudes about (and ideologies of) literacy, even in contexts where the skills of literacy were not being used. As such, these brief pilgrim badge texts offer a new perspective on thinking about the nature, distribution, and functioning of late medieval literacy.