The Mediaeval Journal

Produced in the high and lateMiddle Ages, badges are small, brooch-like objects with images, produced and worn for others to see, read, and interpret.The hypothesis tying together the articles in this special issue is that badges, though made out of different materials, operated as a pan-European, visual and symbolic mode of communication. Especially badges made out of tin-lead, or pewter, alloy circulated in large numbers and were distributed over large geographic areas. Their mass-production suggests a high level of what might be termed semiotic literacy across the diverse individuals and communities who wore them. People displayed specific badges, whether secular or religious (or both), to create and claim social, political, and religious relationships by drawing on iconographies that were familiar and intelligible across large areas of medieval Europe.

Remarkable finds of late medieval pilgrim badges excavated in the former harbour of the Hanseatic city of Stade have opened an unexpected window onto the pilgrimage history of northwestern Germany between the rivers Elbe andWeser. Approximately 160 pilgrim badges found in Stade come from twenty-six identified pilgrimage sites in Middle Europe. About a dozen sites are still awaiting identification. These findings overturn much received scholarship on late medieval pilgrimage in northern Germany and suggest instead the emerging contours of an understudied, dynamic, latemedieval landscape of pilgrimage.

This article deals with the origins of a group of pilgrim badges showing Charlemagne as a monarch seated on a throne with his sword lying horizontally across his knees (Figs 2.1- 2). This is a very particular depiction, associated not with the city of Aachen, the centre of Charlemagne devotion, but with Zürich, Switzerland.That city developed a unique depiction of Charlemagne, an iconography used consistently from the middle of the thirteenth century until well into the seventeenth century to represent the Grossmünster and the city.The pilgrim badges, of which ten are known today, are dated to the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries on somewhat uncertain archaeological and stylistic grounds.The notable manner of depicting Charlemagne, in a range of media, is the strongest indication that points to the badges having been issued in Zürich rather than Aachen.

This article focuses on the badges of Our Lady of Aarschot (Brabant, Belgium) which entwine secular and religious iconographies through the use of heraldic signs and devices.The cheap mass-produced souvenirs deliver both a religious and a political message reflecting the association of the noblemanWilliam of Croy-Chièvres with the Virgin of Aarschot as well as his relationship with the Habsburg-Burgundian rulers, Charles V in particular.The badges display a combination of different heraldic devices, usually associated with elite culture, indicating that these symbols were widely understood, also among pilgrims from the middle and lower classes who bought these objects. The exploration of influences and purposes underlying the design and production pewter pilgrim badges from one cult site demonstrates how fully these cheap, objects participated in the prevailing, symbolic modes of elite self-fashioning for a broad audience.

During the fourteenth century in England, livery badges were increasingly used by elite individuals to extend their influence through their subordinates. However, those who wore badges also used them to advance their own ambitions. Documentation from England in the 1380s reveals conflict, as the badges’ potential to serve multiple masters was realized. Understanding the multiple meanings of livery badges and the assumptions that supported them is explored through comparison with pilgrim badges. Pilgrims’ signs reached their height of popularity simultaneously, and were visually comparable. The comparison helps explain the significance of badge-wearing and the reasons why livery badges could be more contentious than their religious counterparts.

A particular category of signs of identity, seals, circulated in urban spaces as a form of public platform. Serving their owners both as self-extension and as means of engagement with their environment, seals relayed urban identity as it flowed in a concourse of multiple devices, even as seal users themselves circulated and inflected identity beyond its network of media. The paper considers the ways in which mobility, replication, and miniaturization, in predicating particular modes of signification, affordedmedieval cities and citizens a mechanism for the ongoing construction, performance, and communication of their plural personality. The replicated nature of seal impressions, by forming a continuing series of repeated statements, created a trans-temporal template that may well have fostered identity as mobilization. Yet, however immobilized, the formulation of identity on city seals acquired innovative forms that transported representation away from symbolism and toward verism. City seals, in dealing with the representation of a collective person, engaged the tropes of distinction and individuation.