What is it about?

Almost everyone in thirteenth and fourteenth century England had a seal matrix (an engraved die), to push into wax on formal legal documents as a form of signature. Seal matrices were personal - they had images chosen by their owners. But was fixing them to documents personal too? Considering institutional seals of bishops and the seals of individuals shows the answer is complicated but that at least bishops and some ordinary men and women became less concerned than the law said they should have been with the use of their seals

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Why is it important?

This article brings together work from two projects, the British Academy's English Episcopal Acta project and the combined historical and forensic research of the AHRC project Imprint (co-run by Prof Philippa Hoskin and Dr Elizabeth New) to think about the millions of surviving medieval seals of ordinary men and women and the many surviving seals of medieval bishops in new ways. It asks what we can learn about law, individuality adn performance through the ways medieval seals were attached to documents and who did the attaching.

Perspectives

There are many thousands of medieval wax seals surviving in archives - from those of kings and bishops to those of ordinary men and women about whom we know almost nothing but their names, and what they chose for their seals. I hope this article makes people think about those seals are expressions of power and of individuality. And that they explore further at https://www.imprintseals.org/

Philippa Hoskin
University of Cambridge

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This page is a summary of: ‘A Wife and a Seal May Be Deemed Equal’, July 2024, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004693050_020.
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