Pilgrims' Badges
of
High Quality :
A Few Thoughts
about
A Few Exceptions
While
almost all of the badges which have survived in the London and Cluny
Museum collections, so meticulously catalogued by, respectively, Brian
Spencer and Denis Bruna,
display a relatively crude ("Folk Art") aesthetic sensability,
in both their conception and execution, there are several (among the
hundreds in those two collections alone) which seem to exhibit a quality
of design and production (realisation) which can only be said to be
very close to "First Rate." |
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Spencer 134, 134a, 134b (p.128) : Three "Solid circular palques (32-34mm in diameter)... Invoking St. Thomas" [of Cantorbury], perhaps most notable for their astonishingly numismatic form, the clarity and beauty of their epigraphy ["SANCTE THOMA ORA PRO ME" --"the invocation begins to look like a magical formula..." ] and the delicacy of their design and execution. Perhaps from the third quater of the 14th century.
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A Place of Exceptions
:
Rocamadour |
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Badges
from Rocamadour (as a genre, documentable from at least 1161) are
quite remarkable for their numbers, their very consistant form, and
their consistently (and extraordinarily) high quality. The latter
two attributes might be attributable to a peculiar feature of their
manufacture. |
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Spencer 245c : Of a type perhaps produced in the second half of the 12th century and "gone out of use by the end of the 13th;" the London exemplar being found in an archaeological context which "also yielded a remarkably large number of late 12th-century Canterbury ampullae..." (p. 237). |
Spencer 245 (H 46mm.) : A similar example of this badge type has been found in an archaeological context datable to 1200-1225. |
Spencer 245a: "...similar to 245 but...the handiwork of more accomplished mould cutters." |
Spencer 245d : "...closely corresponds to a 13th-century badge found at Dortrecht in 1980..." |
In
view of these exemplars from Rocamadour, I believe that we should
entertain the possibility that the curious and somewhat
unusual seal-like basic form of these exemplars might be a clue to
explaining their exceptionally high quality: namely that they could
have been produced by a class of very specialized craftsmen (perhaps
sucessive generations of just a single family of professional cutters
of seal matrices) who executed the molds for these souvenirs, rather
than the more typical (presumably) purely commercial artisans responsible
for the vast majority of other badge types from the
earlier periods so far discovered and catalogued by Spencer,
Bruna and others. |
Some References :
Brian Spencer, Pilgrim
Souvenirs and Secular Badges: Medieval Finds from Excavations in London.
London: Stationery Office, 1998.
Denis Bruna Enseignes de pelerinage et Enseignes Profanes.
Paris: Musee de Cluny, 1996.
Kurt Koster Pilgerzeichen und Pilgermuscheln von
mittelalter Santiago-Strassen: Saint Leonard -- Rocamadour -- Saint-Gilles
-- Santiago de Compostela. Scleswiger Funde unde Gesamtuberlieferung.
Neumunster, Germany, 1983.