Current Issue: Volume 9, Issue 4 (2025)

Welcome to Volume 9, Issue 4

The articles presented here grapple with how our understanding of medieval objects changes with time, including our assumptions from not that many years ago. The pieces, as analyzed here, show the complex ideas that formed the objects and how they were received, understood, used, and looked at.

The first section features articles edited by Ann Marie Rasmussen based on a session, “Medieval Badges and Miniature Objects” presented at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan in 2021 organized by Rasmussen and Lloyd de Beer. Each essay looks at tiny later-medieval, mass-produced objects and analyzes them in terms of how our own modern-day interpretations might need to be re-calibrated to understand how they may have actually been used and understood when produced, especially in terms of records, literary tropes, and more. Eliot Benbow explains the production of toys and pilgrimage objects in the context of customs records, while Jan Huyghe and Ann Marie Rasmussen explore the literary and linguistic humor in the salacious miniature penis in a pan. Jennifer Lee suggests reclassifying the sword badges traditionally linked to the cult of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury as tournament badges expressing affiliation much as pilgrim badges did. Hanneke Van Asperen investigates pilgrim souvenirs that went beyond badges, including banners, mirrors, rosaries, jewelry, and embossed badges as pendants. Some were purchased onsite, while others were assembled later, the owner creating their own sacred piece.

The second section continues this reconsideration and re-contextualization with Betsy Dominguez questioning the unusual iconography of the ‘Stonehenge’ miniature in BL Egerton MS 3028, including where is follow and where it steps away from the text and why. Matthew J. Champion explores the unusual appearance of a camel badge in Dunwich, Suffolk and its possible link to the appearance of an actual camel in that location in the 1520s. Nicholas Riall investigates how differing opinions of what could be considered medieval original color schemes at Winchester Cathedral caused a good deal of trouble when restoration was undertaken in the 20th century and how the questioning continues. Abigail Berry’s review of The Trees of the Cross: Wood as Subject and Medium in the Art of Late Medieval Germany by Gregory Bryda also canvases how the natural world, especially wood “was shaped by religious thought in the centuries preceding the Reformation.”