Introduction: the archaeology of medieval seal-matrices

1The breaking of images and of iconographic objects often suggests a religious-based iconoclastic gesture against those who attribute to images the illegitimate power of embodying divinity and inspiring adoration. Such smashing of images seeks to demonstrate their inefficacy and the irreducibility of the godly to material contours. However, the very act of destruction, designed to bruise the spiritual and aesthetic sensitivities of image worshipers, suggests that these very images have some worth in that they are worthy of obliteration; such value need not be confined to the spheres of piety and devotion. In fact, medieval violence also targeted iconographic media operative in representational strategies of personal authority and identity, and in procedures of authentication. These media were seals.

2The medieval seal was triune, comprising the seal-matrix, the sealing process, and the seal impressions.1 The seal-die or seal-matrix was a metallic (silver, copper or lead alloy) artefact engraved intaglio with the names, surnames, likenesses, and, where relevant, titles, offices, and heraldic emblems of their owners (fig. 1). Each seal-matrix, a unique object, was also the progenitor of multiple images, capable of being imprinted repeatedly in wax, lead, or sometimes gold. The information conveyed by seal imprints was not limited to what had been engraved on the seal-matrix because the sealing process necessitated personal manipulation, contacts that left significant additional traces (fig. 2). Seals were effective actors in the world, performing specific operations ‒ they recorded marks of presence; they situated individuals socially; they validated deeds thereby obligating contracting parties and creating personal, corporate, and administrative accountability. Their functions thus positioned seals within the normative world of legal and institutional activities, where, as signs of identity and tools of enforceable commitment, they participated in executive as well as aesthetic practices. However, the explicit treatment of seals in legal discourse failed to capture the full range of their practice and of the contemporary attitudes they elicited. A case in point, as we shall see, was the cancellation or destruction of seal-matrices, which, to my knowledge, seems never to have been addressed in medieval legal literature.

3The damnatio memoriae of Ancient Rome, which sought to eradicate and replace the images of bad emperors and serious offenders, was predicated upon a dual understanding: that transformation of the iconographic record could alter perception of the past, and that images played an important role in perpetuating the memory of the dead.2 The Roman damnatio is not mentioned here as a precedent but as a comparative context for the medieval practice of cancelling a variety of images that had served individuals in legal acts (seals), pious deeds (pilgrim badges),3 and economic activities (coins, tokens,4 weights). Although my focus will be on seals,5 it is important to note that seals shared common forms of mutilation and deposition (disposal, abandonment, burial) with these other artefacts, and that all were metallic objects, either printing devices (engraved seal-matrices) or printed matter (papal bulls, pilgrim badges, coins, weights) that bore texts and images. Among these, seals are distinctive in the sense that destruction targeted them as matrices, and not as imprints.6 In contrast to the multitude of medieval seal users and of the wax impressions that remain attached to documents,7 a comparatively small number of medieval seal-matrices survive in private collections, museums and other cultural institutions. Moreover, little if anything is known of the provenance of such matrices, except where they have been found buried in the tombs of their royal and episcopal owners (fig. 1).8 The survival of these objects has owed much to collectors’ taste for intact and aesthetically pleasing artefacts, and as such they constitute a body of evidence whose profile has lately been seriously challenged by archaeological discoveries and metal detectors’ finds (figs. 3, 4, 5). The latter technology especially continues to bring to light masses of seal-matrices that had been deposited in rivers or in the earth. This material is now systematically recorded by competent programs, and is described in notices that include spatial data of discovery and the material state of preservation.9 Such an archaeologically formed body of medieval seal-matrices contrasts substantially with the corpus of objects that have historically entered collections. Firstly, excavated seal-matrices obviously imply some form of deposition in the ground (or water). Although medieval individuals are known to have lost their seals, which they often wore suspended from their persons, the rapidly growing number of recently unearthed items is not likely to be explicable by simple loss. It can be argued that many of these seals may have been thrown away because they were worn, or obsolete. They would therefore fall within the category of refuse, a possibility strengthened by the fact that a significant number of unearthed seals are in fact fragmented (fig. 4). Archaeologists have stressed the difficulty of differentiating waste from intentional deposition, and accidental breakage from deliberate fragmentation. Thus, despite acknowledgment that the casual discarding of objects cannot be ruled out, especially when they appear to be impaired, it has nevertheless been suggested that attention to the manner in which things have been damaged and deposited may indicate a significant dimension of structured action.10 Medieval scholars have of course long understood that seal-matrices were intentionally destroyed or buried when outdated by their owners’ change of status, or death.11 As we shall see, there is textual evidence of such practices among lay and ecclesiastical elites, which presents them as normative rituals. However, as already mentioned, I do not know of specific legal or other documentation that enjoins the discarding of obsolete seals, although canon law, local laws, and the ius commune have legislated about seals. Nevertheless, the archaeological data now suggests the widespread existence of this custom at all levels of society. Such data also provides the possibility of broadening our understanding of the social extent of seal ownership and sealing practice, since it includes more systematically seals from the rural world of small landholders, free and unfree tenants, and members of the lower clergy.12 In this world of rural sealers, particularly in England, seals were primarily affixed to documents that recorded local leases and transactions of small plots of land.13 From the late 13^th century onward, such seals’ legends no longer bore the names of sealers but, rather, pious, witty, or sentimental sentences in dialogue with the seal designs (fig. 3).14 This type of seal in particular was deposited in the earth, where most have been found intact.15

4The social processes within which any intentional disposal of personal image-bearing objects would have taken place involved environment, biography and biology, personhood, representation, and custom.16 Naming such contexts, however, falls short of explaining the mediatory role of object-breaking and object-deposition in enabling these specific processes and engaging the cultural assumptions that underlay them. I therefore propose to outline a typology of the various forms of degradation that seal-matrices suffered and to demonstrate that the nature of damage done to seals actualized a medieval understanding of images, objects, landscapes, and persons, and of the ways that they worked together. I will argue that the destruction and deposition of seals amounted to a technique for guaranteeing the realization of a particular sort of personhood and the production of a particular type of image, whereby a person and their material representation could coexist symbiotically and behave reliably. The system rested upon the agency of both sealer and seal, that is, upon what they accomplished in relation to each other. This reciprocal interaction stressed the active participation of seals in human affairs, even though the identification between seals and sealers might be destabilized by the different temporalities in which they operated. Whereas sealing took place in the present and in the joint presence of sealers and seal matrices, the resulting imprints were expected to project the indexical presence embedded in them beyond the sealing moment (fig. 2), indeed beyond the sealers’ lives. Not only was an imprint exposed to the future, but its mode of production as a serial image suggested an infinite and indefinite corpus that challenged its timely indexation of particular deeds: the imprinted image needed guarantees that would ensure the authoritative permanence of its authenticity. In conclusion, I will present the manner in which the disposal of seal-matrices attempted to provide such a guarantee, and the reasons why fragmentation and defacement could operate as building blocks of a system of timeless trust.

Destruction, defacement, cancellation, deposition

5The disposal of seal-matrices took many forms and was triggered by various circumstances. Although the most general trigger was the death of the seal-owner, disposal could also occur in other dramatic circumstances, which left traces in the textual record. Thus, when claims to corporate status were challenged by hostile authorities, as was the case with the University of Paris at the beginning of its existence, and with many European urban communes, seal-matrices were seized and destroyed, enacting the eradication of their collective personality.17 In such cases, the breaking of images sought to cancel an identity and the means of its identification, in order to obliterate the very person thus identified.

6Similar goals inspired the damage inflicted to the seal-dies of defeated elite individuals whose seal-matrices, often made of silver and engraved with great and artistic care, had emblematized their power and status. For instance, in 1247, King Louis IX crushed the revolt led in the south of France by Raymond VII, Count of Toulouse. Among the defeated lords was Raymond Trencavel, Viscount of Béziers, who was forced to abandon his viscounty to the French king. Raymond’s renunciation of his lordship was recorded in a charter of 1247, sealed with his two-sided seal as Viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne.18 Three months after the issuance of the document, Raymond was called to Paris where, in the presence of the king, he had to renounce his lordship personally and to destroy his seal-matrix, bearing the titles that were no longer his. The charter recording this second renunciation ends with the following final clause:

In testimony of this renunciation and to give it perpetual force, we have sealed these letters with the seal that we used when we bore the title of Viscount of Béziers, and with our new seal. Now that these letters are sealed, we have had our first seal and counterseal broken in several pieces in the presence of the king, so as to further guarantee this renunciation.19

7After this humiliating ritual, and without his seal, Trencavel could no longer claim to be, nor act as, the Lord of Béziers and Carcassone. His new seal was a modest affair, bearing a shield of arms surrounded with the simple and humble legend: sigillum trencavelli, seal of Trencavel.20 The destruction of the earlier two-sided seal with grand equestrian imagery inaugurated a new phase of Raymond Trencavel’s life; it was a rite of passage during which he received a new name, a new identity.

8On the other side of the channel, King Edward I of England (1239-1307) proved equally ruthless to his opponents. Victorious over the Welsh prince, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, and his family in 1284, Edward confiscated their silver seal-matrices, had them melted and made into a chalice that he then offered to his recent foundation, the Cistercian abbey of Vale Royal, itself a monument planned (if not fully realized) on a grand scale to exalt his piety and greatness. That the chalice, a recapitulation of the king’s victory, was now inserted into the liturgy’s holiest moment, at a site celebrating royal grandeur, speaks to the metonymic power of seals, however transformed, to serve as proof of victory and divine approval.21

9Expanding his conquest of Wales, King Edward I took advantage of a troubled succession in the kingdom of Scotland to impose his lordship over the Scots in 1292. He commanded that the seal used by the Guardians of Scotland be broken into four pieces. He then had the four parts sent to London to be kept in the English Treasury so that they might serve as “the sign and most complete evidence of the English king’s suzerainty over the Scottish kingdom, and in order to prove in a striking manner the existence of this suzerainty to future generations”.22 Destruction and possession of the dismantled seal intensified its conversion to testimonial and memorial function. The political violence inflicted on this seal controlled the flow of memory,23 and provided the material for the creation of a new tradition, a new and lasting memory.

10Not all contexts for the disposal in vivo of seal-matrices were so contentious. The event could be self-willed, necessitated by a significant land transaction or a change in social status. For instance, the pattern of documentary sealing among the fourteenth-century rural population of England and Marcher Wales suggests that small landholders used several seal-matrices, each engraved for a specific transaction.24 Such transactions typically involved land, were often leases for the life of the tenant and written in duplicate to form a chirograph, so that each party could retain a copy of the deed.25 The seals affixed to these documents were imprinted by modestly designed, increasingly anonymous matrices,26 (fig. 3) similar to the ones currently being unearthed, in great numbers, and mostly intact, by metal detectorists. This suggests the possibility that these matrices might have been deliberately interred in the land that was the subject of the written record. Such a burial constituted a gesture that would seal the transaction even beyond the imprinting of wax, giving the signatory act a unique and irreversible quality, akin to throwing away the key to keep things or people locked in. Then again, the seal might have been ritualistically deposited in the land being transferred, to mark both the event and the place.27

11In Denmark, changes in status led many individuals to bring their outdated seals to the local castle’s court so that they could be first declared null and void and thereafter destroyed, defaced, and discarded in the vicinity of the castle.28

12When King Henry III of England (1207-1272), in signing the treatise of Paris in 1259 with Louis IX of France, renounced control over Maine, Anjou and Poitou, he had a new seal engraved that registered the modification brought to his titles. In a public ceremony, Henry had the old silver seal broken in the presence of a large assembly, including his eldest son and the Archbishop of Canterbury. The broken parts were thereafter offered as a charitable gift to the poor.29

13The greatest change of status affecting seal owners was death. The fate of seals at death was diverse. Burial with their owners was a possibility, but a relatively rare occurrence that generally involved the entombment of intact matrices (fig. 1).30 The practice is found among twelfth-century French Capetian kings, and remained sporadically in use among high-ranking ecclesiastics.31

14A very widespread form of burial was the deposition in earth or water of the seal-matrices alone, which were thereby separated from their deceased owners. Whether and how such deposition may have been ritually performed is unknown, especially if one assumes that such a separate deposition of seal-matrices was probably meant to render their recovery impossible. A large number of deposited seal-matrices bear marks of obliteration, and whether these actions too involved a ceremony comparable to that which sometimes accompanied the public destruction of seals also remains open to question.

15A radical way of breaking seal-matrices was to cut them into two or more pieces (fig. 4).32 Archaeologically recovered elements suggest that the purposefully broken fragments of seal-matrices were not deposited together since often only parts of seals are found.33 In fact, when all fragments of a matrix have been found together it has been thought that the seal was probably damaged by a plough after deposition,34 or by the discoverers themselves in the course of excavation.35 Such a pattern suggests several possibilities for the fate of seal fragments.36 They may have been deposited in different sites (earth and river). Alternatively, some fragments could have been buried while others were re-used, or else distributed as gifts or keep-sakes. In any case, breaking a matrix transformed a single original object into multiple pieces.

16Another form of fragmentation consisted in clipping the edges of the seal. Cutting erased the name of the sealer and removed the seals’ features for purposes of identity and identification; its central effect was to deprive the seal of its original integrity. A seal-matrix thus broken was not a fragment but an incomplete object,37 a point to which I shall return.

17A particularly damaging gesture involved folding seal-matrices before deposition.38 Many matrices, whether randomly collected or archaeologically unearthed, have had their loops (fig. 3) and other appendices partially broken-off or even totally removed.39 Besides their use for suspension, these appendices also facilitated the imprinting of the matrix into wax and its subsequent removal. With the loops and handles cut off, the back of the seal-matrices was smoothed leaving a levelled, flat surface.40 (fig. 5) This modification would effectively have impaired the ability to use such matrices.

18Techniques of defacement, filing, scoring, hammering, or scratching with a knife, were deployed directly to affect the seal’s surface and its graphic elements. Oblique lines crossed out images,41 (fig. 5) while scratching obscured names.42 Some forms of cancellation transformed seals so that they could be dedicated to another, usually, pious purpose. At the death of the kings of France, their seal-matrices were broken and gifted as alms to the leper house of La Saussaye-lès-Villejuif, to comply with a grant from Philip Augustus (d. 1223).43 It is however in England, in Durham, that the longest tradition of seal breaking for charitable purposes is recorded. From the late eleventh century onward, the bishops of Durham explicitly willed their seals to be posthumously and publically destroyed and thereafter donated as alms to St Cuthbert, the patron saint of Durham. Two fourteenth-century bishops instituted further innovations. Richard of Bury, whose second seal’s extraordinary design is known to have deeply influenced subsequent English sigillographic fashion, was undeterred by the artistic merit of his matrices and willed that they be made into a chalice, bearing an inscription that specifically indicated the origin of the chalice as deriving from Richard’s four seals. The seals of Thomas Hatfield, who was Richard’s successor, were melted to form the image of a bishop, bearing Thomas’s name, which was to hang over the reliquary tomb of St Cuthbert, among other precious objects left at the tomb by pilgrims. From a sealing device to a votive image, from bishop to pilgrim, Thomas Hatfield managed to leave traces behind on his post-mortem path to eternity.44

19The transformation of seals into pious images did not always require artistic retooling, especially when the modest value of their material did not make it worthwhile. The removal of the dorsal ridge and a simple piercing disabled and defaced the seal, but also allowed it to remain an image that could be worn as a medallion or nailed to a wall. Simple perforation therefore engineered the mutation of seal-matrices into functionally different objects.45

20Finally, a seal-matrix could be converted into the seal of a different person. I am not referring here to the re-use of slightly altered seals,46 or to the re-casting of a melted matrix into an entirely new one. Rather, the originally engraved obverse of the seal was cancelled by the attachment of a handle pierced for suspension, which blotted out the former design and legend, while the original reverse, now flat with its handle removed, could be engraved with a new text and iconographic motif.47

21This typology of the various forms of degradation inflicted upon seal-matrices prompts a few observations. The breaking, fragmentation, and defacing of seal-matrices, as well as their high rate of deposition in preference to recycling, strengthens the hypothesis that simple dispersal and deposition were also deliberate. Buried or otherwise deposited, seals disappeared from the surface of the earth and into it. Broken, in any numbers of ways, they were clearly incapacitated as printing tools. Breaking was often followed by deposition, a combination which seems to have been the most frequently employed. The defacement of seal images and the obliteration of names obviously erased identity and any possibility of its further use in representation; this mode of alteration seems to have been employed more sporadically. In other words, the cancellation of texts and images appears, in most cases, to have been secondary to a primary goal, the disabling of seal-matrices as technical tools. Before expanding upon this remark, however, I propose to consider the broken seal-matrices further and to explore the ways in which fragments continued to be relevant and performative in medieval society.

Broken and discarded. The continuing significance of seal-matrices

22The deliberate destruction of seals achieved and drew attention to closure, to the interruption of a relationship between seals and their owners or users who themselves had come to an end, either of status, property rights, or most often death. Indeed, the breaking and folding of seals may well have been a gesture signifying death,48 and since certain forms of seal cancellation expressed piety, it is not impossible that the deposition of seals might also have had a votive dimension (fig. 5).49 However, such a practice did more than signify death. The seal did not automatically die when its owner did; it had to be put to death, sometime dramatically. At the Benedictine abbey of St Albans (Hertfordshire, England), the seal of the deceased abbot was broken with a hammer on the day of his burial, after High Mass and in front of all the people.50 Breaking seals drew attention to the partial ability of human death to end a person’s social life – the demise of their owners did not suffice to disable seals. Thus, in Poitou, Marguerite of Razilly, prevailed at a trial that assigned her deceased husband’s inheritance to her nephew by producing a document sealed posthumously with the matrix of her dead husband.51 Medieval sealers were aware that seal-matrices could extend personhood beyond death, effectively agents in their own right.

23Seal-matrices enacted and promoted, indeed their utility derived from, the notion that humans act in society via a representational scaffolding, a persona, that co-implicated the natural self and its formal appearance within legal and political life.52 As the explicit imago of its owner (figs. 1, 4),53 the seal-matrix instantiated personhood as a substantial condition that afforded an individual authoritative participation in social communication. Dependence of the substantial upon the technic of the image implied a primacy of representation in the sense that seals were considered to have a constitutive (and not only symbolic) function in maintaining status and identity.54 As we have just seen, so long as a seal-matrix existed, it committed its owner, whether alive or dead, to action. The implication here was that a person was not confined by the spatio-temporal limits of biological life and could exist beyond it, within the imago that channelled and imparted duration to their personality.55 The destruction of an imago at the death of its titular holder acknowledged an extended dimension of personhood that did not fully coincide with the physically embodied self, and thereby addressed the vulnerability of individual free will. From this perspective, the breaking of seals was a protective act to accomplish that which an individual’s bodily death had not. From its creation, through its use, to its destruction, the seal thus contained within it an aspect of personhood,56 which, still inherent in seal fragments, has inspired the posthumous reverential, votive, pious and commemorative treatment of broken seals discussed earlier.

24Synergy between person and seal thus remained effective, even after a person’s death. The destruction and deposition of seal-matrices brought an end, not to that synergy but to the seals’ technological and operational force. That the destruction of seals disabled them primarily as tools raises questions about the manner in which seal-matrices were understood to be operational, and about the perceived nature of their operations. In considering these points, we have to reflect once more on the essential unity that bound seals with personhood beyond the embodied self, this time noting that seals were also experienced as having an affinity with the life process, indeed a controlling effect upon it.57 John of Salisbury (d. 1180), writing (in 1148) in the name of the Archbishop of Canterbury, warned about the dangers of falsifying the papal seal, because “by marks of a single impress [of the pope’s seal-die] the mouths of all the pontiffs may be opened or closed”.58 For John, papal seal-matrices and the popes formed one body to the point where seals effectively activated papal speech.59 However, this implied consubstantiality between seal and sealer gives a leading role to the seal : in John’s text, imprinting not only effected papal communication but the popes are metaphorically characterized as automata. A later English dictum (ca. 1312) stated: “The man who acknowledges a seal to be his, acknowledges the ink and parchment attached to the seal to be his”.60 Etiology runs uninterrupted from the sealer, through the seal-matrix and its imprint, to the ink and parchment. The dictum’s enchainment makes clear that, when a man owns and owns up to owning a seal, that seal could expand ownership beyond itself, and transform it into authorship. The vocabulary of materiality that permeates this dictum (seal, ink, parchment), and which does not refer to scribal and documentary expressions, conveys a sense that both personal acknowledgement and the mediatory role of things are equally necessary to produce a valid document. A Scottish resolution concerning the reimbursement of debts further emphasizes the potent implications of the English dictum about seal ownership and representativeness. The case involved a debtor who produced a quitclaim sealed with the creditor’s seal as proof that he had reimbursed his debt. The creditor however denied that the debt had been reimbursed, acknowledging that the seal affixed to the quitclaim was his, but stating that he had not affixed it and that the sealing had been done without his wish or knowledge. The resolution of this case considered as fact that the debtor had actually stolen the creditor’s seal but declared that irrelevant, finding for the debtor who had produced the sealed document, and against the creditor who was charged with the poor keeping of his seal.61 For “there are two things that everyone ought to guard carefully, that is his tongue and his seal”.62 As with John of Salisbury’s earlier comment, the analogy between tongue and seal underlines the seal’s somatic and communicative nature. Moreover, like loose tongues, seals can get loose and speak independently of their owners.

25Thus, seals were perceived as somewhat autonomous actors endowed with enough life force to make things happen. It might be going a bit too far to submit that seals had enough life in them to warrant being put to death, but their destruction and burial suggests such an analogy. Indeed, seal-matrices operated through a material mode, imprinting, that paralleled human reproduction, and medieval treatises in anthropological theology often analogized the sealing process with the life cycle.63 From this perspective, their normative destruction articulated an experience of seal-matrices as entities that could, though they ought not to, be effective independently of their own alter-egos, capable of enacting personhood within and beyond biological limits.

Breaking images, building trust

26The mutual engagement between seal-matrices, life, and personhood meant that they affected each other to the point of having to share episodes of change and the fact of death. However, there was yet another context, the law, which fostered, though it did not mandate, the destruction and deposition of seal-matrices. When, in the late 12^th century, seals first came to be treated within the normative discourse of law, the focus was on the sigillum authenticum.64 Canon lawyers considered seal authenticity in terms of two overlapping meanings. The concept of the sigillum authenticum related authenticity both to documentary authorship and to material format. The power of the sigillum authenticum to be a permanent, fully authoritative self-standing proof thus depended upon both the judicial authority of its owner and a requirement that the seal impression be intact and identifiable so as to bear witness to the document’s provenance. With respect to the detection of seal forgeries, the rules developed in law required that seal impressions have material integrity and be issued from a complete, undamaged matrix. Broken imprints were doubted. Judgment on genuineness relied on a direct comparison of any suspicious seal impression to others known to have been issued from the same matrix and by the same authority.65 Indeed by the early thirteenth century, some seal owners elected to deposit impressions of their seals in various institutions; the validity of future sealed charters were to be verified by comparison with them.66 Thus seal impressions constituted a self-validating frame of reference as true replicas one of another. The adequacy of such impressions was not tested against an original; to the contrary. Since, as a result of the mechanical reproductive technique, all impressions of a given matrix were assumed to be identical copies, each copy came itself to function as an original generating its own accuracy, truth, and validity. Seal-matrices were not used as the verifiers of seal impressions but as tools capable of producing identical texts and images, thereby providing a mechanical mode for establishing authenticity. This mode, however, was insensitive to the actual hands that applied the seal-matrix, as we have seen in the cases of John of Salisbury, the Scottish creditor, and the deceased lord of Razilly. For though the seal’s imprinting process was indexical, involving causality, contiguity, and the embodiment of a human presence, (fig. 2) the imprinted image itself formed automatically and objectively, the result of a direct contact between two materials, metal and wax. It was the generic designs replicated on seal impressions that categorized seal owners and permitted patterns of seal and sealer recognition, while the authenticity of the imprinted seal was affirmed not by the sealer but by the imprint’s integrity as verified by comparison with other imprints. As long as a seal-matrix remained extant and intact, its capacity for subsuming human agency within the mechanical logic of replication rendered the corpus of seal impressions issued from it mutable and vulnerable. The definitive authenticity of a series of images imprinted from a specific matrix therefore could only be accomplished by the timely destruction of that matrix. The reliance of seal impressions upon the disappearance of seal-matrices was nowhere made more evident than during the sealing operation itself, where the matrix had to be lifted and withdrawn from the wax in order for the imprinted design to appear and so actually to exist. The breaking of a seal-matrix, by enacting a final removal, thus fully realized its imprints, permanently empowering a finite body of original images that now formed a bounded, individualized entity of co-referential and stable traces. As the ultimate guarantee of the truth of sealing, broken matrices and their clipped handles thus prevented any further printing of complete, authentic seal impressions. The destruction of seal-matrices targeted not their imagery per se but the control of replication, a process experienced as a technique that empowered the agency of replicated objects but was also capable of substituting for original and personal intentionality. Thus, the logic at work in the sealing technique of imprinting was unable to achieve full protection of personal identity and purpose.

Conclusion

27Seals were broken for several reasons, all grounded by a principal consideration: the need to terminate the efficacy of a device considered capable of agency coterminous with but also separate from its personal owner. The destruction of seal-matrices presented opportunities for eradicating enemies while incorporating traces of their defeat, but also for remembrance, marking space and leaving behind traces of piety and devotion.

28Thus, a great deal of medieval imagery, in many cases crafted with expertise and aesthetic flair, (fig. 4) was created in anticipation of its ultimate destruction. I could not find evidence that the prospect of their subsequent fragmentation informed the manufacture and design of metallic seals. A seal-matrix’s intrinsic value, when made of gold or silver, was usually put to pious use, but the act of destroying a skilful engraving or a personal or sacred image seems not to have been the subject of commentary. It was as printing tools that seal-matrices were regularly and ruthlessly destroyed. The engraved image, the personal imago in the seal’s metallic substance, was a dimension of the seal’s technological identity and representational capacity. Both the format and the fate of this representational medium suggest a particular experience of medieval personhood, as extensible beyond biological boundaries through interaction with artefacts, such as seals-matrices; and a particular notion of image, the imprint, that required both contact with originators (sealer and seal-matrix) and their removal. Operative in the absence of their agents of production, imprints emerged as valid, validating images, which supported an influential system of medieval documentary representation. The practice of documentary sealing thus relied in part on the power of that which is destined to be destroyed, and in that sense, challenges the normative iconoclastic tradition.67

Fig. 1 – Silver seal-matrix of Isabelle of Hainaut (d. 1190), queen of Philip Augustus (d. 1223), found in her tomb in Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris. British Museum, 1970,0904.1. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Fig. 2 – Wax-seal impression of Elvise of Nangis, 1204; with fingerprints on the seal design, Archives nationales, Paris, L 846 no 49. Photo author - With Permission.

Fig. 3 – Impersonal seal-matrix, cast copper-alloy, 14^th century. PAS, HAMP-260CB4. The Portable Antiquities Scheme/ The Trustees of the British Museum.

Fig. 4 – Seal-matrix of Thomas of Coucy, bronze fragment; late 13^th century. British Museum, 1872,0603.72. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Fig. 5 – Seal-matrix, lead, defaced; late 13^th-14^th century. PAS, CAM-BF6953. The Portable Antiquities Scheme/The Trustees of the British Museum.