Two of the essays in this collection have been published before. One is Brigitte Bedos-Rezak’s seminal article ‘Medieval identity: a sign and a concept’, in which she demonstrates the lack of continuity in the function and use of seals between the Roman period and early medieval western Europe, in the context of contemporary theology and philosophy. The other is David J Wasserstein’s account of ‘Coins as agents of cultural definition in Islam’ in which he examines the forms of early Islamic coins, how they were seen at the time and their role in the spread of Islam.

Both serve as important background to the other twenty essays, of which many were presented as papers at successive meetings of the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo. The whole book is divided into five sections. In the first, ‘Sigillography, numismatics and art history’, Lucia Travaini looks at the messages conveyed by the designs of a Merovingian tremissis and a Milanese ducat. In the second, ‘Minting policies in medieval Europe and the Middle East’, Guido M Berndt, Lisa Mahoney and Wayne G Sayles examine the coins of, respectively, the Vandal empire, the Crusader states and twelfth-century Jazira, that is, northern Mesopotamia, and Susan Leibacher Ward compares a small carved bust in the cathedral at Le Mans with the representation of kings on contemporary English coins. A section on ‘Medieval women’ brings together work by Liz James on the coins of the ninth- to thirteenth-century Byzantine empresses, by Anna Gannon on women on early Anglo-Saxon coins, by Erin L Jordan on the seals and coins of thirteenth-century countesses of Flanders and Hainault, by Kay Slocum on images of Anglo-Saxon saintly women on later English seals and by Susan M Johns on early medieval Welsh seals. In ‘Sealing civic, urban, rural, and corporate identity’ John Cherry looks at the images on town seals in general, Elizabeth A New at London’s common seal and Markus Späth at French civic seals, while John McEwan and Phillipp R Schofield both examine the increasing use of seals, respectively, in London and more widely in England and Marcher Wales. In the final section, ‘Coins, seals, medieval art and material culture’, James Robinson discusses the spiritual and secular power of seal images, Jesse D Hurlbut the figure of the Lamb on the city seal and altarpiece at Ghent and Janet E Snyder the clothes that appear on carved figures and on seals in the twelfth century. Susan Solway then looks at antique coins introduced into medieval jewellery and, finally, John Cunnally examines a sixteenth-century drawing of six Muslim coins of the twelfth century.

The above brief catalogue does no justice to the collection. All the authors have something new and interesting to say about their subjects, and to extract a common theme is not so much difficult as impossible. All the same, most of the essays reflect the book’s subtitle: they are looking at the designs of seals and coins with a view to bringing out the unspoken messages they conveyed; above all, statements of personal or corporate identity and statements of power over those who saw and handled them. Implicit in what several of the authors say, and set out explicitly by Susan Leibacher Ward (p 178), is that while we are accustomed to replicated objects in a vast variety of contexts, they were most unusual in the Middle Ages, and it was in seals and coins that most people would come across them, giving these objects a peculiarity, even a status, that is now difficult for us to grasp.

While the book’s subject is coins and seals, nearly every contribution deals with only one or the other. Eleven are about seals, nine about coins; only two, by Lisa Mahoney and Erin L Jordan, discuss both, though several other authors make valuable cross-references. Thus, Guido M Berndt lists fifth-century rulers portrayed on seals as well as those on coins (p 89) and Susan Solway describes the ‘long tradition’ of medieval seal designs copying those of Roman coins (p 426). More, however, could be said of the relationship of coins and seals, not only in their impact on those who saw or used them but also in similarities or dissimilarities of design or wording. Stuart Rigold (Rigold Reference Rigold1974, 99–100) suggested that the design of Anglo-Saxon pennies was taken from contemporary royal seals, and that from ‘all positive evidence, throughout history … the seal-type has the priority and the coin-type is derivative’. It would be very interesting to know how far – if at all – this was a general rule: was the authenticating power of the seal used to validate the coinage by copying its design?

Other unanswered questions will occur to every reader of this book. But this is praise, not criticism: the essays are as stimulating as they are informative. They are superbly illustrated, with black-and-white pictures, mostly much enlarged, at the end of each piece, and nearly fifty of them are repeated in full colour at the end of the book. It is an important contribution to work on both numismatics and sigillography.