Saints and sinners: coins in medieval Italian graves

This paper was originally presented in a Cambridge symposium on interpretation of ritual context in early medieval Europe. It explores the presence of coins in medieval Italian graves in comparison with other ritual uses of coins, considering that funerary contexts cannot be properly understood without a full awareness of the role of coins in medieval mentality and religious sphere. The article proposes a role of coins as memory tokens, as well as chronological tokens (especially so when found in graves of saints), and similar interpretations are documented for coins offered in the foundation of buildings. This paper opened a discussion and further investigations of ritual uses of coins for the attention of archaeologists and Church historians.