Coins and Identity: from the Mint to Paradise

The volume Money and Coins in the Middle Ages in the Brill series “Reading Medieval Sources” introduces coins as sources in many ways. Travaini’s essay investigates the role of iconography and what it implies in relation to the State and to the subjects who used these coins. The images and text imprinted with the dies in the mint guaranteed disks of metal and transformed them into coins. The study of iconography on coins is therefore no less important than the study of other aspects of coinage. It may be sometimes difficult to ascertain how coin iconography was understood and received, but in most cases it is at least possible to know the idea behind the creation of the coin types, the choice of a model or of a language, as part of a crucial interaction of identity between the State and the coinage. This study examines first some examples of the creative phase, before minting took place, and then examples of how a sense of identity can be documented between the coins and the people who used them even in religious contexts. It concludes with a very peculiar use of coins as proof of identity for security at the entrance of gates of fortresses at Parma and Reggio Emilia in 1409. Coins can indeed interconnect the strings of many different fields of research, from the very practical need of security to the less palpable traces of emotions.