The visual language of identity : women's seals in Scotland and Ireland, c. 1100-1400
Abstract
[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] My dissertation explores the visual expression of the power and authority of secular women in Scotland and Ireland from the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries. I approach this large topic with a study of the small: the seals found on documents. Seals function like our signatures today; they add our authority to documents and are expressive of our power. Unlike our contemporary signatures, however, seals also bore signs of the identity of the person that used them. The iconography, size, and shape of a seal signified a person's social standing and gender. Women from the highest social classes possessed oval seals with full standing figures and heraldic emblems and women lower down the social ladder owned oval-shaped, non-figural seals. Women in medieval Scotland and Ireland followed a visual language of identity, drawing from well-established images found in church sculpture, tombs, and manuscript illuminations. The ubiquity of the images ensured that they would be widely understood. The spread of sealing culture as well as the spread of international artistic fashions into the western peripheries of the European world was a result of Norman (and Anglo-Norman) influence. This study brings the seals of women in Scotland and Ireland within the lively scholarly discourse about identity and visual culture in the expansive orbit of late medieval England and France by considering the varying degrees of how foreign influence was adopted within the two Gaelic worlds.
Degree
Ph. D.