In her introduction to the essay collection, The Social Lives of Medieval Rings, the editor, Jitske Jasperse, invites readers to take in the eight contributions “individually” (27). She also suggests that the book as a whole “argues” for “more nuanced stories” about how rings were crafted and forged connections among people. Given the geographical, chronological, and methodological disparities in the essays, the former way of engaging with the book (dipping into it to consult a specific case study) by specialists interested in (say) early modern Galician saints’ cults, or Depression-era American antiquity collections, or Islamic Anadalusi signets, will likely prevail. However, anyone who plows through all 250-odd pages of text will certainly emerge with a more sophisticated appreciation for the use of rings in western Eurasian cultures after Roman hegemony. And just the book’s abundant, well-labelled, and high-quality images would be enough to make the effort worthwhile.
Appadurai’s 1986 Social Life of Things is the inspiration behind the title (5). Yet Jasperse proposes The Social Lives of Medieval Rings adopted a plural because rings “as a category have different object trajectories” (7), meaning that they end up serving different purposes in different contexts, at least when they endure in time (usually their economic value prevails, so rings get recycled into their constituent parts not too long after they are first made). Variable “object trajectories” apply to several other categories of object as well, like books of hours, brooches, or barns. But here the conceit authorizes a book on medieval rings to range widely, from seventeenth-century canonization proceedings (200-5, 212) to twenty-first-century museum display cases (233-43), all parts of the biographies of some rings. To justify closer study of these diminutive objects, the volume’s ultimate purpose, Jasperse further invokes rings’ special relationships with human bodies, their portability, and their late medieval diffusion at all social levels.
As the essays cover such heterogeneous subjects, a summary of chapter contents cannot be selective. Chapter 1, by Mariah Proctor-Tiffany, examines French documents from 1328-1413 that mention rings to reconstruct the growing dissemination of these artifacts, and their social functions: weavers of “emotional communities,” certifiers of authenticity, signs of marriage and sometimes love, and markers of aristocrats’ taste. In the second chapter Eleanor Standley instead deploys late medieval and early modern English archaeological data, greatly enhanced in recent decades by the Portable Antiquities Scheme but nonetheless scanty. She finds rings serving various spiritual, economic, legal, and aesthetic ends, but especially that they were “emotants” capable of causing intense feelings, regardless of their monetary value. Next Inés Calderón Medina surveys written evidence for rings in Reconquista Iberia, noting how military success in the south correlated with increased presence of expensive jewels in Christian lands, where some families turned them into heirlooms. However, Lateran IV’s requirement for ring exchanges at marriage also had an impact on ring usage, and a thing once associated with elites, sacraments, and contracts spread beyond those categories. Christian Raffensperger’s fourth chapter argues that two twelfth-century Rusian rings from Kiev were female-owned and reflect women’s authority, which he thinks places Rusian society squarely within the western European tradition (current EU foreign policy, the war in Ukraine, and political claims based on the medieval history of Muscovy weigh heavily on this essay). Returning to Iberia, in chapter 5 Ana Labarta synthesizes the mostly written information available on the use of rings in Islamic Iberia, from the tenth century to the seventeenth. The pious invocations on rulers’ rings were of great interest to chroniclers, as was the metal used (gold was deemed immodest), even when sealing was no longer done with rings. Labarta suggests that aristocrats’ rings could advertise political affiliation (pro- or anti-Almohad: 154), although, puzzlingly, Muhammad is seldom named on Andalusi rings. In the excellent sixth chapter Juliette Calvarin studies episcopal rings within the context of the Investiture Controversy, when these artifacts, and who gave them to whom, became charged with new theological and political significance. One of the virtues of this essay is that it looks at the early medieval period to understand the eleventh- to twelfth-century debates about rings as agentive signs. By the 1100s, bishops wore rings that no longer sealed documents, but signaled invisible truths like their faith and special status (182). A microhistory of Santo Estevo, a Galician monastery founded in the 900s that attained some local success only in the 1500s, constitutes Therese Martin’s seventh chapter. It retraces nine relic-rings from their twenty-first-century discovery back to the high Middle Ages and perhaps to the tenth century (finger ring dates are not as precise as tree ring dates). In chapter 8 Elizabeth McCord discusses the foundation of Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks center for Byzantine studies in the 1930s, and DO’s endowment with (among other things) a collection of rings by the Bliss family, finding that collectors of ancient artifacts a century ago did not always meet contemporary ethical standards. Finally, in the book’s epilogue Sandra Hindman proposes that the “social history” of medieval rings (231) includes their afterlives as modern collectibles, and their intelligent display in modern museums.
The essays engage very different places, times, and topics. Only diligent cross-referencing, aided by the three indexes (of people, places, and themes) reveals common threads. Several authors ponder who used rings: elites, obviously, but the glass marriage bands and pewter pilgrim rings of the later medieval period have survived poorly, and seldom been collected or displayed, so are underrepresented in the material record, as well as in premodern writings. The gender of ring wearers concerns some contributions (especially chapters 1, 2, 4, 8) but is hard to reconstruct. Since size is the main indicator linking extant rings with either women or men, such gendering is tenuous, unless rings have owners’ names engraved on them. Affection for particular rings, and human attachment to them for political, religious, or genealogical reasons, seems to have been widespread during the second millennium. Perhaps inevitably the official use of rings by the higher clergy, including early medieval abbesses, is another shared theme across The Social Lives of Medieval Rings, particularly in those chapters that rely on written sources. Finally, the slow retreat of signet rings and associated sealing practices across the Middle Ages also emerges in these pages.
Some issues that get short shrift, yet deserved more concerted treatment, include the high medieval sumptuary laws that limited ring use in Latin Christendom, as well as the contemporary Islamic strictures on gold rings (see 44, 85, 147). Though one learns that hands are the most sensual human body part because so full of nerves (46), one is left wondering what medieval people thought about hands. Some cultural history of medieval hands, including how ringed fingers altered both them and interpersonal communication, would have been helpful. Few authors mention which fingers were adorned by rings and why, and whether earrings and toe rings were part of the message too. And given that the “object trajectory” of rings began in mines, it is striking that in this book the social life of these objects starts at jewelers’ shops and not before. Nowadays it is possible to precisely localize the provenance of metals in alloys by x-ray fluorescence, measurement of isotopic ratios, and so on, yet no writer in this collection exploits the palaeosciences as a research pathway. More coverage of mining and metallurgy might have enriched the ring biographies attempted in The Social Lives of Medieval Rings. Still, Jasperse’s somewhat jumbled assemblage of essays shines a multifaceted light on a small but worthy subject.