MEDIEVAL Religious and Profane BADGES

Badges are cheap, popular ornaments dating from the thirteenth to the middle of the sixteenth centuries. Most badges were cast from molds, using an easily processed lead-tin alloy. They were manufactured and sold in large quantities, and distributed among all classes of the population.

Badges were worn - either pinned to, or sewn on, hats, coats or packs - as ornament but always with a specific meaning: as lovetokens, as symbols of piety, or the exact opposite. They could also indicate to which brotherhood or political party the wearer belonged, and they were sold as souvenirs on feastdays. It is well known that there must have been millions of pilgrims' badges. Pilgrims bought them as souvenirs of the places of pilgrimage they visited, or on church feastdays. 
 

>> Lucas van Leyden: The Pilgrims (engraving)

>> Pieter Breughel de Oude: The Pilgrim (pen over black crayon)


The sale of profane or non-religious (and erotic) badges must have taken place in the same commercial manner. Itinerant pedlars and storytellers sold them on markets or fairs; wherever large groups of people gathered.

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AN ICONOGRAPHIC DATA BANK OF THE LATE MIDDLE AGES
 

The wealth of representation on the pins is overwhelming, the themes inexhaustible.
It is possible to range them from the purely devotional to the extremely pornographic;
from Mary, Christ and the Holy Pilgrim James of Compostella, through many known and unknown saints and martyrs, kings, knights, musicians, millers and lovers, weapons, domestic objects, animals and independently operating phalli and vulvas, to intriguing jokes on the subject of pilgrimages, such as the pilgrim dressed as a phallus crowned by a woman and the vulva dressed up as a pilgrim.

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The late medieval badge is a fascinating visual source, not only for archaeologists and art historians,
but also for researchers from other disciplines.
It affords an unique insight into the iconographic culture of the late middle ages.

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During the last decades thousands of these small lead-tin pins have been unearthed. This is specifically due to the metaldetector.

Nowadays Dutch archaeologists use metaldetectors, but it is chiefly the amateur detectors to whom we owe the finds of knife handles, buttons, coins, miniature domestic objects including toys, but also badges. The number of badges and fragments of badges found in the Netherlands and Flanders and placed in private or public collections now amounts to many thousands.

New finds are regularly presented to the Medieval Badges Foundation for assessment and inclusion in the documentation system.

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