More than Money: Tracing the Lifetime of a Medieval Coin

In their sheer ubiquity, it is easy to think of coins as things that have always been around and will always continue to be around. We rarely consider when a penny might retire, or the process by which a quarter was made, or the origins of the imagery on a nickel. Stated simply, coins are too often overlooked. In everyday life and even in looking at historical artifacts, we neglect the significance of coins, dismissing them as common and predictable. Especially when art museums carry enormous collections of coins, we lose the sense of each one having a story, a timeline. However, by looking more closely at individual coins it becomes apparent that they all had a beginning, middle, and end and existed in the context of a much bigger story.

Analysis of imagery and of the physical state of a Medieval coin can reveal details about its time period. For example, I found through researching the Coin of Romanos IV that a Medieval coin could tell us about the role of Christianity and the imperial class in 11^th century Byzantium. This led to more questions, some more technical and others conceptual. What would the process of minting have looked like? What tools were used in creating a coin? In what other ways might a coin be altered or debased? What does this say about the society in which the coin existed? I wanted to know more about how a coin would come to be and then progress through various stages in its life.

In my exhibit I will trace the lifetime of a Medieval coin, going beyond circulation via commerce and observing the production, transformation, and debasement of a common coin.

By incorporating objects like minting tools, coin weights, and clippings along with various coins, this exhibit will illustrate the story of a coin and what it can tell us about its Medieval world. It will cover technical aspects of production and regulation as well as look at physical alteration and the change in a coin's role over time. All of this can speak to the bigger story of the Middle Ages. My hope is that this exhibit will help make clear how multidimensional coins actually are. They are each their own object with a story behind them, and they are far more than just currency.