Interview with Dr. Carolin Rinn

INTERVIEW WITH DR. CAROLIN RINN: PILGRIM BADGES FROM AACHEN AND CANTERBURY

Aachen Cathedral and Canterbury Cathedral were well-known medieval pilgrimage sites. Aachen Cathedral was built under the orders of Charlemagne in the late eighth century and he was buried there in 814. In addition to Charlemagne’s tomb, this site famously houses four holy relics: the tunic Mary wore when giving birth to Christ, Christ's swaddling clothes, the beheading cloth of John the Baptist, and Christ’s loincloth. Canterbury Cathedral is famous for being the site of the martyrdom of archbishop Thomas Becket in 1170, whose shrine became one of the most important pilgrimage sites in medieval Europe. 

To learn more about the medieval badges from these famous sites, Ann Marie Rasmussen met virtually with Dr. Carolin Rinn to discuss her dissertation, “Between Memory and Mediation of Salvation: Visuality and Mediality of the Medieval Pilgrim Badges from Aachen and Canterbury.” Carolin shared her experience studying medieval badges as an art historian and the findings and implications of her research. 

AMR: Your dissertation explores the visuality and mediality of pilgrim badges from Aachen and Canterbury. Could you tell us how these worked at the sites?

CR: The visuality – the iconography of the saints, the legends, the cathedral, and the design of these pilgrim badges – in Aachen and Canterbury is different. [In Aachen] you have Mary as the patron of the cathedral. You also have Charlemagne and some very important relics that are housed there. In Canterbury, visuality is centred around Thomas Becket and his spectacular martyrdom. Becket’s likeness to the suffering and sacrifice of Christ was a very big topic. The mediality of the badges from the two sites is also different. In Canterbury, there were both badges and ampullas. The ampullas contained the blood of Thomas Becket mixed with water, so they said. [This so-called “Canterbury water”] could heal diseases and cause miracles, which we know from the famous miracle records from that time. Buying an ampulla with this special substance was one reason pilgrims went to Canterbury. There are relationships between this substance and the images [on the ampullas], the front and the back of the badges, the frame, and so on. In Aachen, there was no substance. There are relics from Christ, John, and Mary at the site, but nothing pilgrims could take with them. Only the badges.  

AMR: Could you tell us about the mirrors on some of the Aachen badges?

Pewter badge, square frame intended to hold a mirror surmounted by tunic on rod supported on either side by posts topped with deorated diamond, eyelets, Aachen, Germany, 1475-1524, found in Nieuwlande, the Netherlands, 45 x 29 mm. The Van Beuningen Family Collection, inv. 0674 (Kunera 00430). Photograph courtesy of The Van Beuningen Family Collection.

CR: Oh, yes. Special badges from Aachen had these little mirrors built in. When the relics were shown to the pilgrims from the church tower, which has happened every seventh year, basically from the Middle Ages until now, we know that the pilgrims were massed far below. We know that mirrors were raised up to probably “see” the relic and its power, which was collected in the mirror. Many Aachen pilgrim badges bought by pilgrims included both a mirror and an image of the tunic Mary wore when giving birth to Christ, which was the top relic.

Another element commonly found on the Aachen badges that I found very interesting is the face of Christ. It's very big and very dominant. So I wondered, what's that about? You could say it’s the Vera Icon, but the Vera Icon was a relic in Rome, and therefore not specific to Aachen. There were relics of Christ in Aachen, but none related to the Vera Icon. At first, this made no sense to me, but then, what came into my mind was that this face of Christ – which is basically staring at you – might be a preview of seeing God at the end of time. There are these famous words in the Bible by the Apostle Paul who says, ‘You can see God only like in a dark mirror, but not clearly until the last judgement.’ This is a new finding from my dissertation.

AMR: But then you shall see face to face. [see 1 Corinthians 13.12]

CR: Yes, face to face. These words were very important for thinking about how devotion and prayer worked in the Middle Ages, especially during the fifteenth century: you never get to the point you want to get to, but you always have to try. I don’t think that every pilgrim would have thought about this impact, but well-educated pilgrims must have known these discussions and theories. This shows that pilgrim badges could also be used as devotional objects and as objects that led pilgrims to their way to salvation even after the pilgrimage. 

AMR: It is really interesting that you thought about this adult face of Christ. By the fifteenth century it’s on small objects everywhere. It’s obvious they’re not from Rome, but you see this face again and again. That's really interesting. There was no face relic of any kind at Aachen. 

CR: The interesting thing is that the badge also shows the theme of salvation: you have the tunic, which signifies Christ's birth in the beginning, and then you have this face of God in the end. I think the example of the face of Christ and the badge from Aachen shows that there's so much more to learn. It’s worthwhile to integrate badges into art historian research. They were important visual objects, and sometimes they are as tricky as big paintings to analyze. 

AMR: Of all the badges you've seen so far, which one is your favorite and why?

CR: My favorite is still the ampulla from Canterbury with Thomas Becket, which I saw at the British Museum. It's just so beautiful. On the front side, there’s Thomas Becket, and on the right and the left sides, there are soldiers with their swords. On the back, you see the murder within a seal-shaped frame.

AMR: Their swords are raised. It's like the minute before the swords fall, right? 

Front of pewter ampulla, three knights assassinate Saint Thomas Becket, 1170-1200, England, object reference: 1921,0216.62. Photograph courtesy of © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence.

Back of pewter ampulla, pointed oval panel with the martyrdom, inscribed + OPTIM EGROR MEDIC FIT TOMA BONOR [Thomas is the best doctor for the worthy sick]. Photograph courtesy of © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence.

CR: Yes! It's just so beautiful. I think it also works as a devotional object because of image on the back, which was worn near the heart. Having a badge near the heart of the pilgrim plays with this idea that you could impress good images into your heart with prayers during devotions. 

AMR: There’s a very famous piece from Amsterdam, a homemade altar that has had two pilgrim badges nailed onto it. It’s clear in this case that the badges have been repurposed into a devotional object. But in other cases, it's not possible to prove it, but it makes sense. 

CR: Yes, it's not possible to prove it, but I think as an art historian, if you're dealing with medieval art, you can’t prove many things, but you can show they could be possible. In this case, in that region around Canterbury at that time, we know that there were these ideas of impressing your soul with good images and seeing Thomas Becket as a good role model. Not everybody knew this, probably. The monks of Canterbury did at least. And I think it's possible that there were viewers who had these ideas in the back of their mind.

AMR: Oh, absolutely. By the fifteenth century people are beginning to argue about symbols and signs and their efficacy. Badges are made to work within these complex representational systems. The more you bring to them, the more they can say to you – just as you say, they can work on different levels. 

CR: I think the idea of pilgrim badges as cheap mass products has led some scholars to think badges are not complex. Not every badge has these complexities, but some do. This is important because pilgrim badges were a medium for everybody. On every level of thinking or living in the Middle Ages, low or high, you can gain something from the pilgrim badges. I think that's fascinating.

Carolin Rinn studied art history, classical archaeology, and philosophy at the University of Giessen (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen). After an internship at the British Museum, Carolin returned to the University of Giessen to complete a PhD in Medieval Studies. Under the supervision of Markus Späth and Silke Tammen, she wrote a dissertation entitled, “Zwischen Erinnerung und Heilsvermittlung: Visualität und Medialität der mittelalterlichen Pilgerzeichen aus Aachen und Canterbury.” She presently works with the archeological excavation company SPAU, where she offers her historical expertise to guide visitors through various sites, which she views as a pilgrimage of sorts. She continues her research with medieval badges through her work with the Pilgerzeichendatenbank, an online database of pilgrim badges. 

Edited by Hannah Gardiner and Dr. Ann Marie Rasmussen. The interview took place on July 19, 2021. This post was originally published on the Medieval Badges blog on September 6, 2021.

Badges Across Europe: Rostock, Part Four

GEOGRAPHY LESSON 4: Mobile, mutable images

The badges from Rostock and their corroborating evidence testify to the wide-ranging mobility of Rostock pilgrims. This fact should not surprise us; after all, the burghers of Rostock were sea-faring merchants and traders. The sum total of these artifacts suggests that piety wove together many strands of the lives of the inhabitants of medieval Rostock.

The bells in their churches sounded, as it were, with the voices of the saints and divine figures represented on their in-cast badges. Returned travelers must have told stories of miraculous rescues and journeys of thanksgiving, of long treks undertaken for the soul of a deceased or for the chance of inheritance, or of taking up arms to earn salvation by converting to Christianity the Prussian polytheists who lived only a few hundred kilometres to the east. The surviving evidence usually concerns men but here and there women and even children appear in it as well. Sometime around 1254-56, the archival evidence tells us, one Henricus de Horneshusen traveled to Livonia with his wife and son. The image below is a detail from the Saint Hedwig Altarpiece at Church of Saint Catherine in Brandenburg, which is located about 280 kilometres south of the city of Rostock. The Saint Hedwig Altarpiece, made around the year 1500, shows a man, a woman, and a child wearing hats adorned with pilgrim badges.

Selection from Saint Hedwig Altarpiece, Church of Saint Catherine, Brandenburg, Germany, ca. 1500. Photograph courtesy of photographer: Dirk Jacob.

The fact remains, however, that the archaeological evidence could suggest that medieval pilgrims threw their badges away at journey’s end. What might this tell us about the way medieval pilgrims viewed their religious badges? 

Seeking to explain why so many pilgrim badges turn up in wet soil deposits in and along rivers (the Thames, the Seine, the Meuse, and so on), the idea circulated in and beyond medieval circles for decades that medieval pilgrims tossed their badges into rivers at journey’s end as a sign of thanksgiving. This “ritual deposition theory,” as art historian Jennifer Lee calls it, popular though it is, is not borne out by other evidence. There is good evidence that medieval badges were discarded as scrap metal, for example. Disposing of religious badges in latrines, whose contents in turn were flushed into rivers or used as backfill or infill on construction sites, further undermines the ritual deposition theory. It seems more likely that pilgrims at times treated religious badges as unimportant objects; when a badge’s purpose had been fulfilled, it was discarded.

A more promising theory that conforms better to the archaeological evidence is that religious badges were de-venerated, meaning that the badges lost their ritual-like, religious status as a hallowed or revered object and could therefore be discarded as waste. Perhaps, as Lee hypothesizes, religious badges “were more important as signs of a temporary social role (that of pilgrim) than as representatives of the object of the pilgrim’s devotion” (11). The discarded badges suggest that “many pilgrims did make a clear distinction between the venerable images at the pilgrim centres and the cheap, mass-produced copies that they bought to wear, and then to throw away” (Lee, 11). This theory is exciting because, as Lee points out, de-veneration is “a characteristically modern way to regard images” (10), which makes these medieval religious badges, thrown into latrines, the first tangible evidence of image de-veneration.

Does tossing a religious badge into a latrine make a medieval pilgrim less pious? Probably not. Rather, it shows us someone using images in ways that are, in fact, modern, “distinguish[ing] between different types of images with mutable and context-dependent significance” (Lee, 11). Meticulous attention to the medieval religious badges found in Rostock, Germany reveals that some of the practices of the Rostock city dwellers are arrestingly familiar, even when they are embedded in a historical era distant from our own.

Written by Dr. Ann Marie Rasmussen. This post was originally published on the Medieval Badges blog on March 22, 2021.

Works Cited

Ansorge, Jörg. “‘pelgrimmatze in de ere des almechteghen godes’: Pilgerzeichen und Schriftquellen zum mittelalterlichen Wallfahrtswesen in Rostock,” in Verknüpfungen des neuen Glaubens. Die Rostocker Reformationsgeschichte in ihren translokalen Bezügen, edited by Heinrich Holze and Kristen Skottki. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck-Ruprecht, 2019, pp. 29–83.

Lee, Jennifer. “Medieval pilgrims’ badges in rivers: the curious history of a non-theory.” Journal of Art Historiography. no. 11 (2014): pp. 1–11.