“What numismatist worthy of the name,” asks Yvan Loskoutoff in the introduction to this collection of essays, “can afford to neglect blason” (7), that is, the visual language of heraldry? Coins and medals are invested with a system of signs that resemble, in their composition and conventional symbolism, the formal rules and charges (flowers, animals, objects) used to create coats of arms. Many coins from the thirteenth century onward were stamped with heraldic badges to indicate the family ties of the ruler or to assert authority based on dynastic claims. The French écu, Italian scudo, and Spanish escudo (known in English as the “doubloon”) were so called because they carried the armorial shield of the ruling house. Héraldique et numismatique I, the first of two volumes of this name, presents twelve essays demonstrating how heraldry can shed light on the iconography and chronology of coins and medals of the medieval and early modern periods. A second volume devoted to the use of heraldry in seals will appear later.

The first half of the book concentrates on coins, mostly French from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century. Michel Dhénin documents the evolution of the royal arms on the gold écus of the French kings from Louis IX to the period of the Hundred Years’ War, and Joëlle Bouvry provides a similar analysis for the coins of the Counts of Toulouse and Provence. Here a knowledge of heraldry, especially the way a coat of arms is merged with another through quartering, allows us to follow the competing claims of the princely houses based on inheritance and marriage. Andrea Saccocci demonstrates how heraldry can solve problems in medieval chronology, specifically the succession of the Counts of Gorizia and the troubled decade of the 1320s in Padua, when that city was managed by vicars of the German emperor.

The second half of the book, comprising six essays devoted to medals, may be of more interest to historians of the early modern period. A common theme here is the tension between the transpersonal nature of heraldry, which proclaims the legitimacy of an individual’s status through inheritance, and the Renaissance emphasis on the development of personal virtù and genius, qualities that are independent of dynastic authority and even hostile to it. In her study of the earliest Italian-style medals in France, Inès Villela-Petit calls attention to the portrait armorié, seen on medals of Charles VII and Louis XII. Here the profile of the ruler is set within a field of fleurs-de-lis, an attempt to harmonize the personal features of the king with his dynastic background. Armelle Fémelat’s study of equestrian types on Italian medals of the Quattrocento shows how the medieval symbol of the ruler as armored horseman, identified only by the family arms on his shield, was combined with motifs conveying the unique character and achievements of the condottieri so portrayed. The medals of Pope Sixtus V (1585–90), examined by Yvan Loskoutoff, represent a conservative reaction against the classical and heroic imagery of his Renaissance predecessors. Sixtus preferred a medieval heraldic aesthetic of symmetrical compositions and static symbols, such as the famous example of a traveler asleep under a tree, commemorating the eradication of banditry in the Papal States.

Two essays by Fabrice Charton and Marie-Claude Canova-Green bring us to the Grand Siècle and the Petite Académie set up by Louis XIV to create a “medallic history” of his reign. The academicians found themselves competing with the Jesuit Claude-François Ménestrier, who published a series of engravings of imaginary medals, the Histoire du Roy Louis le Grand par les Medailles (1689). Both projects made use of heraldic imagery to help convey the timeless grandeur of the Sun King, but their theoretical differences are significant because these issues are still active in discourse about visual literacy today. The academicians regarded the medallic images as illustrations subordinate to a text, while Ménestrier, an expert on heraldry, expected the visual rhetoric of the pictures to convey meaning independent of logos. Ménestrier’s attitude, based on a Jesuit philosophy of perception that privileged the visual over the verbal, would ultimately contribute to the development of our modern visual culture where images are ubiquitous, authoritative, and utilized to maintain social conformity and control.