Impressive Money: An Art History of Print before the Press

The Department of Art History is pleased to present the 2024 Peter H. Brieger Memorial Lecture

Refreshements will be served. All are welcome!

Impressive Money: An Art History of Print before the Press
Associate Professor Sonja Drimmer
Department of the History of Art & Architecture
University of Massachusetts Amherst

Centuries before Europe had the printing press, it had print culture. Print technology was, in fact, one of the oldest techniques for serially producing images and objects that medieval Europe had known. Artisans used print for seal matrices and their impressions in wax, inked blocks for producing patterned textiles, coins struck from metal dies, hammered badges, eucharistic hosts pressed in hot irons, hallmarks, the list goes on. While the history of art tends to ascribe to the printing press a pivotal role, prompting a revolution to representation and reception of the image, models for thinking about the relationship between print and representation long preceded the advent of replication by woodcut and movable type. This talk examines the political power of the most widely circulated print medium in the decades preceding and coinciding with the Wars of the Roses: namely, money. It was during this period that coins became a flashpoint for political statement and sedition, and it was the nature of its imagery--the "preynt," to use Middle English terminology--on its surface that sparked an exuberant outburst of response, both in word and in image.