What kicked off the Transition Period production of brass badges, then, and what story might it tell about the Christianization of Denmark? King Harald Bluetooth’s bold proclamation on the Jelling stone masks both the existence of Scandinavian Christians who preceded it and a long process of conversion that followed. During those initial years, local communities all over Scandinavia seem to have opted for a kind of middle way, deciding for themselves which teachings and rituals to adopt and which ancient traditions to keep. The outcome was a hybridized version of Christianity that preserved many ancient customs and that prevailed as long as the organized Church remained weak, especially in rural areas. An important component of this hybridized Christianity was a kind of collective approach to devotion, which put greater weight on outwards conformity than on individual conviction.

Our arguments begin to come full circle. It stands to reason that the brass badges of the Transition Era functioned as Christian amulets. Around the year 1100 C.E. Ribe was one of only a very few cities and ecclesiastical centres in Denmark. It featured the predecessor to the modern cathedral church, which happened to be timbered instead of stone-built, in line with contemporary custom all over Europe. Next to this building church goers would find the workshop where they purchased some sacred amulets to carry home to their rural homestead. This way, the new badge-owners managed to fertilize the orbit of their daily lives and activities not only with mere Christian symbolism, but also with the supernatural powers that resided within their purchase – at least, according to their pre-modern world view! This, in turn, facilitated a new stage of ‘inwards’ conversion that would overtake the entire country. The widespread use of Transition Era badges all over the Danish realm points towards a concerted effort to make the laity embrace Christian beliefs at an individual level. In the wake of this, the Danish landscape came to experience a profound re-organization in regard to administration and religious practise. A new wave of church building activity began that left its distinct mark on the modern Danish countryside. As a result, Denmark’s quaint country churches stand today as a living testimony to the growing political and economic power of the medieval Church. They are physical manifestations of certain changes in theological practice that increasingly stressed the importance of personal belief and the need to make the teachings and salvific practices of Christianity accessible to all believers. 

Even though the Transitional Era brass badge industry still acted very much on a regional level, it seems to us that it implemented similar theological principles and that it unfolded similar economical dynamics as the comprehensive production of religious pewter badges in Europe, from around 1200 and onwards. And yet, it should be noted that the Transition Era workshop in Ribe challenges our modern concepts of how badges were made. There are indications that high and late medieval badge workshops implemented a labour division between highly skilled craftspeople, who were carving different designs into stone, and pewter smiths who merely melted the ore and poured it into the molds. At some religious centres, these molds were made by goldsmiths and owned by the abbey or church, which then oversaw the production of the authorized badges that were sold at their sites. These stone molds were used and reused to make hundreds of badges. All of this corresponds deceptively well with the modern industrial dichotomy between a caste of designers who rule over the drawing board and another caste of manual labourers on the factory floor who restrict themselves to pouring someone else’s design into matter … And yet, our archaeological finds from Transition Era Ribe seem to speak a somewhat different language! Here, the metalsmiths operated with clay and with copper alloys. The real challenge with those materials lies not in designing some intriguing iconography, but rather in designing one that also lives up to the technical challenges of a different kind of serial production – which will only reveal themselves to the practicing caster of copper alloys.

Nowadays, scholars of archaeology tend to envision ancient artisans as active creators of the social universe they once inhabited. After all, many choices within the manufacturing process are culturally conditioned and express a mindset. An analysis of the production chain offers a key both to the cultural habitus of individual casters and to the inner workings of society during the historic transformation from pre-Christian to Christian Viking Age and beyond. And thanks to new digital revolution in archaeology, our project team will be able to trace down some previously invisible ‘finger prints’ that the casting profession has left on our material record. This way, we will be able to show how several generations of metal casters contributed to making the far North a part of medieval Christendom and how they enabled Scandinavia to enrich the culture of North Western Europe with innovative ideas and novel items … maybe also in regard to the pilgrim badge tradition?

Further Reading

Croix S, Neiß M, Sindbæk SM. The réseau opératoire of Urbanization: Craft Collaborations and Organization in an Early Medieval Workshop in Ribe, Denmark. Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 2019;29(2):345-364. doi:10.1017/S0959774318000525

Michael Neiß and Rebeca Franco Valle. Devices of Ekphrasis? A Multimodal Perspective on Viking Age Animal Art. Text & Image 36.2 (November 2021) 143–170.

https://pure.kb.dk/da/persons/mette-h%C3%B8jmark-s%C3%B8vs%C3%B8