Seals in Sussex

Our understanding of the relationship between visual culture and regional identity in the medieval British Isles is being transformed through the study of medieval seals. Art historians have argued that the visual culture of the British Isles during the middle ages was a rich patchwork with important pockets of local diversity. However, they have made little attempt to apply the sigillographic sources to the problem of charting variations in visual culture across the British Isles. To establish a foundation for comparative regional analysis based on seals, a dataset of seals of Sussex in the period c.1150-1350 was created. The dataset includes seals from several repositories, including the Huntington Library (California), The National Archives (Kew), Magdalen College (Oxford), Senate House Library (London), The British Library (London), and the East Sussex Record Office (Sussex).