Early modern merchant’s marks in medieval English manuscripts

Abstract

AbstractMerchant’s marks were symbols used by merchants and traders from the early middle ages to the seventeenth century. They functioned as nonverbal signatures in trade networks, and in later centuries as quasiheraldic emblems for wealthy mercantile families. They are common in medieval architecture, and were widely studied in this context by nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century scholars. Their presence in books is more difficult to trace, and often crosses period boundaries as owners inscribed books acquired second hand. This article reveals a previously unexplored history of Tudor merchant’s marks entered into medieval manuscript books. A number of sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century merchants acquired luxury copies of literary texts produced in the fifteenth century, often circulating, gifting, or bequeathing them to others. Merchant’s marks functioned as symbols of professional identity in these practices of ownership and exchange. The article considers the implications of this self‐fashioning for our understanding of early modern book use, demonstrating how the ownership and social function of a book might have been detached from its contents, reflecting instead its aesthetic value, or the space it offered for memorialisation or recordkeeping.