Mobile Technologies and the Mobilization of Medieval Urban Identity

Abstract

A particular category of signs of identity, seals, circulated in urban spaces as a form of public platform. Serving their owners both as self-extension and as means of engagement with their environment, seals relayed urban identity as it flowed in a concourse of multiple devices, even as seal users themselves circulated and inflected identity beyond its network of media. The paper considers the ways in which mobility, replication, and miniaturization, in predicating particular modes of signification, affordedmedieval cities and citizens a mechanism for the ongoing construction, performance, and communication of their plural personality. The replicated nature of seal impressions, by forming a continuing series of repeated statements, created a trans-temporal template that may well have fostered identity as mobilization. Yet, however immobilized, the formulation of identity on city seals acquired innovative forms that transported representation away from symbolism and toward verism. City seals, in dealing with the representation of a collective person, engaged the tropes of distinction and individuation.