Sigillography

Did You Know?

• Sigillography features in the plot of King Ottokar's Sceptre (1939/1947), one of The Adventures of Tintin.
• Tintin accompanies Professor Alembick, a sigillographer, on a research trip to the fictional Balkan nation of Syldavia.

Etymology

The word sigillography blends the Latin for 'seal' with a Greek suffix meaning 'description'. Anton Stefano Cartari effectively coined it in Italian as sigillografia in 1682. English usage came later, with the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citations from 1879 for sigillography and 1882 for sigillographer. The synonym sphragistics, from the Greek for 'seal', first appears in English in 1836.

History

Antiquaries such as Thomas Elmham and John Rous began recording and discussing historic seal use in the 15th century. In the 16th and 17th centuries, seal study became a widespread antiquarian activity, with notable early students including Robert Glover, John Dee, Sir Robert Cotton, and Nicolas-Claude de Peiresc. The first published treatises dedicated to seals included Giorgio Longo's De anulis signatoriis antiquorum (Milan, 1615); Olivier de Wree's Sigilla comitum Flandriae (Bruges, 1639); and Theodorus Hoepingk's De sigillorum prisco et novo jure tractatus (Nuremberg, 1642).

Jean Mabillon's De re diplomatica (1681) and Johann Michael Heineccius' De veteribus Germanorum aliarumque nationum sigillis (1710) were especially influential. In England, John Anstis compiled a substantial manuscript study titled Aspilogia, while the first printed work was John Lewis's Dissertation on the Antiquity and Use of Seals in England (1740). In the later 19th century, German scholars Hermann Grotefend and Otto Posse, and French scholars Louis Douët d'Arcq and Germain Demay further developed sigillography.

The discipline is also important in Byzantine studies, involving the study of Byzantine lead seal impressions; over 40,000 extant seals survive. Gustave Schlumberger's Sigillographie de l'empire Byzantin (1904) is one of the largest compendiums. The first international colloquium on Byzantine sigillography was held at Dumbarton Oaks in August 1986.