More Than Bling: Inscribed Jewellery Between Social Distinction, Amatory Gift-Giving, And Spiritual Practice

One of the most fascinating aspects of inscribed jewellery is how far it can cross time and space, and how it can connect different cultural practices and fields of knowledge. It is often durable, and attractive or valuable enough to be transported and preserved. For example, a ring with a Kufic inscription interpreted as il-la-lah (“For/to Allah”) found its way to ninth-century Sweden, and survived into the twenty-first century.1 The ring began as a religious ornament, was traded, maybe given as a gift, worn as an amulet, buried with a woman, unearthed and misinterpreted by nineteenth-century archaeologists, and finally analysed with an electron microscope and turned from Arabic silver into a virtual 3D model. The ring has thus been part of religious devotional customs, trade, personal ornamentation, burial cult, and archaeological practices. Medieval literature expresses great interest in setting up such constellations around inscribed jewellery, which often refuse strong categorisation and instead entwine different phenomena, practices and fields.2 This article interprets such examples, mostly from Middle High German, Old and Middle English texts. As I will show, jewellery functions primarily to create relationships between people—it can symbolize, initiate, affect, and bear witness to them. Inscriptions can increase such constellations’ complexity: they can intensify or personalise gifts, add layers of ambiguity, and even stress the way objects interact with people as nonhuman actors.