Picturing Devotion: Thomas Becket and the iconography of pilgrim badges in the Canterbury Collection

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Overshadowed by monumental and high-status works of art, the study of pilgrims' badges has remained a neglected field in medieval visual culture until very recently. These tiny, tangible objects made of lead alloy provide an unparalleled insight into the personal devotional habits of ordinary pilgrims. My doctoral research intends to examine the vast range of medieval pilgrims' badges in the Canterbury collection (CC), which remains unpublished, mostly uncatalogued, and relatively unknown in scholarship. This assortment of souvenirs dating from c.1250-1499, many of which were discovered in the mud of the River Stour, are currently stored in the Beaney House of Art and Knowledge. The majority of these artworks represent imagery related to the cult of St Thomas Becket (archbishop of Canterbury).On 29 December 1170 Becket was brutally murdered inside Canterbury Cathedral. After the reports of many miracles, he was canonised just three years later on 13 February 1173. By 7 July 1220, his relics were translated into a magnificent Gothic shrine in the Trinity Chapel of the Cathedral while his head was enclosed in a head reliquary placed in the Corona Chapel. The popularity of Becket transformed the Cathedral into a major site of pilgrimage, attracting thousands of visitors from across Christendom until the destruction of his shrine in 1538. This new examination of a hitherto ignored corpus of material culture- the Becket badges preserved in the CC- has the potential to provide new insight into the invention, variation, and significance of the iconography of Becket's cult, both from within a local Canterbury context and with reference to its wider currency across the Global Middle Ages.By the twelfth century, it had become common practice for Christians undertaking a pilgrimage to purchase their own personal souvenir upon reaching their destination. Quick to manufacture and inexpensive to produce, they constitute one of the earliest examples of mass production in Europe. The anonymous author of the fifteenth-century The Tale of Beryn, an addition to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, implied that medieval pilgrims viewed each badge as a unique object: "Ech man set his sylver in such thing as they liked." These "signs" (their contemporary name) not only embodied and testified to the completion of a pilgrimage; they could also express the identity, status, and personal taste of the pilgrim who acquired it. Ultimately, there is no doubt that these "signs" are central to our understanding of the habitus of medieval pilgrims.There is no other extant type of pilgrim badge to rival the sheer quantity and variety of signs associated with the cult of Becket. Approximately 275 items are currently in the CC of pilgrim souvenirs and about 100 of them display a clear visual reference to Becket. They are in need of a systematic study, including a detailed iconographic analysis of each object. Extending directly from my MA dissertation, which examined the CC for the first time, I hope my doctoral thesis will contribute a wealth of new research into material culture, Gothic iconography, pilgrimage networks of exchange, and the development and diffusion of saints' cults through a close and cautious inspection of the CC.