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On the typology of the texts that appear on migration‐era bracteates
Author(s) -
Mees Bernard
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
early medieval europe
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1468-0254
pISSN - 0963-9462
DOI - 10.1111/emed.12075
Subject(s) - iconology , scholarship , epigraphy , typology , hermeneutics , interpretation (philosophy) , semiotics , literature , period (music) , history , philosophy , art , art history , linguistics , epistemology , classics , archaeology , iconography , aesthetics , political science , law
Historiographically, the main tradition of interpreting the Old Germanic bracteates has been that developed by Karl Hauck in the late 1960s. Much contested by critics, Hauck's bracteate iconology has also influenced the way the runic legends that appear on the golden amulets are understood in much continental scholarship. This paper presents an alternative interpretation of such testimonies of early Nordic language based on a less‐ambitious approach to the decoration and associated epigraphy of the controversial migration‐period finds, grounding its analysis in a more explicitly theorized linguistic and semiotic hermeneutics.