Coins and medals are similar in format and content but are distinguished in that coins (as well as banknotes and tokens) bear indications of the role that they play within the monetary economy, while medals exist only for the information they convey about the people, places, and events they depict or those who display them.
It is a commonplace of classical and medieval numismatics that coinage was the emanation of political authority most frequently encountered by the populace as a whole, and hence constitutes direct evidence for the information that the issuer wished to be disseminated to the users. Even in the modern era, coins are ubiquitous in the hands and pockets of most of the world’s population and represent a message that is aimed at the public, but it is difficult to estimate the degree of reception of the information contained on them. Though endless discussion, plans, and drafts went into the series of circulating quarters issued from 1999 to 2008 by the United States with reverses commemorating the individual states, it is difficult to imagine that many of the users made more than a glancing perusal of them—to say nothing of deriving significant information about the various states from their representation on the coins.
The information carried by coins is conveyed by three elements—physical aspects of them as objects, plus the images and inscriptions stamped onto their two surfaces. It is actually the physical aspects of color, size, and edge treatment that constitute the most common information used by consumers to classify frequently encountered coins—observations that, taken together, form an almost subliminal identity of the piece in question. Only with unfamiliar coins would the average user examine the images or inscriptions to identify and hence evaluate a coin. Color serves the function of distinguishing gold-, silver-, and copper-based coins, which generally fall in that order in terms of relative valuation. Size is mainly a matter of diameter, but the combination of diameter and thickness (plus the relative density of the metal) determines the weight, which is only rarely used today in identifying coins but played a regular role in the medieval and *early modern marketplace. Edge treatment usually refers to the placing of ridges on the edges of coins (milling), which sometimes distinguishes denominations (as in the difference between the US nickel and quarter). Even in contemporary coinages in which all denominations are made of the same cupro-nickel alloy, traditional distinctions of color, size, and edge treatment are maintained to aid in the recognition of denominations.
The images (types) placed on a coin are usually identifiers of the issuing authority. Since the fifteenth century, most monarchical polities of Europe and the Americas have placed a portrait bust of the current ruler on the obverse of the coin. Since classical antiquity, it has been the practice of nonmonarchical states to avoid portraits and to use as the obverse type a representation meant to identify and symbolize the state as a whole, such as an animal, an allegorical figure, a building, or a cityscape. In the course of the twentieth century, many nonmonarchical states adopted the practice of using a portrait of a deceased individual of national significance as the obverse type of their coins.
The most common reverse image has been a heraldic device representing the issuing authority as a whole or the family of the ruler; in many cases these are extremely detailed in their quarterings, mottos, helms, crests, and supporters, probably more for the sake of impressing the viewer with the prestige of the tradition than with offering useful and readable information. The same range of symbols that appear on the obverse of nonmonarchical issues also may appear on the reverses of their coins.
The inscriptions on coins (legends) are secondary to the images on coins of the European tradition but dominate the surfaces of both sides of the coin on most pre-twentieth-century Asian issues. These commonly bear information on the authority, place, and date of issue, as well as religious expressions, and can be arrayed across the whole surface of each face or in various configurations. Legends on European coins generally go clockwise around the central type and were in Latin in an ancient epigraphic style with all uppercase letters on coins of early modern Europe, but in the course of the nineteenth century most issuers changed to *vernacular language (with the exception of Great Britain), and often to a more readily legible lettering font. The obverse legends usually identify the individual represented, often with long and abbreviated lists of titles, or the name of the issuing nonmonarchical authority.
Coin reverses often have technical information in their legends, including the denomination, the year of minting, the mint, and even the mint master’s initials, sometimes arrayed horizontally beneath and separated from the reverse type by a line (exergue). Especially on low-value coins, the identifications of the denomination may take up all or most of the reverse, in either words, numbers, or symbols. In general, it can be supposed that the only aspect of the written information on either face of a coin relevant to most users would be the denomination.
As paper money is manufactured from a nonvaluable basic material, the information provided by size and color is seldom relevant to users. Most of what goes onto paper money in terms of types and legends has a primary purpose of discouraging counterfeiting, not only by such obvious exhortations as “To counterfeit is death,” but through elaborate scrollwork, mismatched type fonts, intentionally misspelled words, and hand-inked signatures and serial numbers. The one crucial piece of information put on a banknote is its denomination, usually both in numerals and spelled out; in the case of the earliest paper money of China in the fourteenth century the denomination is illustrated with an image of the string of coins for which the note could be redeemed. The larger surface of the banknote allows much more complicated depictions than that of the coin, frequently including vignettes related to the industry and the architecture of the issuing state or regional entity.
The manufacture of low-denomination copper-based coinage by a state is often done at a financial loss to the issuer, so in many times and places there has been no officially minted small change. This gap has sometimes been filled by privately issued tokens, most notably in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in the United States in the nineteenth; these are generally the size of the coin they’re meant to replace. The issue of tokens was often sponsored by local businesses, especially store owners, and they usually bear the name of the issuing place and establishment; as such they constitute an early and widespread form of private advertising. Jetons resemble tokens in general appearance but usually have a nonmonetary function, such as use on counting boards, in gaming, or as calling cards of individuals.
Medals are totally nonmonetary objects but are close to coins in their appearance and manufacture; they have no function other than to be collected and displayed. The medium took its inspiration in the fifteenth century from large, high-relief ancient Roman bronze coins called sestertii, which were thought by many scholars in the *Renaissance and through the eighteenth century to have been commemorative rather than monetary in nature. The earliest medals were produced on behalf of Renaissance princes as personal gifts to friends or followers; because of technical limitations on the ability to strike coins of high relief, especially in bronze, they were cast in only a few examples and survive mainly as aftercasts (that is, made later from a mold formed from the original casting). The obverse generally bears the portrait of an individual while the reverse bears a heraldic device or, more commonly, a scene considered emblematic of the spiritual nature of the individual whose physical aspect is presented on the obverse.
In the course of the sixteenth century, as minting technology evolved, medals were struck rather than cast and took on the proportions and general appearance of Roman sestertii. Rulers began to issue series of medals with scenes of their achievements represented on the reverses, often imitating ancient precedents; Medici princes and Habsburg emperors figure importantly in these developments. Individuals began to collect medals in order to have sets of three-dimensional representations of contemporary and historical figures, and artists produced pieces specifically to sell to such collectors, often depicting ancient or even mythological individuals for whom no genuine coins had been produced.
As in many aspects of the culture of the early modern age, the disparate developments of the medal came together in the court of Louis XIV, who created the Académie des Inscriptions to invent the allegorical scenes and Latin legends for the reverses of his series of medals and gave sets of this Historia Augusta in various metals to visitors as a portable invocation of the glories of Versailles. In succeeding centuries, the governmental issue of medals was joined by their issue by cities and organizations and by entrepreneurs producing series for the benefit of collectors; as these medals had no official or monetary value, the information they carried was their prime raison d’être. The nineteenth-century invention of die-engraving machinery brought the work of sculptors rather than engravers to the medium, with a growing emphasis on the artistic aspects of pieces over the information they conveyed. In the twentieth century, medals sometimes bore political and patriotic themes, often mirroring the graphic arts of the period. In recent decades, there has been a growing interest among artists and collectors in the medal as small sculpture, often bearing little or no information.
Decorations constitute a source of information on an individual, for instance, his or her membership in a group or receipt of an award, destined to be physically worn on the person, and hence constitute a conspicuous form of identity information in social life. Particularly prestigious, and still widely used, are the decorations known as orders. These began as the insignia of the military monastic communities of the Middle Ages and in the early modern period were extended to societies of members of royal families and individuals of high status recognized by a sovereign. Napoleon created the Légion d’honneur as recognition for both military and civil service; though it has all the grades of membership and sashes, crosses, and stars of other orders when worn on formal attire, it is the small rosette of the order worn in the button hole of daily clothing that most commonly identifies its wearer as one of the elite of French society. Military award insignia (usually called medals) constitute another wearable sign of achievement that came into widespread use in Napoleonic Europe and spread throughout the world; as in the case of orders, they are commonly issued in a series of sizes and formats to reflect the status of the recipient. Medals for war service sometimes have the names of the various battles in which the individual participated on bars attached to the ribbon from which the medal itself is suspended.
Alan M. Stahl
See also commodification; forgery; inscriptions; money