Touching the past: the Breadalbane Brooch and its bearers

Abstract

• The Breadalbane Brooch is a highlight of the British Museum’s early medieval Insular collection. A lavish accessory, it writhes with interlace and glitters with gold and glass gems. Encountering it on display, its first impact is as an art object rather than something that was made and used by real people in the past. This sense is reinforced by its provenance: not discovered in a grave on a person’s body, but emerging in a private collection in the twentieth-century, seemingly divorced from its early medieval bearers. In fact, the brooch preserves many signs of its relationship with people over time. Modifications to its form reveal concerns to redefine its cultural relevance; abrasions show how it may have been worn on the body; and deteriorated ornament point towards reversible wear, perhaps tailored towards the culturally diverse audiences of early medieval Britain. In these ways, the condition of the Breadalbane Brooch offers tangible clues about how people used, shaped and experienced the artefacts they owned, and what they might have meant to them in pragmatic, social and symbolic terms. It puts researchers, quite literally, in touch with past individuals.