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The first two sections delineate the early history of the nomina sacra, staurogram, and chi-rho, from the late first to third centuries AD as well as relevant early Christian discourse on the symbolic meanings of certain letters and graphic signs, and show how the staurogram and chi-rho developed from utilitarian abbreviation signs into symbolic visual proxies for God and Christological concepts. The next two sections provide an overview of the use of graphic signs as protective seals among various religious communities, with reference to artefacts such as the Bruce Codex and votive leaves from Water Newton, and compare the early usage of more acceptable Christian signs with the concurrent culture of the so-called ‘magical’ characteres. The final section underscores that the early development of Christian graphicacy should be seen in the context of a general predilection for apotropaic graphic devices in the Imperial period, and in late antiquity in particular.

This chapter surveys the origins of monograms in the Hellenistic world and their early usage in republican and early imperial Rome, and continues with a general overview of quantitative and qualitative changes in their application in the third and fourth centuries AD. It also examines the more general cultural background to the increasing popularity of late antique monograms as protective and intercessory devices, suggesting that the growing use of such invocational monograms in visual communication paralleled the increasing popularity of acclamations in oral communication. Finally, it employs a contextualized study of the dedication monogram in the Calendar of 354 as a window into fourth-century Roman calligraphic culture. The concluding section discusses the development of a new, contemplative quality of calligraphic monograms in the late fourth century, and shows how some Neoplatonic ideas and their Christian adaptations affected late antique graphicacy.

The concluding chapter highlights how the cultural history of graphic signs of authority in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages encapsulated the profound transformation of political culture in the Mediterranean and Europe from approximately the fourth to ninth centuries. It also reflects on the transcendent sources of authority in these historical periods, and the role of graphic signs in highlighting this connection. Finally, it warns that, despite the apparent dominant role of the sign of the cross and cruciform graphic devices in providing access to transcendent protection and support in ninth-century Western Europe, some people could still employ alternative graphic signs deriving from older occult traditions in their recourse to transcendent powers.

This chapter first examines various material media manifesting the use of monograms as signs of authority for early medieval kings and bishops and as visual tokens of social status for sixth- and seventh-century elites. It also surveys the functional usage of invocational cruciform devices, christograms, and the sign of the cross on material artefacts and manuscripts, both in the Christian East and the Latin West. The final section analyses the impact of late antique monogrammatic culture on the evolving early medieval discourse on the extralinguistic qualities of letters and the symbolic significance of their visual characteristics and on the appearance of monogrammatic lettering in Latin manuscripts. It also examines the importance of this cultural tradition for the origins of ‘monogrammatic initials’—initials that were composed of several letters combined in the manner of a monogram—a new visual phenomenon characteristic of early medieval graphicacy.

This chapter examines the monogrammatic display of authority in public buildings, and churches in particular—a practice that was established in the sixth century—and sets the three most influential architectural examples of that tradition in Constantinople within their contemporary Byzantine political and cultural contexts, namely St Polyeuktos, Sts Sergius and Bacchus, and Hagia Sophia. The final section of this chapter examines the continued use of personal monograms on capitals, chancel screens, and mosaics by early Byzantine emperors, as well as the appropriation of that imperial practice by early medieval ecclesiastical hierarchs in various parts of the post-Roman world—such as Constantinople and several cities in Asia Minor, Tomis in Romania, Zvart’nots in Armenia, Rome and Ravenna in Italy, as well as Grado, Porec, and Solin in the North Adriatic.

This book presents a cultural history of graphic signs such as the sign of the cross, christograms, monograms, and other graphic devices, examining how they were employed to relate to and interact with the supernatural world, and to represent and communicate secular and divine authority in the late antique Mediterranean and early medieval Europe. It analyses its graphic visual material with reference to specific historical contexts and to relevant late antique and early medieval texts as a complementary way of looking at the cultural, religious, and socio-political transition from the late Graeco-Roman world to that of medieval Europe. This monograph treats such graphic signs as typologically similar forms of visual communication, reliant on the visual-spatial ability of human cognition to process object-like graphic forms as proxies for concepts and abstract notions—an ability that is commonly discussed in modern visual studies with reference to categories such as visual thinking, graphic visualization, and graphicacy. Thanks to this human ability, the aforementioned graphic signs were actively employed in religious and socio-political communication in the first millennium ad. This approach allows for a synthetic study of graphic visual evidence from a wide range of material media that have rarely been studied collectively, including various mass-produced items and unique objects of art, architectural monuments, and epigraphic inscriptions, as well as manuscripts and charters. As such, this book will serve as a timely reference tool for historians, art historians, archaeologists, epigraphists, manuscript scholars, and numismatists as well as the informed general public.

This chapter examines the use of monograms as graphic signs of imperial authority in the late Roman and early Byzantine empire, from its appropriation on imperial coinage in the mid-fifth century to its employment in other material media in the following centuries. It also overviews the use of monograms by imperial officials and aristocrats as visible signs of social power and noble identity on mass-produced objects, dress accessories, and luxury items. The concluding section discusses a new social function for late antique monograms as visible tokens of a new Christian paideia and of elevated social status, related to ennobling calligraphic skills. This transformation of monograms into an attribute of visual Christian culture became especially apparent in sixth-century Byzantium, with the cruciform monograms appearing in the second quarter of the sixth century and becoming a default monogrammatic form from the seventh century onwards.

This chapter shows the unquestionable role of the sign of the cross as the primary sign of divine authority in Carolingian material and manuscript culture, a role partly achieved at the expense of the diminishing symbolic importance of the late antique christograms. It also analyses the appearance of new cruciform devices in the ninth century as well as the adaptation of the early Byzantine tradition of cruciform invocational monograms in Carolingian manuscript culture, as exemplified in the Bible of San Paolo fuori le mura and several other religious manuscripts. The final section examines some Carolingian carmina figurata and, most importantly, Hrabanus Maurus’ In honorem sanctae crucis, as a window into Carolingian graphicacy and the paramount importance of the sign of the cross as its ultimate organizing principle.

The first section provides a synopsis of early Christian discourse on the symbolism of the cross, and emphasizes the importance of the emergence and the dissemination of the cult of the Holy Cross for the increasing public profile of the cross sign in late Roman culture from the mid-fourth century onwards. The second section overviews the appropriation of this sign by Theodosian empresses and emperors as a major imperial symbol of authority, and its rise to paramount importance for imperial culture in the course of the fifth and sixth centuries. The final section underscores beliefs in the apotropaic power of the sign of the cross as an important factor contributing to its growing popularity in late antiquity. It also points out that in this function the sign of the cross was similar to other apotropaic devices, alongside which this sign was often employed in textual amulets and ritual practices.

The first section discusses definitions of the graphic sign and its typologies, and provides an overview of relevant academic literature. The second section highlights major historiographic trends in the study of graphic signs in the humanities from the early twentieth century to the present day. The next section outlines the relation of graphic signs to a wider corpus of graphic non-figurative data in the late antique Mediterranean and early medieval Europe with reference to the overarching methodological framework of visual thinking and graphic visualization and the related concept of early graphicacy, focusing particularly on the latter’s general cognitive aspects and intrinsic connection to the late antique and early medieval cultural system of visual representation. The concluding section defines the book’s subject, namely graphic signs of authority, outlines their functional usage in early medieval political culture, and summarizes the content of the following chapters.