Union Académique Internationale

Project nº88, adopted in 2015

The Medieval European Coinage project is based at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, and overseen by the British Academy; we were proud to be adopted as Project 88 of the UAI in June 2015. Professor Philip Grierson (1910-2006) established the Medieval European Coinage (MEC) project in 1982 to produce an up-to-date, authoritative account of medieval coinage, c. 400-1500, to replace the only comparable (and very outdated) survey, the Traité de numismatique du moyen âge of Arthur Engel and Raymond Serrure (3 vols., Paris, 1891-1905). The project was subsequently led by Dr Mark Blackburn (1953-2011) and is currently directed by Dr Elina Screen (General Editor, 2011-) and managed day to day by Dr Adrian Popescu, Keeper of Coins and Medals at the Fitzwilliam Museum. The project spans Europe from the Iberian Peninsula to Scandinavia and from Ireland to present-day Russia and Romania. The volumes cover the coinages of Western and Eastern Europe and the Latin East, but deliberately omit Byzantium, which Grierson covered in a separate multi-volume project on the Harvard Collection at Dumbarton Oaks. Islamic coins are introduced briefly in the regions where they circulated and influenced Western coinages, such as Spain and the Latin East, but are otherwise omitted. Medieval numismatics is a vibrant field, with much research conducted by academic numismatists and museum curators, and by scholar-collectors at the local level. The often technical literature is therefore dispersed in specialist studies in many languages, making it hard for non-specialists to access the most recent research and to understand the overall picture and its implications. Each MEC volume provides historians, archaeologists, art historians and numismatists with a thorough and accessible evaluation of the numismatic evidence, accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s internationally significant collection of around 30,000 medieval coins, which was largely formed by Philip Grierson. The volumes make a particular contribution in setting individual coinages, which are generally studied city by city, or ruler by ruler, into their wider regional and international context. Volumes also act as a stimulus for future research through identifying problems and questions. In addition, each volume includes supporting materials such as a glossary and index of coin finds. The project’s volumes are published by Cambridge University Press, while the coins are also made available to the general public via Collections Explorer, the Fitzwilliam Museum’s online public access catalogue. Each MEC volume is prepared by leading scholars in the field and the project currently has ten volumes in preparation. Twenty-three project authors (past and present) from twelve countries participate in the project. It is overseen by the British Academy’s Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles/Medieval European Coinage Project Committee, chaired by Professor Simon Keynes. The volume authors, project staff and committee members are all unpaid. Five volumes of the projected twenty in the series have been published between 1986 and 2017. The books have found their place in the hearts and minds, and on the bookshelves, not only of the academic community, but also of museum curators, coin collectors and professional numismatists, for whom the volumes are an invaluable reference when cataloguing coins. Bernd Kluge’s recent review of MEC 12: Italy (I). Northern Italy, described the project as ‘das bedeutendste Unternehmen der Mittelalternumismatik’ [the most important undertaking in medieval numismatics] (Geldgeschichtliche Nachrichten 294 (2017), pp. 374-6, at p. 374).