Anglo-Saxon Button Brooches

Book excerpt: The Anglo-Saxon button brooch is a small disc brooch, about 2cm in diameter and decorated with a single human face mask, found mainly in southern England and occasionally in France; although many examples survive, its origins and development are not fully understood. This book offers a comprehensive study of its typology, genealogy and chronology. It investigates formal and structural design features, proposes a prototype- and statistics-based typology, and examines the physical, conceptual and geographical dimensions of the classification. Through an in-depth description of class-internal distinctions and class-external similarities, the author also explores the development of button brooches and reconstructs their genealogy or derivational history. He then situates the evolutionary trajectory of button brooches in a temporal framework, by linking them to other brooch types such as Jutlandic relief brooches and Saxon cast saucer brooches, and by taking account of associated grave goods as appropriate. A catalogue of the entire corpus of 209 button brooches and that of related objects is provided in the appendices; there are also over 200 plates and other illustrations, enabling the details to be carefully studied. SEIICHI SUZUKI is Professor of Old Germanic Studies, Kansai Gaidai University, Japan.