Until now, Philip Grierson's tentative dating of Charlemagne's monetary reform to 793/4 has been generally accepted. His dating was based not only on numismatic evidence but also on his attempt to set this event in the context of Charlemagne's activities from 792 to 794. This traditional date of the reform does not, however, take into account evidence provided by Codex Sangallensis 731, in which the scribe Wandalgarius drew the image of a post‐reform coin around mid‐October 793. Based on this evidence as well as the historical contextualization of Charlemagne's stay in Regensburg in 791–3, this paper attributes the introduction of the novi denarii to the period between the autumn of 792 and the early autumn of 793, when his court was located in Regensburg.
Diagrams, maps, and other forms of graphic visualization are nowadays discussed as a specific mode of communication, graphicacy, typical of the modern age with its ever-increasing role of visual media in social life. This essay questions this tendency to see graphicacy as a by-product of modernity by surveying various forms of representational graphic signs and systems that were placed on various media in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, and it suggests that this graphic material should be seen as expressions of the very same mode of communication rising at the time of the sociocultural-and more specifically, religious-transformation of the late Roman and post-Roman worlds. With reference to this graphic evidence, early graphicacy is defined as a mode of visual communication of conceptual information and abstract ideas by means of non-figural graphic devices, which may comprise inscribed letters, words, and isolated decorative symbols.
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