Brigitte Bedos-Rezak 
Seals – Making and Marking Connections across the Medieval World [PDF ebook] 

By placing medieval sealing practices in a global and comparative perspective, the essays gathered in this volume challenge the traditional understanding of seals as tools of closure and validation in use since the dawn of civilization. Far from being a universal technique, sealing is revealed as a flexible idiom, selectively deployed to mediate entangled identities: the introduction of Buddhism in early medieval China; the Islamization of Sasanian and Byzantine cultures; even the advancement of diplomacy from northern Europe to Indonesia.