That Silver Lining

Focusing on the geographical region of Crimea, a peninsula on the northern coast of the Black Sea, during a roughly two-hundred-year period of European exploration and colonization, this paper will show the manner in which wearable silver objects played a role in the formation of a medieval frontier society. The paper investigates how, within this confined geographical locale, art and material culture played a major role in the figuration, promulgation, and deployment of what a frontier could be and mean in the premodern world. It will simultaneously examine how these processes developed in dialogue with conceptualizations of that very frontier in the minds of scholars and institutions in the heart of Europe. Through a focused look into how the material of silver worked to produce, define and profess the actual and conceptual space of the frontier, I argue, a new understanding of the center can simultaneously arise. This bifocal look at the construction of a frontier—considering, on the one hand, the actuality of material and artistic production in the peripheral zone and, on the other, the intellectual conceptualization of that frontier in the center of Europe—will allow for new framings of art in the formation of medieval societies in places traditionally overlooked by art historians.