Where did the term medal come from?

DeliaBug

Inspired by coinsarefun's recent post on the Jefferson medal and edited for brevity, this excerpt is from the Saville translation of Ernest Babelon's 1901 Traité:

The word medal dates from the fifteenth century and is derived from the Italian medaglia which, during the middle ages, was synonymous with obol or half-denarius. So originally, a medal was a half-denarius, and it is in the low Latin term medalia or medalla and from which the old French term maille was derived.

How was it then the medalia came to be a term used to describe an old Greek or Roman coin rather than the original half-denari? Lenormant explains that the term fell into disuse, as it referred to ancient coins which had, by that time, no monetary value and were of no interest to anyone; later on, people began to use the word to describe all kinds of old coins, particularly ancient coins. Megaglia or médaille no longer referred to coins in circulation, and that people had come to use the word for coins of no face value that had begun to be produced no earlier than the fifteenth century, with a similar appearance to coins, and created using the same procedure. They were artistic objects, portraits on metal, a means of perpetuating the memory of events, but not intended to circulate with a legal value. The present day understanding of a medal is that it is an object which resembles a coin but which is quite distinct from it, as its metal, type, weight, and dimension is chance and arbitrary.



Tom

coinsarefun

Not only am I happy that I inspired someone on this forum I learned something


Thanks for the information!