Leaf-thin bracteate coins were minted for several hundred years during the Middle Ages. The existence of hundreds of small independent currency areas with their own mints in central, eastern and northern Europe and the strong link between bracteates and periodic recoinage explain the large number of bracteate types. A special minting technology linked to goldsmithing technology was required to produce the bracteates. A soft material was placed under a flan, and the motif was created by bending the flan rather than pressing the motif into the flan. This study analyzes how bracteate technology could save costs in the minting procedure compared to traditional coinage technology. The bending characteristic of the bracteates together with the flat hammering of old bracteates imply that the size of the flan remained almost unchanged after recurrent overstrikes. Thus, the bracteate technology saved one of the costliest steps in the minting procedure: the time-consuming production of the flan. In contrast, overstriking of biface coins using the traditional coin technology could only be performed a few times, since it caused a stepwise thinner and larger flan. The latter phenomenon explains the existence of biface half-bracteates.

The aim of this article is to describe the silver tankard made by Nathaniel Pressding I for the wedding of Johann Peter Titz with Aurelia von Strackwitz in 1678. The bride and groom received the cup from the students of the Academic Gymnasium in Gdańsk. One of the customary rituals in Gdańsk involved giving gold and silver coins, medals and dinnerware as wedding gifts. Silver tankards were one of the most popular gifts in the late 1600s. The decorations on the tableware were chosen to match the importance of an occasion. In the case of wedding gifts the ornaments were taken either from Bible stories (Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Isaac and Rebecca, the Wedding Feast at Cana) or from Greek and Roman art. The scene of the relief of the tankard’s corpus presents popular decorative elements with Cupid taken from Otto van Veen’s Amorum emblemata… (Antverpiae 1608). The described object is striking in the perfection of its workmanship and refined expression of the creator’s expertise. It is also an example of the first use of the master craftsman’s mark.