CELTIC COINS FOUND IN OLD COIN BOOK

Most people have hidden a little cash in a book at one time or another, and librarians are never surprised to encounter examples of things tucked into books about them, like dried plants pressed in herbals. That said, I wasn't expecting to find medieval coins laid into an eighteenth-century numismatic handbook, but that's exactly what happened when I paged through the Kislak Center's copy of the second volume of Mikuláš Voigt's Beschreibung der bisher bekannten Böhmischen Münzen nach chronologischer Ordnung (Prague: Gerlische Buchhandlung, 1771-1787).

The Piarist Voigt (1733-1787) was a pioneering Czech numismatist who studied the Podmokelský poklad-a hoard of Celtic rainbow cups buried in a bronze cauldron and unearthed by a farmer at Podmokly in western Bohemia in 1771-as well as writing this inventory of then-known Bohemian specie. A previous (unidentified, alas, but possibly 20th-century) owner of our copy of volume 2 laid in four small envelopes containing two thirteenth-, one fourteenth-, and two fifteenth-century coins next to the engraved illustrations depicting them.

The oldest and most fragile of the five coins is a silver bracteate produced under Ottokar II, who ruled Bohemia from 1253 until his 1278 death in battle against Rudolf I, King of the Romans (whose throne he coveted). Bracteates were a common German penny from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries; minted for local circulation, these very thin, one-sided coins feature a repoussé image on the obverse. The device on our example, according to Voigt, is "[d]er böhmische gekrönte Löwe mit doppeltem Schweife; auf der Brust das österreichische Wappen" [the Bohemian crowned lion with double tail; on its breast the Austrian coat of arms] (p. 63).

To read the complete article, see:
Skryté Stříbro! (Hidden Silver!) (https://pennrare.wordpress.com/2019/05/22/hidden-silver/)

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