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Paper and papered seals
Paper and papered seals
The materials utilised to make seals varied and evolved until paper was employed. In effect, the history of sphragistics reveals that as from the fourteenth century hot wax was overlaid with a small piece of paper that was incorporated in the seal impression by the matrix. Initially, these papered seals were only used for ordinary documents but later their use became standard practice for documents of some importance.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the wax generally used to seal private documents was replaced by a shellac and flour glue and this development gave rise to the paper seals commonly used in the binders of the archives of that period.
The definitions used in the literature differentiate the former, called papered seals, from the latter called simply paper seals.
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