Brigitte Bedos-Rezak’s scholarship bears primarily on medieval France (900-1600), with some attention to England, Germany, and Spain. Her early social-historical and archival work considered the modes of engagement between kingship and the northern French nobility over six centuries, particularly their documentary practices, their manipulation and domination of bureaucratic structures, their relations as clients and kindred, and their conflicting politics of prestige and cultural modeling. In the course of considering the dialectics of power among ruling elites, Bedos-Rezak observed the developing agency of media in these elites’ strategies of representation and communication from the twelfth century onward. She has demonstrated that authoritative presence and personal identity during that period came to be embodied in material artifacts (badges, insignia, seals, images, inscribed parchment), so that such artifacts were effective as agents of their users in situations requiring commitment and accountability. In her analysis of these mediatic developments, Bedos-Rezak’s work aims at constructing a semiotic anthropology of the western Middle Ages. She has explored the relationship between medieval sign theory and both the concept of and markers of personal identity. Her investigation of medieval definitions of person and identity has revealed that loci of singularity and distinction did not necessarily overlap with or result in the creation of individuality. Her present work considers the medieval imprint as an object, a process, and a metaphor, so as to probe the spectrum of active concerns during the later Middle Ages about the autonomy and agency of material signs.