Object description: This item is a Goldgulden, a coin minted in Bingen between 1444-1449. Gulden is the historical German and Dutch term for gold coin. Currency became more standardized in the Holy Roman Empire with the imperial reform (Reichsmünzordnung) of 1559. In particular, Rhenis guilder was the base currency coin of the Rhineland in the 14th and 15th centuries. The Renish gold guilder was created when the electors of Cologne, Trier and Mainz were rewarded for their support in the election of Charles VI with a right to mint gold coins (Goldmünzprivileg). The present coin is minted under count elector of Mainz Dietrich von Erbach.
Why we considered it: This item is particularly interesting due to the loan of 1600 Dutch gulden that Gutenberg got from Johann Fust. The loan allowed Gutenberg to hire about twenty workers and buy print materials. Conversely, the same loan was the cause behind Fust’s legal action against Gutenberg. The latter was forced to give up part of the printing equipment to Fust. We have chosen this object to represent the economic-social phenomena on which the birth and diffusion of the press depend.
Standard used: LIDO (Lightweight Information Describing Objects) is an XML schema for describing museum objects. It is applicable to all kinds of objects: art, natural history, technology, cultural objects and it is widely used for harvesting museum data in union catalogs, and as a preliminary step for converting to semantic formats like CIDOC CRM or EDM.