Diana Scarisbrick's Rings: Jewels of the Finger — published in its first edition in 1993 by Thames and Hudson, and subsequently revised and expanded — stands as one of the most authoritative and comprehensive surveys of ring history ever committed to print. Drawing on decades of archival research, first-hand examination of museum collections across Europe and North America, auction-house records, and private inventories, Scarisbrick produced a work that is simultaneously a gemmological reference, a social history, and an art-historical document. It is cited by Christie's, Sotheby's, and Bonhams in sale catalogues; consulted by curators at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Louvre, and the Walters Art Museum; and regarded by serious collectors as an indispensable companion to any meaningful engagement with antique and historic rings.

Diana Scarisbrick: Scholarly Context

Diana Scarisbrick is a British jewellery historian whose career spans more than four decades of sustained original scholarship. She studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and her work is characterised by the rigorous archival methodology associated with that institution — a preference for primary sources, portrait evidence, inventories, and wills over received wisdom or trade mythology. Her other major publications include Ancestral Jewels (1989), Chaumet: Master Jewellers Since 1780 (1995), Tudor and Jacobean Jewellery (1995), and Jewellery in Britain 1066–1837 (1994), each of which demonstrates the same commitment to documentary evidence that distinguishes Rings. She has contributed essays to exhibition catalogues for the British Museum and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and her expertise is regularly sought by the major international auction houses when attributing or contextualising important pieces.

What distinguishes Scarisbrick from many jewellery writers is her refusal to treat jewellery as mere decorative object. In all her work, and most fully in Rings, she insists on the jewel as a bearer of meaning — political, amorous, funerary, devotional, dynastic — and traces those meanings through the documentary record with the precision of a legal historian. The result is scholarship that is useful to the gemmologist, the collector, the curator, and the social historian in equal measure.

Structure and Scope of the Work

Rings is organised broadly chronologically, beginning with the ancient world and proceeding through the medieval period, the Renaissance, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth. Within each period, Scarisbrick organises her material thematically as well as chronologically, grouping rings by function and meaning — devotional rings, betrothal and wedding rings, mourning rings, poison rings, signet rings, posy rings, gimmel rings — so that the reader can trace any single typology across centuries while also understanding the aesthetic and social context of each era.

The ancient world receives substantial treatment. Scarisbrick examines Egyptian scarab rings, Greek gold rings with engraved bezels depicting mythological scenes, and Roman intaglio rings — the latter being among the most technically accomplished objects in the entire history of jewellery. She draws on collections at the British Museum, the Museo Nazionale Romano, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and her discussion of Roman gem-engraving situates the ring within the broader culture of the glyptic arts. The social function of the signet ring in Roman civic life — its role in sealing documents, authenticating identity, and signalling rank — is treated with particular care.

The medieval chapters are among the richest in the book. Scarisbrick's discussion of devotional rings — those set with relics, inscribed with prayers, or bearing images of saints — is informed by her access to ecclesiastical inventories and wills that have rarely been drawn upon in jewellery literature. Her treatment of the fede ring, in which two clasped hands symbolise fidelity and betrothal, traces the typology from its Roman origins through its medieval flowering and into its persistence in Irish Claddagh rings of the seventeenth century and beyond. Similarly, her account of the gimmel ring — a double or triple hoop that separates and rejoins — illuminates a form whose symbolism of union and reunion was understood across social classes in early modern Europe.

The Renaissance chapters benefit from Scarisbrick's deep familiarity with portrait evidence. She reads rings on the fingers of sitters in paintings by Holbein, Titian, Bronzino, and their contemporaries with the attentiveness of a detective, identifying specific pieces, tracing their histories, and using them to illuminate the social and political meanings that rings carried for their owners. Her discussion of the table-cut diamond ring as a symbol of power and dynastic alliance in the courts of the sixteenth century is particularly illuminating, connecting gemmological form — the flat-topped table cut, which maximised the apparent size of a stone — to the political theatre of gift-giving between monarchs.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are treated with equal depth. Scarisbrick's account of the mourning ring — a form that reached its most elaborate development in the decades following the English Civil War and the Restoration — draws on a remarkable body of surviving examples and on the wills and funeral accounts that commissioned them. She traces the evolution of mourning jewellery from simple gold hoops enamelled in black, inscribed with the name and dates of the deceased, to the more elaborate hair-work and miniature-portrait rings of the later eighteenth century, situating these objects within the broader culture of Protestant commemoration and the emerging cult of sensibility.

The nineteenth century receives extensive coverage, reflecting both the extraordinary proliferation of ring types in the Victorian era and the richness of the documentary record. Scarisbrick discusses the revival styles — Gothic, Renaissance, Egyptian, and classical — that characterised the work of the great nineteenth-century jewellers, including Castellani, Giuliano, and the Parisian houses. She is attentive to the gemmological dimension: the introduction of new gem materials, the development of new cutting styles, and the impact of major new discoveries — the South African diamond fields from the late 1860s, the Burmese ruby mines, the Colombian emerald trade — on ring design and the social meanings attached to particular stones.

The twentieth century, though necessarily treated with somewhat less archival depth, is handled with the same analytical intelligence. Scarisbrick traces the impact of Art Nouveau on ring design — the dissolution of the stone-centred composition in favour of organic, enamel-rich forms — and then the counter-revolution of Art Deco, with its geometric severity, its preference for platinum, and its celebration of the white diamond in combination with calibré-cut coloured stones. The mid-century chapters discuss the work of the major jewellery houses — Cartier, Van Cleef and Arpels, Bulgari — and the emergence of studio jewellery as a distinct tradition in the post-war decades.

Photographic Plates and Visual Documentation

A scholarly text on jewellery is only as useful as its visual documentation, and Rings is exceptionally well served in this respect. The book contains several hundred colour and black-and-white plates, drawn from museum collections, private collections, and auction-house archives. Scarisbrick's captions are themselves a form of scholarship: precise in their dating, careful in their attribution, and alert to the distinction between what is documented and what is inferred. The plates are organised to support the text rather than to substitute for it, and the quality of reproduction — particularly in the Thames and Hudson editions — is sufficient to allow meaningful gemmological observation of stone cuts, setting styles, and surface treatments.

Particularly valuable are the plates drawn from portrait paintings, which allow the reader to see rings as they were worn and understood by their original owners, rather than as isolated objects displayed on a velvet ground. Scarisbrick's integration of portrait evidence with object evidence is one of the methodological signatures of the book and one of its most significant contributions to the field.

Use in the Trade and Among Collectors

Within the international jewellery trade, Rings occupies a position comparable to that of a standard reference work in any other specialist field. Auction-house specialists at Christie's, Sotheby's, and Bonhams routinely cite it in catalogue entries for antique and period rings, both as a source of comparative examples and as an authority on dating and typology. Dealers in antique jewellery use it to contextualise pieces for clients and to support attributions. Museum curators consult it when preparing exhibition labels and catalogue entries.

For collectors, the book serves several distinct functions. As a typological guide, it allows the identification of ring forms — the fede, the gimmel, the posy, the regard ring, the keeper ring — that might otherwise be opaque. As a dating tool, it provides the stylistic and technical benchmarks against which individual pieces can be assessed. As a social history, it enriches the experience of ownership by situating a ring within the human contexts — betrothal, mourning, devotion, political allegiance — that gave it meaning for its original wearer.

The book is also valued for its treatment of inscriptions. Posy rings — those inscribed with mottoes or verses, typically on the inner surface of the hoop — are a form that requires linguistic as well as art-historical expertise to interpret, and Scarisbrick's command of Latin, French, and Middle English inscriptions is evident throughout. Her discussion of the conventions of posy-ring inscription, and her transcription and translation of numerous examples, constitutes a reference resource that is not easily replicated elsewhere.

Editions and Availability

The first edition of Rings: Jewels of the Finger was published by Thames and Hudson in 1993. Subsequent editions and reprints have maintained the essential structure of the original while incorporating additional material and updated bibliography. The book has remained in print, with varying availability depending on edition, and commands a secondary market among collectors and scholars when new copies are unavailable. It is held by the libraries of the major gemmological institutions, including the Gemological Institute of America, the Gemmological Association of Great Britain, and the major art and design schools in Britain, Europe, and North America.

A companion volume, Rings: Symbol of Wealth, Power and Affection, published by Abrams in 1993 in the United States (and in a slightly different edition in the United Kingdom), covers related ground with some variation in selection of examples and emphasis. Collectors and scholars generally regard the Thames and Hudson edition as the primary reference, though both volumes are useful and complement one another.

Significance in Jewellery Scholarship

Rings belongs to a tradition of serious jewellery scholarship that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century and that sought to bring to the study of jewellery the same rigour that art history had long applied to painting and sculpture. Scarisbrick's work, alongside that of scholars such as Yvonne Hackenbroch, Shirley Bury, and Clare Phillips, established jewellery history as a legitimate academic discipline rather than a branch of connoisseurship or trade expertise. The book's enduring authority rests on the solidity of its documentary foundations, the breadth of its coverage, and the intelligence with which it integrates gemmological, art-historical, and social-historical perspectives.

For anyone engaged seriously with antique or historic rings — whether as a collector, a dealer, a curator, or a scholar — Rings by Diana Scarisbrick remains the essential starting point: a work of scholarship that has not been superseded and that is unlikely to be in the foreseeable future.

Further Reading

• Gems & Gemology — GIA's peer-reviewed journal, for gemmological context on historic stones and cuts
• Victoria and Albert Museum — Jewellery Collection, London
• British Museum — Department of Britain, Europe and Prehistory (includes major ring collections)