Bornholdt Collins

During the early Middle Ages -- when the Irish Sea became a melting pot of different cultures and a hotly contested political arena -- the Isle of Man stands out as a unique and fascinating place, extraordinarily wealthy, and of considerable interest to scholarship for the impact of Scandinavian Viking culture. Chronicles and other textual sources are virtually silent on Man in this period, so finds of coins and other metallic objects represent a vital window into the economy of the island. In this volume, Bornholdt Collins catalogues the coin collection in Douglas and discusses a group of coins that was made on Man itself in the eleventh century. A system is revealed that used silver and other metals on a substantial scale, but in the form of bullion as well as coin, influenced by Anglo-Saxon England, the Danelaw, and the Viking Dublin.

Kristen Bornholdt Collins, Independent Scholar

Kristin Bornholdt Collins is an independent scholar with degrees from St Andrews and Cambridge (MPhil & PhD, Archaeology). Her doctoral research, which was supervised by Catherine Hills and the late Mark Blackburn, focused on the Viking-Age coin finds from the Isle of Man and the economy of the Irish Sea region. Her primary interests include the Hiberno-Manx coinage (from c. 1025) and the intersection and overlap of bullion, coin, and other economies in the later Viking Age. She also works as an English language consultant to Scandinavian archaeologists and numismatists writing in English.