The Medieval Latin term identitas was an ontological concept referring to an exclusively divine attribute. Only the Christian God was said to have an identity, since only he was self-identical, as he uniquely achieved a perfect sameness with the persons of his triune being and with the eucharistic sign of his incarnation. In this paper, I will analyze the implications that this notion and experience of identitas had for the formulation of personal identity in medieval western European society (1050-1250). I will show that signs of personal identity emerged, from the late eleventh century onward, in parallel with an anthropological discourse which particularly emphasized the status of men and women as images imprinted by the divine prototype. The pre-eminent twelfth-century signs of personal identity were, in fact, actual imprinted images (seals). Thus personal identity was at first conceived as and predicated upon an ontological principle of differential sameness.
A second purpose of this paper is to analyze personal identity in relation to its signs, as these came to play an important role in mediating political, economic, and legal actions. The logic of imprinted sameness preserved and conveyed traces of causal processes which required that there be an originating agent to assure that sameness could be verified and authenticated. Social actors were thereby transformed into original authors. Medieval identity was primarily a mechanism for the production of socially empowered agents whose characteristics were then organized in normative templates, which permitted classification, identification, and recognition.