ABSTRACT
At least 20 elaborately decorated shoehorns survive by the maker Robert Mindum, who worked in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Most striking about these shoehorns is that they each bear an inscription recording not only the owner’s name and the name of Mindum himself but also the year in which the horns were made. Through these inscriptions, maker and owner are linked for posterity in a single temporal moment. This example, held in the Worshipful Company of Horners’ collection, is decorated with the heraldic symbol of the crowned Tudor Rose and inscribed around the upper contour of the shoehorn ‘Robart Mindum made this shooing horne for Ricard Gibon anno Domini 1612’. How might we interpret this inscription? Since no documentary evidence on Mindum or his client Richard Gibon is known, the object itself is our most important source.
