Herb miejski jako medium społecznej komunikacji. Treści symboliczne herbu Kamienia Pomorskiego do końca XIX wieku

The article aims at presenting the town’s coat of arms as a medium of social communication in the Middle Ages and early modern times, with the example of one of the small towns in Western Pomerania – Kamień Pomorski. The text analyses the transformations that took place in the iconography of the town seal from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries and investigates different ways of understanding the symbolism of the coat of arms, based on written sources created from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries in the town chancery. The example of the coat of arms of Kamień Pomorski was used to determine the reasons that led to changes in its appearance and in the message it conveyed. The undertaken studies demonstrated that the changes in the symbolic meaning of the coat of arms were the result of an intentional adaptation of the visual message shaped in the Middle Ages to the changing religious and social circumstances of the early modern period. The changes in the conveyed message were not only the result of the replacement of emblems placed on the seals, but also of their new interpretation by means of legends explaining the origin and symbolism of the coat of arms conceived by the town council and burghers.