Coats of Arms in Practice 2: The Differentiation of Heraldic Communication in the High and Late Middle Ages (12th to 15th Century)

During the first phase of funding, the project studied the function of coats of arms, their means of expression through heraldic communication, and the conclusions that can be drawn for their analysis. In the follow-up project, those insights will be transformed into a concrete methodology and, starting with a central research question, applied to further academic investigations. The implementation of methods and techniques drawn from the digital humanities will considerably enhance the project’s existing use of sources from auxiliary sciences and research questions drawn from cultural history, allowing for a far deeper analysis.
The starting point of this undertaking is the observation that during the high and later Middle Ages, coats of arms witnessed several advances in terms of innovation, which in turn led to a substantial differentiation in their communicative potential. It can be assumed that these innovatory processes were the result of concrete changes in the contemporary cultural and social context. Thus, the assessment and analysis of these processes may offer new perspectives on late medieval culture and society, as well as on the history of visual communication. By using the coats of arms as an example, it is possible to demonstrate that the increasingly literate culture which spread from the twelfth century did not suppress visual communication in the prioritisation of the written word, but rather that both were undergoing a quite similar process of differentiation.
Due to the complexity of the coats of arms, and the immense and diverse collection of examples which survive, such an analysis has hitherto proved largely unfeasible. But these challenges will now be met by the introduction of digital methods, which enable us to structure and analyse large amounts of complex date in a transparent and comprehensive way. Techniques and methods made possible through the use of Semantic Web technologies will be implemented, further studied, and developed within the project. When refined, these technologies will be applied to Steen Clemmensen’s existing database “Ordinary of Medieval Armorials“, considerably enhancing and further enabling the research potential of the data.
After a comprehensive reassessment of medieval coats of arms during the first funding phase, the follow-up project shall lay the foundation for a sustainable implementation of its findings pertinent to both historical research and ancillary sciences. By applying and refining new methods of digital humanities to the field of historical research, through the study of heraldry, the project contributes at the same time considerably to the necessary digital reorientation of auxiliary sciences.