General Links
Geographic Links
- China
- Eastern Europe
- England
- France
- Germany
- Greece
- Italy
- Japan
- Low Countries
- Middle East
- Scotland
- Spain
- Sweden
- Viking
Greetings and welcome to the Medieval Heraldry Archive. I am Ld. Eirik Halfdanarson, editor, and this is a major redesign of the web site.
I am currently in the proccess of rearranging and adding information to the Archive. The biggest change is the seperation of the Public and Internal links to seperate sections on each page and the information organized geographically. There is also the addition of a general heraldry links page. See the explanations below for a description of the division of the links.
If you have questions or suggestions about the site, please contact me.
Public Links
These links can be used to get ideas of what heraldry looked like in history. They are generally without error and can be used by the public without specific knowledge. Currently there aren't any links here but I will be moving links as soon as I can.
Internal Links
These links require more specific knowledge of heraldry in history. There may be errors or lack of specific information that require more research to get historical examples from these links.
General Links
These are links that discuss general information about heraldry, not specific information on a region.
This collection of articles on medieval and renaissance heraldry is intended to help historical re-creators to choose authentic armory. This archive was created as a parallel to Arval Benicoeur's Medieval Names Archive, and as with that site, the articles published here were gathered from various places, and some of them appear elsewhere. In all cases, the copyright on each article belongs to its authors.
A few notes on medieval heraldry
Heraldic arms were invented in northwestern France in the mid-12th century. The custom of using arms spread rapidly through western Europe, and was well-established in most western cultures by the end of the 13th century. It spread into eastern Europe by the 14th and 15th centuries, though some cultures there did not develop native heraldry until well after the 16th century.Many medieval re-enactors portray characters derived from cultures that didn't use heraldry, but because of the customs of the organizations in which they participate, they want to use arms anyway. We've written a short article on different approaches to this dilemma. Some other articles discuss approaches for specific non-heraldic cultures.
You can help!
If you have any questions or comments, or if you have an article that you would like to contribute to this library, please let us know. The Medieval Heraldry Archive is published by
The Academy of Saint Gabriel.
© 2000. Copyright on individual articles belongs to their authors.
http://www.s-gabriel.org//heraldry/index.shtml