Evaluating armorials (I) - Identifying coats of arms

Brussels, KBR, MS IV 1249, f.8r Having edited a number of armorials and shown several of them to be dependent on the same sources, the editors of Heraldica Nova asked me: How does one evaluate an armorial and its contents? The short answer is by having common sense, lots of reference materials and treating armorials as non-verbal prose. In this first part of this series on how to evaluate armorial, I will deal with the challenging task of identifying individual coats of arms and the problems ..