✦ The foundation course
The academy.
Twelve expanded readings, with worked examples, documentary workshops, source notes, and guided introductions. Learn to read the design and test the claims made about it.
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✦ Core curriculum
Work through
the evidence.
68,807 words of chapter prose. About 319 minutes of reading, estimated at 220 words per minute; drawing, source consultation, and research exercises take additional time. These expanded teaching drafts await specialist review.
The visual language
How armorial identity survives changing artwork, audiences, and documentary witnesses.
Anatomy of an achievement
Read the components of an achievement as a set of relationships, roles, and institutional claims.
Tinctures & contrast
Read metals, colors, furs, and contrast through worked designs and dated records, including buff, copper, Rose, Bleu Céleste, and red ochre.
Geometry of the shield
Partitions, positions, arrangements, and transformations—and why geometry alone cannot identify a bearer.
Ordinaries & subordinaries
How bands, crosses, borders, and smaller geometries behave as named figures with edges and layers.
The world of charges
Identify a figure through its morphology, attitude, attributes, arrangement, and source-language conventions.
Reading a blazon
Read compact armorial descriptions through scope, reference, nesting, and a traceable textual witness.
Cadency & difference
Trace armorial transmission through particular records rather than treating a birth-order chart as a pedigree.
Marshalling & quartering
Read composite shields as structured assertions about marriage, descent, office, dynasty, and territory.
Law, custom & authority
Compare the actors, acts, records, and historically specific mechanisms behind armorial authority.
Heraldry in public life
Follow public emblems through authentication, representation, changing institutions, and different materials.
The armiger's workshop
Develop a reproducible study through source control, competing explanations, critical editions, and controlled design.
✦ Continue beyond the foundation
Follow the regional sources.
The foundation gives you a working vocabulary and a method for testing a claim. The regional chapters apply those tools to particular institutions and records; the research seminars develop transcription, comparison, and source criticism into larger investigations.
✦ The capstone
Explain what
the evidence supports.
Study a documented display or develop an original teaching design. Build a witness inventory, test competing explanations, and show how your conclusion follows from the evidence. Extended routes develop material histories, institutional comparisons, critical editions, and controlled design studies.
A blazon explains how to draw the design. A claim to bear it needs a connection between that design, the person, and the relevant record. Your study should show how you established each step.
Explore the capstone ↗