01 Research competency
Historical evidence
Evaluate how manuscripts, seals, paintings and legal records can—or cannot—support a historical claim.
✦ Advanced research programme
The research seminar.
A university-level approach means more than remembering heraldic vocabulary. It means producing a defensible interpretation from actual documents, in the languages in which those documents survive.
✦ A graduate research framework
Build an argument from the sources.
Each seminar follows a research task from its evidence to a defensible conclusion. You will locate documents, compare readings, examine institutional differences, and explain the decisions that produced your result. The assignments and capstone give you a way to put those methods to work; they confer no academic or professional qualification.
02 Research competency
Language competence
Translate critically, preserve the original terminology, and show your editorial decisions.
03 Research competency
Research design
Construct a reproducible source corpus, argue with evidence, and make an original contribution.
✦ Six documented seminars
The curriculum.
Read them sequentially or work on a method your research presently requires. Each unit asks for evidence that someone else can independently inspect.
- 01Historical method and archival epistemology · Graduate methodsSeminar I · What does an armorial source prove?Archival provenance, sources as witnesses, genre criticism and the anatomy of an evidence claim.
- 02Philology, translation and scholarly editing · Graduate methodsSeminar II · Translating the visual languageSource-language vocabulary, false friends, legal concepts and a reproducible translation apparatus.
- 03Comparative legal and institutional history · Graduate methodsSeminar III · Which institution can grant what?The comparative law of arms, private registers, municipal powers, and the evidentiary meaning of official status.
- 04Digital humanities and scholarly data · Graduate methodsSeminar IV · The computable armorialDesign a reproducible multilingual armorial database rather than a surname-to-picture directory.
- 05Material culture, comparative iconography and ethics · Graduate methodsSeminar V · Artifacts, seals, and political memoryHow a heraldic image changes meaning across manuscripts, monuments, seals, and modern national emblems.
- 06Research design, critical editions and publication · Graduate capstoneSeminar VI · Designing a publishable investigationA graduate research capstone: question, primary corpus, edition, argument and reproducibility.
✦ The master's level challenge
Can someone
verify your work?
The capstone requires a research proposal, an original-language source corpus and a contribution another historian could critique or use. Another researcher should be able to follow your evidence and identify exactly where they agree or disagree.
Read the capstone ↗