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In the 15th and 16th centuries, it was common for armorials to include the arms of notable people from around the known world both past and present. The fact that…

There are times where you might want to find examples of a certain charge in period heraldry; you may want to know whether a certain charge was used at all,…

The earliest known heraldic sunflower was granted in 1614 by William Segar, Garter King of Arms, to Aurelia Florio, daughter of author John Florio: Azure, "an Heliotrope or Turnsol" Or…

There haven't been many updates recently, but I do keep looking for new sources to add to the Armorials collection (I've dug up enough that there's a bit of diminishing…

Rainbows are a reasonably rare charge in pre-17th C armory overall (I’ve found none in French or Iberian armory, for example), but they show up in German armory regularly. Every…

Because of the variation in the evenness of pigments and photo quality these are inherently approximate. My admittedly unscientific method was to sample pixels in a section of tincture until…

Find collections of digitized manuscripts.A decent, if sometimes out-of-date, place to start is https://digitizedmedievalmanuscripts.org/, which is a meta-collection of institutions with digital manuscript collections. If the link to an institution…

Human skulls (and death’s heads: skulls lacking the lower jaw) are very rare charges in period heraldry, but they do show up occasionally. The following is a rundown of all…