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About this Site |
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Hubert de Vries,
graduate in social Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam started this
site 15 November 2006 It is about the heraldic
emblems of all nations of the world and, when possible, about the emblems of
their administrative units of the second level like federal states and
provinces. The main inspirator
of this site has been Ottfried Neubecker who has pointed out in some of his
publications the importance of public or civic heraldry, contrary to the
heraldry of (european) families. The lemmata about national arms in reference
books were also an inspiration. It has been tried to
trace the emblems back to their origins and sometimes these turned out to go
back as far as millennia before our time The gathering of the
data started in the beginning of the seventies, mainly in the
Universiteitsbibliotheek of Amsterdam but later also in several other
libraries in Europe e.g. the British Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale in
Paris, and the libraries of Berlin, Brussels, Lissabon, Madrid, Stockholm,
Venice etc.. Thus the main
sources were secondary and almost no visits were made to national or other archives
to do primary research. Nevertheless when travelling every opportunity was
taken to photograph of as many freely accessible heraldic emblems as
possible, resulting in a unique collection of primary data. After the
introduction of Internet in the nineties the gathering of data got much
easier and many pictures could be downloaded and put into their places in the
heraldic grid designed in the previous years. The classifying of the emblems
was also facilitated by the improved accessibility of lists of rulers and
data of political changes. Many other
case studies and important publications could be found which otherwise would
have been difficult to consult in libraries before. Without Internet we may state, this site
never could have existed, being too time-consuming to do for just one
scientist. For many lemmata a
model was used consisting of a socio-political division of society into the
empire or realm, the ruler and the state, the state itself being divided into
ranges of authority: the administrative authority, the armed authority and
the religious authority. This division works well as a model until the
development of new socio-political organizations after the French revolution
and the introduction of the sovereignty of the people, that is to say until
the end of the ‘era of the kings’. It has been tried to
make an inventarisation of the symbols used in the heraldic language, tracing
their origins and trying to understand the changes in their
significance. In many cases we have to
accept that symbols of almost universal validity have completely lost their
meaning in the last few centuries and are not understood (and used) in their
original meaning any more. This very
anthropological task which I set
myself, has proved to be somewhat too much for one life. Much research and
analysis still has to be done. |
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Amsterdam,
19 September 2012 Hubert
de Vries
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With great sadness, we would like to inform the visitors of Hubert Herald that the creator of this site, Hubert de Vries, has passed in June 2021. The site will remain available, but there will no longer be responses to enquiries sent to the e-mail address in the footer. |
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Heraldry of the World