Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Blazon

2019; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nlh.2019.0026

1080-661X

Megan L. Cook,

Historical Studies of British Isles

Blazon Megan L. Cook (bio) Though the term "blazon" is widely used as a catchall term for a comprehensive poetic description, especially of the female body, it has been used since the sixteenth century in a narrower sense to refer to the description of a coat of arms, generally using a concise, standardized language. In 1610, the heraldic writer John Guillim explained that "blazon is taken … for an explication of Armes in apt and significant terms." Its purpose is "to expresse what the shapes, kinds, and colour of things born in Armes are together with their apt significations."1 Heraldic blazon shares with the broader use of the word an impetus toward comprehensiveness, but it replaces the capaciousness and seriality of the more general sense with specificity and concreteness. In theory, heraldic blazon functions as a comprehensive verbal analogue to the visual signifier of the coat of arms, articulating all significant elements of armorial bearing. Every coat of arms can be reduced to a verbal description via the systematic and routinized language of blazon; every description written in blazon can be reconstructed as a visual signifier. Accordingly, blazon aspires to precision, providing a set vocabulary not only to mark the colors and charges, often animals, used to decorate the shield, but also delineating the precise postures of those animals, the subtle differences in graphic elements like crosses, and the complex ways of patterning or subdividing a shield. The language of blazon evolved alongside European heraldry, and together they constituted a feedback loop of word and image whose power to signify identity and privilege depended on its iteration across time and space. Today, the Western European coat of arms—the familiar escutcheon, or shield, sometimes flanked by supporters and surmounted by a crest—is the medieval form we encounter perhaps most frequently in our daily lives; it is embossed on university stationery, adorns civic buildings, and lends gravitas to beer labels. Such coats of arms first emerged in the high Middle Ages, when distinctive patterns were applied to shields to identify knights in battle and tournament. By the mid-thirteenth century, the iconography of political and military leaders was standardized enough that Matthew of Paris illustrated his autograph [End Page 363] manuscript of the Historia Anglorum and the Chronica Majora with the arms of kings and other nobles discussed in the text. As individual coats of arms became more widely used, they became more difficult to track: the famous Scrope-Grosvenor case in the Court of Chivalry involved two men who, apparently unwittingly, made use of the same arms (azure, a Bend Or); the trial dragged on for more than four years in the 1480s and involved several hundred witnesses, including Geoffrey Chaucer.2 To cope with the increasing complexity of their work, heralds, who had previously functioned primarily as announcers and messengers, began assembling compendia known as rolls or armorials. Initially, these might catalogue the arms of all knights present at a battle or tournament, or living in a particular region. Over time, these armorials became more encyclopedic in scope, and heralds became responsible for controlling as well as recording the use of arms. Blazon developed as a way of using language to represent coats of arms more concisely and compactly than full illustration; armorials recording thousands of coats of arms in this way are not uncommon.3 The other textual element associated with heraldry is the motto, often displayed on a banner beneath or surrounding the rest of the heraldic achievement of a family, locale, or institution such as a monastic order or university college. In contrast to the other elements of a coat of arms, the motto is often abstract and flexible, like the royal dieu et mon droit ("God and my right"); very few have origin stories like the Order of the Garter's Honi soit qui mal y pense ("Shame on him who thinks ill of it"). Mottoes were used alongside coats of arms in practice, but were rarely included in early heraldic compilations and are generally not described using blazon. Mottoes complement but stand outside of the putative one-to-one correspondence of word and image that animates the circuit linking blazon and visual...