5 x 11: The Code of Heraldry

Numerous developments occurred since the presentation of the thesis, more than two years ago. I mention firstly those strictly linked to its contents. Some of these developments correct inaccuracies, as the transmission of the Scottish tressure and the verbalizations for the single-headed eagle of the Holy-Empire or even the Castilian fortress. Others complete what was already proposed but then only partially interpreted: broken designants - Cenomanum ~ Senum... - or heteronymic polysemies as in Reuss ~ Kreuz. A great amount of them amplify the interpretations of the corpus to additional heraldic traces included in the same arms, more or less conspicuous: the rest of the Hungarian partition, the tinctures for the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Danish blue lions. The new circumstances lead to the reduction of the respective discretion indexes, stressing, furthermore, new semantic interactions within the coexisting traces. In the table below, the first of these developments were designated as rectifications (R), the second as additions (A) and the third as extensions (E), followed by their proper location (page and line). We list all the results gathered for our first studies, referring by Y (yes) or N (no) its state relatively to the types mentioned previously. These data may be updated as long as new elements are available and the information keeps relevance.

I refer secondly the work made outside the dissertation's ambiance, then briefly approached within the corpus, building the sampling universe of 711 heraldic traces. Since then, more than 1500 new armorial traces have been analysed by applying the parophonic methodology. Some of these blazons appear in the map that follows, although somewhat displaced to the present nationalities. They emphasize a remarkable geographical dispersion, seeming to indicate a comprehensive phenomenon and possibly its establishment with the beginning of heraldry.