Everyday political objects: from the Middle Ages to the contemporary world

Abstract

standing of it by expanding our knowledge of the ways in which states sought to institutionalize heraldry, and the very problematic nature of this institutionalization. Part of the problem for the state was resistance in the public to state intervention and hostility towards heraldic officers. At the same time, many members of the public used heraldic officers for their purposes, something made possible by the willingness of no small number of officials to conspire in heraldic frauds by manipulating records and even selling rights to coats of arms. In certain respects, the effort of the state to control heraldry was uniquely difficult. Authorities were seriously constrained by past conventions, regional practices and the historic rights of families; it was also beyond the state’s capacity to control the meanings of heraldic symbols. But in many ways the limitations of the state institutionalization of status were characteristic of difficulties faced by the state in exercising power more generally in the Early Modern period. It simply did not have the kind of apparatus that most states have today, nor the ability to control the apparatus it did pretend to have. Thus, Heraldic Hierarchies occupies an important place in the large interdisciplinary literature on state formation in Europe. More precisely, it adds to existing work on the contingent nature of this state formation; it illustrates the complex interaction of state and society in the Early Modern period; and it demonstrates that governments were then seriously concerned about the social distribution of status and its symbolic imagery, including heraldry, the latter of which is today often dismissed, even by some historians, as a pretentious aristocratic pastime. The book also enhances our recognition of the evolution of status as consisting of processes that encompass more than one country. Hopefully this valuable volume will persuade scholars to broaden their research to include the role of heraldry in the social and political processes they are studying.