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[caption id="attachment_5796" align="alignleft" width="175"] Paris, BnF, ms. fr. 5230, f.7v[/caption]This week, Elmar Hofman handed in his dissertation on armorials in Dutch, German and French manuscripts from the thirteenth to the early sixteenth centuries, a subproject of the “Performanz der Wappen” research project. In this dissertation, Hofman pursues the question as to how armorials in medieval manuscripts can be studied as means of communication and historical sources. He presents a diversified approach, taking into account various aspects of a communicative process: media (in this case, the manuscript), content, contexts, visual presentation, and purpose. This requires a wide methodological scope, including material analysis, textual analysis, contextual analysis, and visual analysis. Together with a broad and unprejudiced perspective on armorials, this approach enables to attain the more specific research goals of reassessing traditional views on armorials in medieval manuscripts, of broadening and deepening the understanding of the content, contexts, visual presentations, and purposes of armorials in medieval manuscripts, and of opening them up for further historical research.The defense of the thesis will probably take place in early 2020. Then, the dissertation is scheduled to be published in the “Heraldic Studies” series. We will keep you posted!