[HS] welcome to Heraldry School!

[Sara L Uckelman <liana@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings, everyone!

This first "lesson" is going to be mostly an introductory sort of
thing.  Here's how I sort of see things going:

There are three main "categories" in which I'll have lessons - 

Medieval naming practices
Armory
SCA practices

I see this division for a number of reasons.  First, the circle
of medieval names and the circle of registerable names, while they
overlap quite a bit, neither contains the other.  A large part
of my personal research is on the authentic names side of thing, so
alot of the lessons on that will be either capsules on basic
name construction for different cultures or me spouting off on
random things that have come up in my recent research (so you'll
get to see neat things like the French woman's given name <Fleur
de Lys>, and the French byname <de Fleury>, which I found in the
same source recently and of which I think <Fleur de Lys de Fleury>
is a very pretty name. :)).  On the armory side of thing, I myself
don't know enough about medieval arms to be able to give any sort
of in depth treatises on those topics, though I'll use heraldry
school as a reason for me to learn more about medieval armory and
pass that information on to you.  But the armory category will
cover both medieval style and SCA registerability questions all
together.  The last category, SCA practices, will deal with
administrative stuff (how to submit, how to comment, how to do
research), aspects of SCA-registerability of names (things
like weirdnesses), and treatises on the RfS. :)  These three
categories will be restructured at will if I find they aren't
working well.

Occassionally with each lesson I'll give assignments - chances for
you to take the things you've been learning and put them into use.
ALL ASSIGNMENTS ARE VOLUNTARY! :)  And you won't be graded on them
either. :)  Assignments will be things like "Look in the Medieval
Names Archive, French section, and find me any citation of <Anne>
as a masculine name that you can find" or "Are there any 
precedents on the use of unicorn's horns as charges in SCA heraldry"
or "Try conflict checking this set of arms".  This'll give you a
chance to start trying out your skills on these things without
necessarily doing it in front of a bunch of people (like on NS-
Heralds or the Baldric site) and feeling stupid if you didn't find
the right thing.

So, what I'd like to hear from you are a few things - first, 
introduce yourself to the rest of the students (there's just 5 of
us here, and we're all in it together, so don't by shy), and then
let me know where your interests lie (I have one vote for "names"
already) so that I can try to tailor lessons to what you're
interested in.  (Feel free also to recommend topics at any point
along the way!)  I'd also like to know where you're at information-
wise already.  For example, would it be useful for me to do something
quick on how the rules of contrast work?  I don't want to cover
ground that you all consider old hat.

One last thing and then I'll end this rather long email.  I set up
the mailing list so that I don't have to remember all your addresses
each time I send something out, and so that I can keep an archive
of the posts for easy future reference.  I don't envision this
becoming a discussion list (though if it does, I wouldn't mind), so
I don't want you to become worried about being subscribed to another
high-traffic mailing list, because this won't be it.  Currently,
the reply default is reply-to-sender, not reply-to-list, so just
keep that in mind if you ever do reply.

So, not much of an actual lesson - we'll get to that next week.

In service,
-Aryanhwy




-- 
vita sine literis mors est
http://www.ellipsis.cx/~liana/
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