Heraldry in Urban Society: Visual Culture and Communication in Late Medieval England and Germany. By MarcusMeer. Oxford University Press, 2024. 336 pp. £99.00.

In this first-rate monograph, Marcus Meer provides a comprehensive examination of English and German urban heraldry in the later Middle Ages, mainly the period from the second half of the fourteenth century to about 1530.His basic thesis is that, though the aristocracies in these countries played a major role in constructing heraldic culture and practice, these constructs were not an aristocratic preserve but were shared by urban populations, who adopted them relatively early.In this period, heraldry was much less regulated than it would become later.And, though people pursued and received grants of arms, most urban arms in this period were adopted independently, without a grant from an emperor, king, prince, or bishop, indeed frequently without permission from a heraldic authority.Coats of arms, badges, and ornamental staffs were medieval methods of visual communication.Meer demonstrates that arms were used by people most of all to express their identity and purported virtues, values, beliefs, and especially honour.In doing so, arms were meant to advance or defend status entitlements within and outside communities.Arms also served as status insignia, identifying specific rights, claims to authority or a social function.Arms were employed by the upwardly mobile to help elevate their status.However, they were also used by higher status groups to resist upward mobility and reinforce the existing status structure.The coats of arms of urban elites were usually located in prominent or prized urban spaces.Even in guild halls, the heraldic shields of members might be displayed in a spatial hierarchy according to their status.The status of aristocrats in the Middle Ages was not as secure as is widely assumed, but the status of urbanites was even less secure.Urbanites traced and celebrated their genealogies in an effort to establish their own security in a manner similar to how aristocratic families sought proofs of their nobility to secure their status.Personal heraldic designs generally included symbolic representations of a family's history.Ideally, a claim could be made that a coat of arms had a long and celebrated family history; often such claims required a considerable measure of genealogical invention.Meer's study is not restricted to the heraldry of individuals or families.He devotes as much attention to the heraldry of collectives and of governing bodies.Guilds adopted arms to promote their collective identity; raise the status of the guild and its members; negotiate their place in an urban hierarchy; advertise their tools, product, or service; and strengthen the solidarity of members.Municipal arms were used, especially in Germany, to increase communal solidarity, to advance or improve urban culture and signal the norms that town members were expected to follow and their obligations to the community, and to maintain and bolster the standing of a city or town in the larger society.Permission of individuals to display their arms in specific places could be used as a method of social control.And urban authorities and elites tried to employ them to reinforce their political power.Meer shows that within cities or towns, arms served to strengthen social relations, in particular to symbolize family alliances, to express loyalty to a city or town, or to indicate patronage over public buildings.Cities and towns also used coats of arms to strengthen their relations, and acknowledge their dependence, on lords, princes, monarchs, and (for German cities and towns) the Empire.This might be done by including symbolic references to these superiors in coats of arms, by linking local arms to those of superiors, or by putting arms on

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