The Elements of Armories
- Title
- The Elements of Armories
- Heading
- The Moveable Book
- Description
-
Today we associate interactive, movable books primarily with books for young children, with flaps to lift or tabs to pull. Such interactivity is, however, a mediaeval concept. Volvelles are turning wheels: pieces of paper which are fastened to a leaf and can be rotated on it. Ramon Lull used them in his thirteenth-century manuscripts, and the first printed volvelle appeared in Johannes Regoimontanus’ Calendarium (Nuremberg, 1474; see [Incunabula] 12). Particularly famous sixteenth-century examples appear in Peter Apian’s Cosmographia (1524) and in Astronomicum Caesarium (1540). Caxton and his English contemporaries did not use volvelles, and Edmund Bolton’s The Elements of Armories (1610) is the first English book to do so. It is unusual in putting volvelles to heraldic use, to show how to design a coat of arms.
Heraldry had been popular since the Middle Ages. Caxton showed interest in the wider area of chivalry through his translations Ordre of Chyvalry or Knyghthode (1484, from Ramon Lull’s Libre del orde de cavayleria) and Fayts and Arms of Chivalry (1489, from Christine de Pisan’s Faits d'armes et de chevalerie). - Author
- Edmund Bolton
- Place of Publication
- London
- Publisher
- George Eld
- Date of Publication
- 1610
- Format
- 4to
- Century
- 17th
- Illustrations
- Woodcut