Invented coats of arms are when someone depicts a coat of arms for a figure like Prester John, or the Sultan of Babylon, or the kings of the Heptarchy. I’m obsessed with the prevalence of these, and the ideological work they do, and what they tell us about political fiction in premodern Europe
Like, did heralds really think the Magi bore arms in the conventional sense? I doubt it, but they’re regularly depicted in amoral collections, all the way through the 17th century
They are definitely related! Armorials have a synchronic relationship to time whereas rolls have a diachronic one, and the armorials I'm interested in are often ostentatiously encyclopedic rather than selective in the way that genealogical rolls are, but they certainly work in tandem
Also in the case of genealogies you do really have people being born, marrying, having children, and dying, where has heraldry is just an invented symbolic system from the top down, no matter how ardently heralds claim it was invented at the Siege of Troy and/or by Julius Caesar
oh yeah, didn't mean to suggest that they worked the same way, even for the mythical genealogies! both they and the fictional heraldry are pretty amazing products of the times tho.
