Talk:Shield of the Trinity

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Shield of the Trinity is a former featured article candidate. Please view the links under Article milestones below to see why the nomination failed. For older candidates, please check the archive.
July 26, 2007 Featured article candidate Not promoted
Heraldry and Vexillology Portal

Shield of the Trinity is within the scope of the Heraldry and vexillology WikiProject, a collaborative effort to improve Wikipedia's coverage of heraldry and vexillology. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.
A This article has been rated as A-Class on the quality scale. (FAQ).

Contents

[edit] First half of 19th century

William Hone included in his 1823 book Ancient Mysteries Described a 15th-or 16th-century woodcut incorporating a version of the Shield of the Trinity diagram (which was later reproduced in Manly P. Hall's Secret Teachings of All Ages book [1]) -- but mainly to mock at the three-faces-on-one-head depiction of the Trinity included at the top of the diagram (a type of Renaissance iconography which is now rejected by mainstream Christian groupings).

Also, Augustus Pugin (1812–1852) seems to have included a very pseudo-Medieval (and not very legible) version of the diagram in one of his books.[2]

The general impression I get is still that the Shield of the Trinity diagram was very rarely actively used as a Christian symbol or teaching tool at that time... AnonMoos 09:14, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Use outside England and France

I haven't been able to come up with much usable information about any use of this diagram outside England and Northern France before the late 19th century. In the book "Heraldry: Sources, Symbols, and Meaning" by Ottfried Neubecker (1976), there's a photo of a redrawn version (by Otto Hupp) of an illustration from the now-lost late 15th-century (ca. 1490?) Wernigerode/Schaffhausen armorial (probably originating near Noerdlingen) which includes a whole heraldic achievement (with helm, mantling, crown, and crest with dove of the Holy Spirit) -- not just a shield -- presented as the arms of God. However, it's hard to conclude much from just that one item without any context... There's also an article Das "Scutum fidei christianae magistri Hieronymi Pragensis" in der Entwicklung der mittelalterlichen trinitarischen Diagramme by František Šmahel in a book "Die Bildwelt der Diagramme Joachims von Fiore: Zur Medialität religiös-politischer Programme im Mittelalter" (edited by Alexander Patschovsky, 2003), but I haven't been able to access it. AnonMoos 15:54, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] External links

The British Library online site has recently changed in a manner which makes the former links to images pages on that site (the illustrations to the "Ca. 1208-1216 manuscript of Compendium Historiae in Genealogia Christi by Peter of Poitiers / Petrus Pictaviensis" and the "Ca. 1255-1265 manuscript of Summa Vitiorum or Treatise on the Vices by William Peraldus") now invalid, and it's not clear to me that there are publicly-accessible replacement URLs, or whether there's any method of determining whether there are publicly-accessible replacement URLs without having an approved registration to the new site (which requires you to claim that you're a legitimate potential business customer). Not entirely sure what to do about this -- I have the formerly available images, and could theoretically upload them to Commons, and they're probably also still available somewhere on http://www.artbible.net/ (though I'm having difficulty finding them there). AnonMoos 01:35, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Uploaded Image:PetrusPictaviensis CottonFaustinaBVII-folio42v ScutumFidei early13thc.jpg, there were workarounds for the others. -- AnonMoos (talk) 23:45, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] 14th century

According to C. Boutell's work on monumental brasses, the 1383 memorial bronze of John of Campden (or John de Campden), warden of St. Cross, Winchester (who died in 1382) contains a small Shield of the Trinity and Arms of the Passion, one on each side of the effigy. This is the first solid source I've found on 14th-century usage (the whole ca. 1275-1395 period otherwise seems to be a kind of dry spell). A small reproduction is on p. 95 of the Rodney Dennys book. AnonMoos 23:27, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Attempts to use of the structure of the diagram for other purposes

There's information in the Michael Evans journal article and several other places about efforts to use the structure of the "Shield of the Trinity" diagram (i.e. three peripheral nodes and one central node, fully interconnected by six links) for other purposes, beginning as early as a "Shield of the soul" (Scutum anime) which is included in Matthew Paris' Chronica Majora manuscript of ca. 1250. There's also an image of a stained-glass window Shield of Mary available on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/paullew/506681385/ . However, I'm unsure what if anything to say about such attempts, since none of them seems to me to be very succesful (since few subjects other than the Trinity can usefully be expressed with the particular peripheral-negative central-positive approach of the original diagram, while if all the links are used for positive meanings, then the diagram usually becomes merely a redundant way of expressing tautologies). Certainly none of the attempts has caught on... AnonMoos (talk) 13:49, 11 December 2007 (UTC)