Heraldic Visitations between Historical and “Social” Narrative

The article examines the peculiarities of visitation narratives that are interpreted as the evidence of the “autonomization of the social” in the intellectual discourse of the 16th — 17th centuries. The source basis is a group of early visitations (Visitations of the North, ca. 1480—1500) and visitations conducted under the Stuarts by Nicholas Charles and William Camden. The material for the visitations was collected empirically. The heralds were interested in the following information: the coat of arms used by the family and the genealogy of the owner of a particular estate. These elements were the structural basis of the visitation narrative. While early visitations include elements of dynastic narratives, in the Early Stuart heraldic texts the horizontal structure of the lineage comes to the fore, which has a historical (however, devoid of an event and chronological canvas) and spatial dimension, and in which the designated personalities are maximally impersonalized.