Torsten Hiltmann (Münster)

Torsten Hiltmann is a Junior Professor for the High and Late Middle Ages and Auxiliary Sciences at the University of Münster. He is a specialist for late medieval courtly culture, heralds and heraldry and wrote his PhD thesis on the late medieval heralds’ compendia in France and Burgundy. He worked for several years at the German Historical Institute in Paris where he led, inter alia, a database project on heralds in Burgundian sources (account books, historiography), compiling all the references to heralds in plain text extracts categorized by keywords and extracting details about the offices and the different office holders from Burgundy and elsewhere. The database covers a period from 1383-1519 and contains more than 7000 entries, but is still unpublished. Since 2013, he leads the research project “The performance of coats of arms” on the history of heraldic communication in late medieval culture and society (12th to 15th centuries), funded by the VolkswagenStiftung. Besides that, he is maintaining the collaborative blog “Heraldica Nova” on hypotheses.org.