Today's update:

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Monumental Brasses
An article by Chad Arnow

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Arma Bohemia Ballock Dagger
A hands-on review by Chad Arnow

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Arma Bohemia Ballock Dagger
Added to Chad's collection

As always, you can see our Complete History of Updates listed right from our home page.

A well done article about a somewhat rare topic. I had no idea that so many existed, or that so many had been destroyed. It's a shame there's little correlation with the animals at the figure's feet; I've often wondered what those were about.

Thanks for taking the time to put it together.

M.

I second the thanks to you for putting this together. Really a much more interesting topic than I'd realized.

Cheers,
Steven

Thanks, guys. :) I never intended to get so interested in brasses, but so many arms and armour books reference them that I decided to look more into the subject. I now have around a 1/2 dozen books on brasses. :)

I could have gone into a lot more depth, but I think that would be pushing it for a hobbyist site like ours. Effigies (the 3D statues on tombs) are worthy of their own article, but finding books on them is even harder than books on brasses. Maybe some day....

M.,
Regarding the correlation of animals at people's feet, there have been a system as many have suggested but enough don't seem to follow that system that it casts enough doubts to discount any correlation.

Gothic Eye is an awesome website for English/British funereal brasses. Whenever Osprey cites a brass or effigy as the inspiration for thier colour plates, I try to find a photo of the original, so I can rate the interpretation myself.

Some of you may have noticed that Nathan is phasing in an updated way of viewing pictures in the collection galleries. This slicker approach makes it easier to browse through all the images (backwards and forwards) in the same window as the item's page. Before, you had to click on a picture to get back to the item page, then click on the next picture to view it, and so on. Now, click on any photo and it opens on top of the text. You can click on the right hand side of the picture to view the next image or the left hand side of the image to view the previous image. Pretty slick and a better browsing experience. :) The actively updated galleries have already been enhanced with this new interface.

Also, each gallery now has a link to "Show my complete collection", which is a list of all the items currently published for that collection. From that list, you can see each item in each category and choose where to browse to. You can still just choose a category from the drop-down menu at the top and browse, of course. The new "complete collection" link just lets you streamline your browsing if you wish to.

These may seem like simple changes, but they required a lot of Nathan's time to implement. My thanks go to him for his continuing efforts to make the user's experience better.

P.S. Isn't that a cool ballock dagger in this update? :)

Thanks, Chad, for taking note and mentioning the newly formatted galleries.

When looking at photos in them, you can also hit the right and left arrow keys to browse the photos like a slideshow presentation.