Thanks to a tip-off by Jeffrey Hildebrandt here of a post by Tom B over at The Armour Archive (http://forums.armourarchive.org/phpBB3/viewto...p;t=174159), here's Mattias Goll's PhD thesis:

- Iron Documents. Interdisciplinary studies on the technology of late medieval european plate armour production between 1350 and 1500: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/17203/

The file is 3GB ... more than 5000 PDFs, and tens of thousands of photos.

Tom has done an amazing job also extracting the photos into 10 photo albums, if you just want to browse:

Tom B. wrote:

All of the photos are uploaded into 10 albums Goll's Thesis Photos Part 1 Goll's Thesis Photos Part 2 Goll's Thesis Photos Part 3 Goll's Thesis Photos Part 4 Goll's Thesis Photos Part 5 Goll's Thesis Photos Part 6 Goll's Thesis Photos Part 7 Goll's Thesis Photos Part 8 Goll's Thesis Photos Part 9 Goll's Thesis Photos Part 10 Goll's Thesis Illustrations

Thanks to Matthias for making this available ... and Tom for bringing it to our attention, as well as making the images more accessible!

Sooooo....He got his PhD, right? This is a breathtaking collection of resource material and and incredible amount of work! Fantastic! Thanks for posting this!

Hi Tim,

Yes, I believe he got his PhD ... and well-deserved. This is a huge amount of work, and a real game-changer for researchers, armourers, historians, etc ... we'll be using this resource, and referring to it, for decades, I imagine!

For those who want to download the file, there's some discussion of the technical aspects of this over on The Armour Archive thread, in case you want to check there first ... would be great to keep this thread 'clean' for just discussions of the resource itself, and the armour contained within ... although that's more likely to spawn dozens of separate threads!

I believe this was already posted here, but I might be mistaken and saw it somewhere else. At any rate I downloaded this a while ago, and I remember thinking "Why is his thesis 3 gigabytes?!"

Truly a remarkable work. I assume he'll be Dr. Goll from now on!

Tom also uploaded these to a Pinterest album if people find that more convenient:

http://www.pinterest.com/tbiliter/photos-from...hd-thesis/

OMG.

Wonderful! Many thanks all and to mathias, well done amazing work. Only down side to the pinterest thing is there is going to be a heck of a lot of 'where is this' questions flying about and I still can't find a pic of a particulalr flemish mannifer I need making!

Just a quick new-year bump for anyone who might have missed this over the holiday break ... this really is an amazing resource!

Thanks for bumping, I missed this one!

Absolutely amazing. No words.

An incredible resource! Thanks for the link!

Hello, the links are unfortunately a dead end.
Does anyone know of a location to consult the data?
Thanks in advance

The link here still works

http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/17203/

Click on "Download (3 GB)"

Has his PhD been published as a book?

I don't know if his PHD has been published. He has a book Mit Eiserner Faust. Der Freiburger "With Iron Fist" It is specifically about gauntlets, lots of good colour photo's and details. Would be good for armourers and historians. Its in German and I haven't yet bothered with a serious attempt at translation.

I got my copy from bookdepository.com in the UK.