In matters of war, ‘only heralds should deliver the challenge’. So insisted a Burgundian herald at the turn of the sixteenth century. The challenge he meant was the ‘deffiance’, or in Latin, the diffidatio: the formal articulation of a grievance against an adversary that launched warfare. Borrowed from noble feuds, this ritual often took the form of a declaimed letter accompanied by a token, or gage, of battle – usually a glove. That heralds arrogated to themselves this pivotal duty in war-making and interstate relations points to their self-image as ministers of organized conflict. As such, heralds saw themselves as embodiments of princely power, which entailed subsuming their own personae into the ruler’s. This unique relationship between signified (prince) and signifier (herald) produced a shadowy agency that this chapter unfolds and interprets.

In the wake of some pathbreaking studies in the mid-twentieth century, recent research has expanded significantly our knowledge about the activities of heralds in premodern culture as it has pulled them from the musty antiquarian garrets back into socially embedded milieux. In so doing, this wave of scholarship reveals how heralds and heraldry belonged to a cultural project to build and sustain the image of noble power. As officers of such systems, heralds propagated mythologies about those elite classes and provided them with representational tools. Those tools were visual, but also material and mystical: the herald manifested his sovereign's presence like a glittering spark of the ruler's flame. But let us return to shadows for a moment.