D'Arcy Boulton is an historian with a special interest in the history of heraldica. His interest in such matters derives in part from his family background: since he is the Chief of Name and Arms of a lineage of the Lincolnshire gentry of which a (then) cadet branch crossed from New York to Upper Canada (as Late Loyalists) in 1799, and soon produced the leading members of what its enemies called the 'Family Compact'. The seventh in a line of D'Arcy Boultons, he was born in 1946 in Toronto, where the original seat of his family, The Grange, built by D'Arcy Boulton II in 1817, is the oldest civil building in the city. While still a graduate student, he negotiated with the College of Arms in London for letters patent confirming to his father in the name of his grandfather (D'Arcy V) the arms borne by the senior branch of the Boultons of Moulton, Lincolnshire (included in the first edition of Burke's Landed Gentry), which had become extinct in the late nineteenth century. The letters, dated 18 June 1974, also granted a badge and an augmented form of the crest, to which he has recently added a Military Loyalist's coronet in honour of his four-times-great grandfather Christopher Robinson III — who served as an ensign in the Queen's Rangers under Simcoe, and was one of the founders of Toronto and Upper Canada. This descent was officially confirmed by the Dominion Genealogist of the United Empire Loyalists Association, and gave him the right to use the postnominal letters UE.
Boulton studied at the University of Toronto Schools (1958-65) and then at Trinity College in the same university, where he obtained an Honours B.A. in Modern History in 1969. He next studied at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, obtaining an M.A. and Ph.D. in Medieval Studies in 1970 and 1978 respectively (and also his wife, Maureen, in 1972), and studied concurrently from 1972 at St John's College in the University of Oxford, where he received a D.Phil. in History in 1976. In the process he acquired a good basic knowledge of social and cultural anthropology and historical linguistics and an expert knowledge of several 'ancillary sciences' of historiography, and learned to read (with varying levels of facility) seven modern and seven ancient or medieval languages. After teaching from 1975 to 1985, first at Davidson College, North Carolina, and then at Harvard University, he was appointed in the latter year to a position in the Department of History and Medieval Institute of the University of Notre Dame, and has taught there ever since — most recently as Professor of the Practice of Medieval Studies. His courses have included graduate seminars on the European nobilities, the court of Burgundy and the 'ancillary sciences' of diplomatic, sigillography, and heraldic studies, and undergraduate courses on knighthood, castles, palaces, and courts.
Boulton has had a strong interest in matters heraldic and nobiliary since about the age of twelve — when his grandmother and two cousins gave him his first books on those subjects — and all of his subsequent research and publication has been in the fields of heraldic and nobiliary studies, with an emphasis on comparisons across the Latin European world. His first book, The Knights of the Crown: The Monarchical Orders of Knighthood in Late Medieval Europe 1325-1520 (1987, revised edition 2000), took this approach to chivalric orders; another nearing completion, Grants of Honour, deals comparatively with the origins of the practice of conferring hereditary lordly dignities. More recently, he has taken a similar approach to the subject of heraldic emblems in a set of books (nearly completed) called Heraldic Emblems and Their Rivals, and in a new, doctoral-level introduction (commissioned by Brill Press in the Netherlands) called Heraldic Emblems in Europe, c. 1130 – c. 1690: A Handbook for Scholars. He has also published a number of lengthy articles in the field in various venues, including Heraldry in Canada, the proceedings of various colloquia and congresses, and a book he co-edited called The Ideology of Burgundy (2006).
Boulton's work has led to his election first as a member of the Standing Committee on Heraldry of the New England Historic Genealogical Society (1980), as a Fellow of the Royal Heraldry Society of Canada (1993), as a Serving Brother of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem (1993), as an Associate (1990) and then a full Academician of the International Heraldic Academy (2000), and most recently as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London (2007), and a member of the Editorial Council of Heraldisk Tidsskrift, journal of the Societas Heraldica Scandinavica (2007).
In addition to being the Editor of this journal, he is a Director of the RHSC, the first Vice-Dean and Registrar of the Faculty of Fellows of the Society, the founding Chairman of its Committee on Academic Affairs (and as such, organizer of and presider at its annual Colloquia since 2003), the founding Vice-Chairman of its Committee on the Heraldic Arts, a member of the Editorial Board of Heraldry in Canada, a member of its Committee on Honours and Awards, and a member both of the Committee on Education and of its Examinations Board. In the International Academy he has been elected a Member of the International Commission on Orders of Chivalry, and a Co-Director of the International Commission on Contemporary Heraldry. He recently served as a member of the Scientific Committee on heraldic subjects for the XXVIIIth Congress of Genealogical and Heraldic Sciences, held in Quebec City at the end of June 2008. He is also a member of various heraldic and loyal societies in Canada and elsewhere.
Boulton is finally an (occasional) heraldic artist and designer, and in addition to contributing to the Society's Roll of Arms, and both designing and painting armorial bearings for a number of institutions in the United States (especially divisions of Harvard and Notre Dame), he drew not only the rendering of the achievement of the Society on the cover of Alta Studia Heraldica, but his own achievement at the head of the editorial page, and a number of the illustrations to his article in the second issue.
Honours and awards
- 2012 Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal
- 2007 Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London
- 2000 Academician of the International Heraldic Academy
- 1995 Fellow of the Royal Heraldry Society of Canada
- 1974 Grant of arms, College of Arms, London