In their magisterial work, Les Toscans et leurs families, David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber examined in considerable detail a problem faced by many historians studying late medieval tax censuses such as the Florentine catasto: how much credence to give to the ages of individuals whose names are included in these documents? Following a lengthy investigation of the catasto of 1427-1429, they reached the wistful conclusion that “Tuscans in 1427 had only a vague knowledge of their own ages or were loath to report them accurately.“ In the course of their inquiry, Herlihy and Klapisch compared the ages of some individuals recorded in the catasto with the ages of the same individuals found in other documents.

Castiglione's Libro del cortegiano (1528) and Renaissance courtesy literature in general chart an uneven course between the description of an illustrious courtly ideal never fully incarnate and the establishment of a set of rules enabling courtly practice and prescription. These two intentions, one roughly Platonic and the other roughly Aristotelian, are in the end contradictory, for the more substantial the ideal becomes, the less can it accommodate varying experience and therefore practice. The impulse to set forth an ideal as something outside of variety through which experience is to be judged is incompatible with the production of that ideal through the experiential mean of varying extremes.

Sometime between 1502 and 1509 one of Antwerp's city clerks took time to pen a small drawing and inscription on the flyleaf of a document in his care (fig. 1). His depiction of a naked soul seen from the backside while ascending into the clouds of heaven, succinctly labeled “ascensio,” turns out to be only the first of several dozen doodles preserved in a special class of judicial manuscripts in the Antwerp city archives. Taken as a group, these pictorial and verbal jottings provide a unique opportunity to eavesdrop upon the spontaneous mental meanderings of several Antwerpians in the age of Metsys, Erasmus, Bruegel, and Plantin. The art of doodling is revealing by its very nature, and the possibility that one of the doodlers was the humanist Pieter Gillis provides an additional incentive for the discussion of this material, which is catalogued and translated in the accompanying appendix.

The relationship of the imagination to the realities of life, whether factual or moral, was not something that Sidney could take for granted. He is forever trying to make known its proper role; and for him, this means essentially the role of metaphor. Throughout the Apology, he not only identifies his metaphors but also tries to explain their workings; within the Arcadia, he exercises the utmost freedom in his use of them, but also signals them, so that they are clearly identified as metaphors. Finally, the whole of the Arcadia is a metaphor because it is fiction, a fiction set in pagan times and therefore needing from the Christian reader even more understanding of its relationship to higher truth. So, from small metaphors to large ones, he holds in his hands imagery to reflect the motions of the soul and the life of the affections as on a screen.