This is another of those scenes which surely presupposes a (lost) print or maybe woodcut illustration in a book? Is the subject from some chivalric Romance I should know? It looks decidedly old-fashioned by this date. Is it from Ariosto, perhaps? — cf. the verses from the French…

Seemingly deriving from an early 16C neo-Latin epigram by Heinrich Solde [Henricius Cordus] of Brunswick, beginning Tres medicus facies habet [the doctor has three faces] this is in fact a satire on the patient not the physician! I first encountered it in the alba amicorum (4 below —…

In Eisenhart’s Grundsatze der teutschen rechten in sprichwortern (Helmstedt, 1759) appears the apparent legal maxim, Studentengut ist zollfrei [student goods are duty-free], but appears with the variant gabenfrei in a poem published by Picander 30 years earlier — as in the form in the Harpprecht album below (1738).…

Not perhaps the most politically correct motif, but for a few years in the second decade of the 17th century she was a celebrity, famous for being fat! (can we still use the F word?). She was married to a Strasbourg rope-maker [Seiler] — hence her name —…

A motif found in the alba amicorum. It derives from a woodcut illustration made by Hans Weiditz in Von der Artzney beider Gluck (Augsburg,1532), a German translation of Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae. The lover saws through a branch growing out of his heart; the branch bears a…

as far as I can see, a motif limited exclusively to the early 17C alba amicorum of German students, and deriving from an engraving in the print-books published in Strasbourg in 1618 by Jakob von der Heyden (i.e. the Speculum Cornelianum and the 2nd ed of the Pugillus…