One colourful aspect of student life registered in the print-books is the initiation or ‘hazing’ ritual to which new students were subjected. The so-called Depositio appears in the Pugillus Facetiarum (Strasbourg 1608, 1618) and also in de Passe’s Academia sive Speculum Vitae Scolasticae (Arnhem 1612), and the miniature in the Frölich album clearly copies the…

December 2025 (3) A peculiarly German motif — in both senses of the word! Presumably a sexual innuendo — riding on pricks? (works just as well in German). The earliest example known to me is one of the supporters of the arms of Christoph Sell, painted on the wall of the Bruneck drinking cellar which…

December 2025 (2) A monk hurries towards his monastery with a woman/nun concealed in the sheaf of straw he carries — another enduring Protestant satirical anti-monastic motif which seems to appear first in late 16C alba amicorum, before being picked up by the early 17C print-books [here the Pratum Emblematicum (1617) and Philotheca Corneliana (1619)…

I have embarked on this blog in order to advertise the astonishing wealth of imagery painted (for the most part) in the Early Modern alba amicorum or Stammbucher [‘friendship books’] of (mainly) ‘German’ students, compiled between c.1560 and c.1700. This iconographic wealth is all but unknown to British art historians (the keeping of such souvenir…