Words, Pictures, and a Connection

Mark Hildesly, a seventeenth-century English barrister, left behind a manuscript full of religious exhortations and overstuffed poetry celebrating the sober character “jurisprudent.” Asking himself whether “exerting of books or babies are best becoming a jurisprudent,” he came down in favor of books. Hildesly also doodled in the margins—a ship and a woman in profile. The doodles made Hildesly more real than the “jurisprudent” poems soberly singing of babies forgone. The poems made Hildesly seem like a source, the doodles like a man.