The present volume tries to do justice to the variety of self-representational strategies in the art and literature of the late medieval and early modern period by focusing on both the traditional con texts of self-definition (such as courts, schools and religious institutions) and the more innovative contexts of humanist art and literature. The essays collected in this volume represent some of the scholarly approaches to historical testimonies of self-representation and self-fashioning, and hence deal with the literary, artistic, philosophical and theological conceptions of the self. They are preceded by a more general essay indexing the ways in which self-representational texts, ego-documents and self-testimonies should be defined.