On a Thursday in June 1433 nine leaders of the Peruzzi family, one of Florence's biggest and most celebrated lineages, met in the house of Ridolfo di Bonifazio Peruzzi to discuss, as they had precisely four years earlier, how to prevent or if necessary how to deal with various offences—slanders, robberies, assaults or even murders—that might be committed by men of the Peruzzi against others. We know about these intriguing clan meetings, a response to the factional manoeuvring of the years 1426-34, from an unpublished document, formally recording the family's decision on 25 June 1433 to elect three of their number with “pieno e libero mandato da tutti gl'altri a potere procedere contro a qualunche persona facessi per l'innanzi alcuna villania, danno o dispiacere ad alcuna persona,” which survives in two seventeenth-century copies in the Archivio Peruzzi de' Medici, a private collection deposited in the Florentine State Archives in 1935.

The final disposition of one's worldly possessions is the prelude to the ultimate act in the life cycle. It offers a rare view into the mind of the testator as well as insights into his social and cultural milieu. For historians of art and students of social, economic, or political history, the form and content of testaments can often supply important data for research. However, all scholars who have sought specific wills know the difficulties encountered in their search.

In the Florentine archives all notarized acts survive in two basic collections: the Notarile antecosimiano and the Archivio Diplomatico. The former consists of volumes of notarial protocols as written and recorded by individual notaries, while the latter consists of rolls of pergamena. The inventories for both collections are cross-referenced. The Notarile inventories are numbers 38 through 40, with an Appendice (No. 41).

Miles Hogarde has been recognized, both by his Protestant antagonists in Queen Mary's reign and by modern historians,as the best of the Roman Catholic propagandists in the bitter pamphlet war of 1553-58. But there is more to Hogarde than the polemic brilliance of The displaying of the Protestantes, and little attention has been given to these other aspects—particularly that implicit in his characterization by Anthony Wood, the seventeenth-century Oxford antiquarian, as “the first trader or mechanic that appeared inprint for the catholic cause, I mean one that had not received any monastical or academic breeding.” Whether or not Hogarde was statistically the first, he was certainly regarded (both by his opponents and himself) as unusual in his role, though Protestant lay preachers had been unobtrusively present in England for years past. He is unusual in various ways: for one thing, instances of sixteenth-century London artisans expressing themselves in print are certainly not numerous.