Beasts, street scenes, shops, objects of everyday life, planets, women, saints, and prophets: these are amongst the subjects depicted in the fifteenth-century Florentine manuscript illustrations that are the focus of this book. I explore the role played by images in helping readers to assimilate knowledge, but not the knowledge that we usually associate with the Florentine Renaissance (such as the re-discovered philosophical postulates of Plato and Hermes Trismegistus). Instead, this book is about knowledge for everyday life: the moral principles that helped people to live with each other; the mathematics that facilitated business transactions; the geometry that helped craftsmen and merchants in their trade and provided the young with a basic understanding of the cosmos and the world; and the insights into human nature that would be necessary in an often treacherous environment.