Admittedly, the literature of the imagination, which poses special problems for an historian of opinion, is a minority presence among Thomas's sources, most of which can be interpreted more straightforwardly. Yet the very volume of his evidence may create illusions. It is the product of the rise of print in the Renaissance. To support his claim that the early modern period produced a novel insistence on the enhancing qualities of friendship, Thomas points to a "torrent of printed literature - sermons, essays, poems, plays, novels - on the theme, for which there was no precedent. Here as elsewhere we may have too little evidence about the everyday assumptions of the middle ages to decide what the early modern period changed.

Even when medieval society has given way to the world of print, can Thomas's technique take us below the surface of thought and feeling? His snippets of quotation line writers up on one side or other of an issue. At one moment, John Milton appears as an advocate of immortal fame, at another as the enemy of its pursuit. How did he square those positions? Thomas does not examine the tussles in writers' minds between values that he shows to have been in conflict. We do not watch authors weighing the precepts of classical antiquity against the teachings of Christianity, or learn what happened when, say, an injunction to martial achievement clashed with the requirement to turn the other cheek. An approach which paused on the intellectual or emotional sojourns of individuals would leave room for a smaller range of voices than Thomas's, but it might better enable us to hear occupants of the past thinking and feeling. In our world, people will state opinions about adultery or abortion and then infringe them when confronted by practical choices. The early modern period knew parallel dilemmas. Thomas's readers will learn much more about what people said than about what they were like.