“Memoirs of a Court Dwarf, a Gnostic by Conviction” is the title of a book published in the “fabula rasa” series by the Symposium Publishing House. The author, hiding under the pseudonym David Madsen, is a living English Catholic philosopher, theologian and monk, who published the novel in 1995 By genre, this is the diary of the personal secretary of Pope Leo X, the dwarf Giuseppe, representing the Renaissance and its figures - Raphael, Leonardo, Mirandola through the eyes of a contemporary. “Memoirs” were written as if from the inside, by a Renaissance man, a comprehensively educated cosmopolitan, reconsidering the concepts of good and evil, vice and virtue, perversity and norms. Before us is a fascinatingly frank, sharp and frightening novel about the Renaissance and beyond with its documentaryism.