The historiographical and methodological musings that characterized the history of science as a discipline—and especially its early modern factions—in the second half of the twentieth century have given place to a strict demand for professionalism. Yet the tools of our trade have not obliged by becoming any more transparent or self-evident. In homage to my teachers of yore, who were much given to “programmatic attempts” and “notes towards,” I would like to offer a cluster of rules of thumb for the interpretation of early modern texts, which I found embedded in my own studies. I will illustrate each with an example from this work.