On Pedantry.

Back in 2020 I posted about the etymology of pedant; now I offer a very interesting review by Clare Bucknell (NYRB, May 14, 2026; archived) of On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-All by Arnoud S. Q. Visser. (You can see the book discussed at this Overthink YouTube video, hosted by Ellie Anderson and David Peña-Guzmán; Visser shows up at the 20:14 mark.) Herewith, as usual, some excerpts to whet your appetite:

In 1930 the poet and classicist A.E. Housman published the final volume of his edition of an obscure astrological poem by the Roman author Manilius. He had labored on the project for almost thirty years. All five of its volumes, he wrote, “were produced at my own expense and offered to the public at much less than cost price; but this unscrupulous artifice did not overcome the natural disrelish of mankind for the combination of a tedious author with an odious editor.” Housman did not mind being thought a pedant, out of touch with what “mankind” tended to relish. In fact he played up to it. His introduction to the last volume is full of needling corrections and unpleasantries, aimed both at rival Manilius scholars (“The corrections of Ellis were rather more numerous, and one or two of them were very pretty, but his readers were in perpetual contact with the intellect of an idiot child”) and, more unfairly, at the ancient author himself, for having been an incompetent astrologer. At the end he describes spotting a misprint (“rustling” for “rusting”) in a poem by Walter de la Mare that he declined to correct:

If I had been so ill-advised as to publish my emendation, I should have been told that rustling was exquisitely apt and poetical, because hedgerows do rustle, especially in autumn…and I should have been recommended to quit my dusty (or musty) books and make a belated acquaintance with the sights and sounds of the English countryside. And the only possible answer would have been ugh!

It’s hard to think of anyone who better answers to our contemporary notion of the pedant than Housman at his classical labors. But our understanding of pedantry, denoting the sticklerishness of academic specialists and grammar obsessives, is a relatively narrow one. […] In his lively cultural history, the Dutch scholar Arnoud Visser gathers a wide range of objectionable intellectual behaviors under the pedantry umbrella: debating aggressively in public, teaching in an obnoxious manner, neglecting one’s wife, dressing badly, quoting poetry at parties. The only constant across different time periods and milieus is that no one has wanted to be accused of it. Visser describes pedantry as “the excessive use or display of learning” (“excessive” according to shifting historical criteria) and potential pedants as those “who pursue learning and cultivate the mind”: professionals and amateurs, specialists and dilettantes, men and women. Medieval schoolmen worrying over Aristotle could be pedants; so could cultivated female salonnières in seventeenth-century Paris.

Visser’s main claim is that accusations of pedantry have tended to be “less about the content of ideas than about conduct.” Scholarship may turn on abstract questions, but the way its practitioners act in the world and present themselves to others is a social and material one. The beliefs of Greek philosophers in imperial Rome often dictated striking displays of indifference to decorum—Stoics loftily rejecting worldly comforts, Cynics farting or masturbating in public. In Lucian’s The Carousal, or the Lapiths, a second-century satire about prominent philosophers brawling at a wedding dinner, Zenothemis the Stoic yelps when he loses an eye and has to be reminded that he isn’t supposed to care. […] In ancient Greece, those who paraded their learning were branded as greedy and fame-hungry. We don’t tend to think of intellectuals as being in it for the money (Housman certainly wasn’t), but the Greeks suspected teachers in particular of being cheats and cozeners. […]

Underlying these representations, but not always made explicit, is the notion that those who need to make money to survive shouldn’t possess cultural power. The “charge of pedantry,” Visser argues, has long “served as a weapon in struggles over social status or political authority.” In The Clouds the social satire is double-edged: the traditional aristocratic educational model seems just as dodgy as the rising Sophist one, though for reasons of sexual rather than financial indecency. (To elites, one character says drily, virtue seems to consist of having “a rippling chest, radiant skin,/broad shoulders, a wee tongue,/a grand rump and a petite dick.”) […]

Early modern anti-intellectual attacks were often responses to the rise of humanists at courts and universities. In Aretino’s Stablemaster, the pedante character, a court tutor, is portrayed as both naive and power-hungry, an incorrigible brown-noser of the Duke of Gonzaga: “The reception granted to me by his most Excellent Lordship has penetrated right to my intestines, my bowels, and my uterus.” (The play was written to be performed in front of the real duke Federico II of Gonzaga during Aretino’s stay in Mantua.) In “Du pédantisme” (circa 1580), an essay on the state of French learning, Montaigne claims that schoolmasters would be wretchedly poor but for the needs of the next generation of greedy masters, lawyers, and doctors. In his view, a dangerous state of affairs has arisen whereby those who possess the most learning are the least fit to use it. […]

Learned women found themselves fighting on multiple fronts. In mid-seventeenth-century England and France, space had opened up for those from elite backgrounds to participate in intellectual culture. But their visibility exposed them to censure and shaming. As the word “pedantry” shifted in meaning, no longer tied to the vices of scholars and schoolmasters, the kinds of people who could be called pedants and the behaviors that condemned them evolved. During the long eighteenth century, Visser notes, there was a “marked rise” in usages of the word, and to an even greater extent it was tied to sociability, designating incompetence in matters of etiquette: gaucheness, boorishness, a failure to understand the difference between intellectual cultivation and the performance of cultivation in front of others. […]

As usual the attack was double-edged. Truly learned women, unshowy and committed to the acquisition of knowledge, could always be dismissed as ugly, slatternly, unmarriageable. Visser gives the example of the character of Cornelia Hartog, a thirty-something spinster who appears in the Dutch epistolary novel Historie van Mejuffrouw Sara Burgerhart (The Story of Miss Sara Burgerhart) (1782). According to Sara, the protagonist, Cornelia can read difficult scholarly texts in four or five languages and corresponds with learned men; she is also tall, skinny, mannish, slovenly, and addicted to her snuffbox. There is a suggestion that she lacks the proper sexual innocence. “She is experienced,” Sara says knowingly, “in many, if I may say so, unfeminine arts.”

The focus on Cornelia’s looks and body reminds us that pedantry has often been imagined as a physical condition. Visser begins with the fact that the desiccated Edward Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872) gets his name from the early modern classicist Isaac Casaubon, who was believed to have been so committed to his studies that he refused ever to urinate and died. (Eliot herself was accused of pedantry by, among others, Henry James.) Anti-intellectual works of all periods feature representations of exhausted, frail, smelly, unsexed scholars. In the course of his schooling, Aristophanes’ Strepsiades is relieved of his shoes and cloak and devoured by bedbugs but still worships his fellow philosophers, “men so frugal that not one of them has ever cut his hair or anointed himself or gone to the bath house to wash.” An influential allegorical poem on sin, Johannes de Hauvilla’s Architrenius (1184), contains a long section set at a university in Paris, featuring one of the most harrowing descriptions of student life ever composed. “What rocklike spirit (and what is harder than rock?) is not moved by the plight of this shaggy horde of logicians?” the speaker exclaims. “Evils rush upon them from every quarter.” Empty stomachs, dirty faces, ratty hair, threadbare garments, miserable meals (“A pea swims, an onion wanders, bean and leek threaten torment to the head”), interminable nights spent poring over manuscripts, sleep that isn’t sleep at all, “nightmarish cogitations” of failure—who would be a scholar? Erasmus’s The Ciceronian (1528), a satire on humanist scholarship taken to extremes, features a Cicero obsessive, Nosoponus, whose devotion to Latin syntax mandates a strict daily diet of “ten very small raisins” and “three sugared coriander seeds,” for fear of anything heavier weighing down his brain. Small wonder, as personified Folly remarks in another Erasmus satire, The Praise of Folly (1511), that women are “no less shocked and repelled by a wiseman than by a scorpion.”

On the face of it, the desire to dwell on cerebral people’s bodies seems paradoxical. But accusations of pedantry often take this form because getting to grips with minds is difficult. It’s a convenient anti-intellectual suggestion that a person’s animal behavior—how they behave at the dinner table, or while drunk, or in the bedroom—reveals who they really are, the activity of the brain being a sort of disguise or distraction. Visser points out that Italian pedante comedies often smeared tutors as pederasts or sodomites, though there’s nothing in the historical record to support the association. Suggesting that they enjoyed thrashing their pupils’ buttocks a bit too much was another implicit rebuke to their authority.

[…] Scholasticism, a method of interpretation and disputation, emerged in twelfth-century Europe as part of a new intellectual culture in which learning and logical analysis were becoming “ends in themselves,” Visser explains, rather than educational tools or prompts to ethical growth. Scholars engaged in increasingly self-referential forms of inquiry. “What have these quibbling sophistries to do with the mysteries of eternal wisdom?” Erasmus asked in 1515, defending his attack on scholastic theologians in The Praise of Folly. “What is the purpose of these labyrinthine quaestiones?” His fake examples of debate topics make scholasticism sound both nugatory and dangerously stupid:

Whether the following proposition is possible: God the Father hates the Son. Whether God could have taken on the nature of a woman, of the devil, of an ass, of a cucumber, of a piece of flint? And then how the cucumber would have preached, performed miracles, and been nailed to the cross?

The parodies of scholastic reasoning in The Praise of Folly are some of the best bits in the satire. “From my long-standing contact with theologians…I have picked up something here and there,” Folly says modestly, then offers a pitch-perfect imitation of a scholastic reading of Ecclesiastes. Scholarship, the driest kind especially, is always potentially comic, being both hyperformulaic and, often, messy—knotty, excessive, self-important. Eighteenth-century writers discovered in it a bountiful source of satiric material. Swift prefaced his religious satire A Tale of a Tub (1704) with a fictional list of “Treatises written by the same Author,” which sound as trivial as they do convoluted: “A panegyrical Essay upon the Number THREE”; “An analytical Discourse upon Zeal, histori-theo-physi-logically considered.” In The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (circa 1713–1714), a mock-biography of a pedantic literary critic by Pope, Swift, and others, Martinus’s father refuses to do anything without the sanction of an ancient authority, including getting his wife pregnant. When the boy proves to be a slow runner, his father turns to Pliny for help and determines to have his “Spleen cauteriz’d,” an operation likely to be fatal. Only the quick arrival of Martinus’s uncle saves the day. “It was well he came speedily, or Martin could not have boasted the entire Quota of his Viscera.” […]

Was it necessarily a problem if learned people weren’t politically engaged or hid away from the world? The Sophists were resented for their sheer worldliness—their influence over their pupils, the dangerous amorality of their oratorical training. Intellectuals have been mocked for not knowing what a pair of shoes costs or how to behave at parties, but also for sticking their noses into public questions they aren’t supposed to understand. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, Visser shows, partisan attacks on Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams drew on the popular view of the learned as elitist, out of touch, unsuited to government. “A philosopher makes the worst politician,” one pamphleteer wrote during Jefferson’s 1796 campaign. Such men relied on “visionary, wild and speculative systems” rather than facts; they were marked by “timidity, whimsicalness, a disposition to reason from certain principles, and not from the true nature of man.”

Those on the side of philosophy might have pointed out that whimsy and speculation, too, needed protecting, as belonging to a realm of “pure” thought that ought to be insulated from worldly interests. But there is no abstracting oneself wholly. Even the most quixotic of thinkers, as Stefan Collini observes, can be “no more entirely ‘removed’ from the world than that world is entirely devoid of ‘ideas.’” The finest novel of and about pedantry, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), explores the subject as a phenomenon in the world, not out of it. The spectacularly pedantic Walter Shandy’s learned theories—on everything from noses to cursing, door hinges to eternity—spark into life when they come up against human nature. Nothing, Tristram remarks, is so calculated to provoke his father, “make his passions go off like gun-powder,” as an innocent clarifying question during one of his famous disquisitions. “Can noses be dissolved?”

I suspect I’m not the only Hatter who has sometimes felt that Eliot’s portrait of Edward Casaubon hit a little too close to home…