Obstupefacting Excrescences.

I don’t normally make separate posts for different reviews of the same book, but Colin Burrow’s LRB review (9 July 2026; archived) of Arnoud Visser’s On Pedantry has so little in common with Clare Bucknell’s for the NYRB (LH), and it’s so frabjously expressive in and of itself, that I can’t resist presenting it on its own. It starts:

This is what​ ‘Listen up’ sounds like when translated into pedantese: ‘Why, you brute nebulons, have you had my corpusculum so long among you, and cannot yet tell how to edify an argument? Attend and throw your ears to me, for I am gravidated with child till I have indoctrinated your plumbeous cerebrosities.’ So speaks one of the earliest representations of the pedant in English literature, the schoolmaster Rombus who appears in Philip Sidney’s The Lady of May. This was an entertainment put on for Elizabeth I in 1578, in which courtiers were invited to laugh at schoolteachers and the queen was encouraged to choose between different styles of rustic suitor for the Lady of May.

Sidney’s playlet was eventually published two decades later, in the same year as Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. That made 1598 the year of the pedant. Shakespeare’s play included a walk-on part for the schoolmaster and turbo-pedant Holofernes. He is right down in Sidney’s groove, so get your plumbeous cerebrosities (leaden brains) in gear or you won’t understand a word of what he says about his rival, the braggart Armado:

He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument. I abhor such fanatical phantasimes, such insociable and point-device companions, such rackers of orthography, as to speak ‘dout’ sine ‘b’ when he should say ‘doubt’, ‘det’ when he should pronounce ‘debt’: d, e, b, t, not d, e, t.

Holofernes’s first sentence here means that Armado talks bullshit, or takes a small hank of raw wool and spins it out into a thread so fine that it loses all substance. There was a strong association in Shakespeare’s period between rough woven native woollen cloth and honest speech, or what Berowne in the same play calls ‘russet yeas and honest kersey noes’. Nasty overspun silks, expensive imports and foreigners like Armado (whose very name reminds you that the beastly Spanish are always ready to send another Armada) are all threats to the solid English of douBts and deBts and honest truths.

The period between 1590 and 1600 was the most extraordinary decade in English literary history. At its start came Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the publication of Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella. At its end, or maybe just after, was Hamlet. It was also the decade in which the word ‘pedant’ first appeared in print in English. There is a deep connection between these apparently unrelated phenomena. The figure of the pedant as a literary character emerged in Italian drama of the 1540s, both in the commedia erudita (which was written down and based on Roman comedy) and in its improv version, the commedia dell’arte. Sidney was doing some Italianate showing off by allowing Rombus in The Lady of May to spin out the thread of his verbosities. He was saying ‘Your Majesty, we English (or at least Sir Philip Sidney) can out-Italian the Italians.’ Shakespeare was doing something similar. There’s a flavour of ‘anything Sidney does I can do better’ about Love’s Labour’s Lost, with its fancy French courtiers and high-flown language. The aspiration to be European was one driver of the literary revolution of the 1590s.

Another was the desire to grow a language which could conquer and absorb foreign terms and styles, while staying recognisably English. That was an inherently unstable duo of ambitions, and the pedant sat squarely on the faultline between them. The polysyllabic shower of Latinate globulosity that eructates from the gobs of early modern pedants shows not only that their authors and creators could be European but also that they have a mocking grasp on all the words, even the words you can’t understand, and that the author is just a little bit uneasy about his own powers of linguistic innovation. Does my love of polysyllabic foreign-sounding words (which were in this period called ‘inkhorn’ terms because they came from people who spent too long scribbling) make me un-English, or even absurd? George Puttenham, whose Arte of English Poesie (1589) was keen to police rhetorical excess in the interests of spare London courtly English, inveighed against the use of ‘words of exceeding great length, which have been fetched from the Latin inkhorn or borrowed of strangers, the use of them in rhyme is nothing pleasant, saving perchance to the common people, who rejoice much to be at plays and interludes’. Creating a pedant was a rhetorically nationalistic act of a curiously double kind. It said: ‘I can entertain you with all the big words; but being solid and English I can also laugh at these obstupefacting excrescences.’

Click through for more; needless to say, Martinus Scriblerus and Edward Casaubon make their ineluctable appearances. Oh, well, I can’t resist adding this passage:

There are some juicy details along the way: the pedagogue (and pedagogues have often been portrayed as pedants) Cassian of Imola was supposedly murdered in 363 ad by his pupils, who stabbed him with their writing implements. That might make him the patron saint of pedants, though Vilgard of Ravenna has a claim to that title too: he had a dream in which demons disguised as Virgil, Horace and Juvenal told him that every word they wrote was true, and he was condemned to death for heresy in 970. By 1678 Ulrik Huber had produced the first full-length Latin treatise on pedantry, which he defined as ‘learning that is corrupted by arrogance, feigned virtue and impertinent judgment’. In the elegant salons of late 17th-century France, the pedant ‘became a model of excessively masculine boorishness’. In the battle of the Ancients and Moderns (between those who thought antiquity was the best source of knowledge and those who trusted modernity to produce new ideas), both camps ‘used the label of pedantry to discredit each other’s approach’.

Cassian of Imola or Vilgard of Ravenna — a difficult choice!