On the morning of October 10, 1552, a fifteen-year-old boy named Felix left the city of Basel, on the Rhine River, to study medicine at the university in Montpellier, some 330 miles away. He was the only son, and only surviving child, of a Swiss German schoolmaster and his wife. At his departure his father gave him seven gold coins, two fresh shirts, some clean handkerchiefs, and a lecture on the virtue of hard work. His mother gave him an additional gold coin and a tearful hug. Mounting a small horse, he set off with a pair of companions for the southern coast of France.
That first day the travelers stopped to dine at an inn in nearby Lieschtal; unaccustomed to walking in spurs, Felix nearly fell down a set of stairs. Two days later, in Bern, he saw six captive bears and a woman on horseback who got snared in the branches of an apple tree and was left dangling, skirts in armpits, until someone helped her down. The following day it began to rain, and Felix and his companions were forced to stop for the night at an inn filled with unsavory-looking peasants. Fearing robbery, or worse, they barricaded themselves in their room and left before dawn. (They later heard that the other guests had in fact intended to kill them.) They arrived in Geneva, where Felix met the famed reformer John Calvin and heard him preach, though he couldn’t understand the French sermon. He also got his first short haircut, which left his head uncomfortably cold.
In Lyon a ferrywoman cheated Felix of his change, so he threw stones at her boat. In Avignon he succumbed to a brief but intense bout of homesickness. At some point along the way, he turned sixteen. Finally, on the evening of October 30, a Sunday, he mounted a hill and saw spread out below him the walled city of Montpellier—and, beyond it, the sea. He proceeded down the hill, across a bridge, and past the place of execution in the fields outside the city gates. “Pieces of human flesh hung from the olive trees,” and seeing them gave him “a curious sensation.” It soon passed: entering the city, he found the streets filled with revelers, clad in white, accompanied by stringed instruments and bearing silver shells full of sugared almonds. He made his way to the home of his new landlord, a Marrano Jewish pharmacist named Laurent Catalan, who greeted him in Latin and brought him into the house. A serving girl named Beatrice took off his boots. A new life had begun.
The diary, or “daybook” (Tagebuch), of Felix Platter currently resides at the University Library in Basel, in a manuscript compiled late in Platter’s life, in 1612, at the urging of his half-brother Thomas. Its opening pages recount memories of Platter’s early childhood—local theatrical performances; a visit to a nearby fair; scuffles with schoolmates; a recurring nightmare about a cow. The later sections provide a detailed, almost daily account of his youth and young adulthood: his studies in Montpellier, his relations with his family, his courtship of a girl named Magdalena, and the beginnings of his professional career. The manuscript is written in a Swiss dialect of Early New High German and, after its discovery by nineteenth-century scholars, was published in German (in 1840 and 1878) and French (in 1866 and 1892). In 1961 the British book designer, poet, and travel writer Seán Jennett produced an English translation of the diary’s middle sections, roughly a third of the whole, devoted to Platter’s years in Montpellier, and called it Beloved Son Felix. That edition has now been reissued in paperback, with a foreword by Stephen Greenblatt.
Curious sensations abound within. Fascinated horror, for one, at spectacles of public torture and execution and secret autopsies performed on corpses harvested from gallows and graves. Pleasure, too, at ocean swims, ripe cherries, and the scent of rosemary, which grows so abundantly in the fields outside Montpellier that it is burned indoors for fuel. Nervous excitement at dancing with a pretty girl or donning a new pair of bright red breeches, slashed, pleated, lined with taffeta, and cut too snug for sitting in. Mingled boredom and absorption at university lectures, hilarity at a drunken practical joke, terror at sleeping alone. But the overwhelming and abiding sensation, for the reader, is astonishment: at the precise impressions all these things made in the mind of young Felix, and at the fact that he wrote them down.
He had no obvious model for doing so. Sixteenth-century schoolboys were trained to keep commonplace books in which they recorded extracts from their reading, but—as the name suggests—a commonplace book was a repository of collective wisdom, not a record of private experience. From antiquity on, certain exceptional types had left first-person accounts of their lives, though typically as part of a larger historical or literary undertaking: Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War, say, or Petrarch’s letters. Saints, of course, had lives and sometimes even wrote them, Augustine’s Confessions being the exemplary instance. But such lives were also lessons. To keep the record of a life not because it was exceptional or edifying but because it was one’s own: this is something almost no one in pre- or early modern Europe seems to have done.
For the most part, as the historian Nicholas Terpstra and the literary scholar Adam Smyth have shown, early life-writing sheltered in the margins of other documentary forms: letters, business accounts, legal cases, university records, parish registers, almanacs, recipe collections, memorial brasses, and annotated family Bibles. In his foreword to Beloved Son Felix, Greenblatt borrows the term “ego-documents” from the Dutch historian Jacques Presser to describe such fragmentary traces, which range “from signatures on wills to love sonnets to obscene graffiti.” Given the right pieces, and a sufficiency of them, a gifted storyteller may assemble a striking mosaic: Iris Origo’s The Merchant of Prato (1957) mines the voluminous personal correspondence of the fourteenth-century Tuscan Francesco di Marco Datini to discover “what life ‘felt like’” to the tough-minded trader and his circle of family and friends; Charles Nicholl’s The Lodger Shakespeare (2007) extrapolates a surprisingly detailed account of the middle-aged playwright’s “‘other’ life”—intimate, daily, and mundane—from clues seeded in his testimony for a 1612 court case. But the life stories of most people who lived before the seventeenth or eighteenth century are scantier by far: a year of birth, a year of death, and a hyphen in between.
The word “autobiography” is a late-eighteenth-century coinage, suggesting the relative novelty of the form. In 1796, surveying the published efforts of certain pioneering seventeenth-century practitioners of what he calls “self-biography,” Isaac D’Israeli observed, deprecatingly, that “the art of writing lives has been but lately known,” and that “the writers of these Diaries were not philosophers, for the age was not philosophic.” (He particularly deplored the antiquarian Elias Ashmole’s attention to his boils, stomach upsets, toothaches, and gouty toes.) But even as he objected to the tedium of existing instances of the form, D’Israeli saw its possibilities: “When Cato wishes that every man had a glass window in his breast,” he writes, “it is only a metaphorical expression for such a Diary.”
A few windows do survive. In 1575, a year before his death, traumatized by the execution of his eldest son for poisoning his wife and by his own imprisonment for heresy, the Milanese mathematician, astrologer, and polymath Gerolamo Cardano wrote a Latin manuscript titled De Vita Propria Liber. In addition to chapters on subjects such as “My Nativity,” “Stature and Appearance,” and “My Manner of Walking and Thinking,” there are chapters titled “Concerning My Enemies and Rivals,” “Calumny, Defamations, and Treachery of My Unjust Accusers,” “Poverty and Losses in My Patrimony,” “The Disasters of My Sons,” “Perils, Accidents, and Manifold, Diverse, and Persistent Treacheries,” “Dishonors,” and “Things in Which I Feel I Have Failed.” There is a single brief chapter called “Happiness,” at the start of which Cardano cautions us, “My happiness in any given period of time is merely comparative in relation to the whole…. It does not follow that I was of a happy nature.”
Similarly rich in conflict and disaster, but altogether different in tone—brash, exuberant, and self-delighted—is the Life of Cardano’s contemporary, the Tuscan artist Benvenuto Cellini. Cellini was the sculptor to Cosimo de’ Medici, a jeweler and goldsmith to the pope, and the creator of the bronze Perseus with the Head of Medusa, which stared down Michelangelo’s David in the city’s Piazza della Signoria; he was also a notorious womanizer and rumored sodomite, a frequent brawler, a suspected embezzler, a convicted homicide, and the survivor of at least one failed assassination attempt. In 1558, not long after Felix Platter returned to Basel, Cellini sat down to write the history of his existence. (Being a busy man, he delegated the actual writing to a fourteen-year-old amanuensis, the son of an acquaintance.) It was, as he declares in the opening line, his duty to posterity:
All men of any condition who have done something of special worth or something that may truly resemble those things of special merit, should, if they are truthful and good people, write in their own hands the story of their lives.
However, he adds, “they should not begin such a fine undertaking until they have passed the age of forty.” Cellini was not widely regarded as either truthful or good, but he was fifty-eight years old, and he had plenty of material to work with.
When the manuscript of Cellini’s My Life was rediscovered by eighteenth-century scholars and translators, it was greeted as an authentic distillation of the spirit of its age: ruthless, inventive, addicted to beauty, faultlessly pious, and splendidly amoral. Romantic readers swooned at its protagonist’s excesses and eccentricities: in prison on charges of stealing jewels from the Church during the sack of Rome, Cellini saw a vision of Christ with the face of a beautiful boy; he once shot a Sienese postmaster in the throat for cursing at him on Good Friday (though he claimed the gun went off by accident); he rose feverish from his sickbed to pour the molten bronze of the Perseus with his own hands. Like Faustus, that other Romantic avatar of Renaissance individualism, he was divinely gifted and damnably proud of it. Auguste Comte included Cellini’s Life in his select canon of humanity’s essential books; Stendhal stayed up until three in the morning reading it, and Horace Walpole said it was “more amusing than any novel.”
Though it emerged from the same sixteenth-century ferment of art, science, religion, and politics, the diary of Felix Platter is nothing like Cardano’s Vita Propria or Cellini’s My Life. Rather, it is as if that teenage amanuensis of Cellini’s had decided, while he was at it, to write the story of his life, too. To be sure, by the time he put its contents in order, Platter was in his mid-seventies and nearly as accomplished in his professional field as Cardano and Cellini had been in theirs. After obtaining his doctorate, he became a university professor and Basel’s leading medical practitioner, attending the bedsides of aristocrats, publishing treatises on anatomy and ophthalmology, and corresponding with such luminaries as Conrad Gessner and Theodor Zwinger. His household museum of rare botanical and anatomical specimens, one of the finest in Europe, was sufficiently renowned that Montaigne paid a visit in 1580 and lunched with the proprietor.
But all of this must be gathered from other sources. Although the voice of the older Felix occasionally intrudes on the diary, often to gesture proleptically at the gruesome fate of some minor character—the serving girl Beatrice, for instance, who, some years after she removed Felix’s boots, is hanged for abandoning a baby born out of wedlock—the narrative remains largely free of retrospective moralizing or commentary. Episodes unfold as they happened and are accorded whatever significance they possessed at the time: the haircut takes up as much space on the page as the encounter with Calvin; the progress of Felix’s long-distance courtship of Magdalena matters as much as the progress of his medical studies.
In this respect—the transparency and force with which it conveys, across centuries, the discombobulating intensity of adolescence itself—Felix Platter’s diary is, as Greenblatt suggests, not “remotely comparable” to anything in the early modern archive. The claim rings true despite the fact that both Felix’s father and his half-brother, each named Thomas, also left detailed records of their lives; autobiography was something of a Platter family specialty. Those accounts, vital resources for sixteenth-century social and cultural history, are available in German, French, and English editions, and their contents have been carefully contextualized and richly annotated in the three volumes of the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Le Siècle des Platter, 1499–1628 (1995). (Volume 1, The Beggar and the Professor: A Sixteenth-Century Family Saga, is available in an English translation by Arthur Goldhammer.)*
Felix was in some sense responsible for the lot. When his father, Thomas Platter the Elder, was seventy-three years old, Felix urged him to write what he called his Lebensbeschreibung, or life story. It’s a remarkable and often harrowing tale. Born in 1499, Thomas was essentially orphaned soon after, when his father died and his mother remarried, leaving her son to the haphazard care of extended family. He spent his early childhood tending goats in the upper reaches of the Swiss Alps, suffering frequent brushes with death from exposure. At age ten or so he traded this perilous existence for a not much less perilous one as an itinerant scholar, begging with an older cousin in university towns across Europe. In theory, the pair were acquiring an education; in practice, young Thomas spent most of his time scrounging for food (doled out grudgingly by townspeople) and hiding from beatings (doled out freely by his cousin). He arrived at adulthood homeless, penniless, and functionally illiterate.
Thanks to the intervention of a schoolmaster in the Alsatian town of Schlettstadt, Thomas finally learned to read when he was twenty-one, squeezing himself next to the smallest children in the schoolroom until he had memorized the rudiments of Latin grammar. From there, he advanced with exceptional swiftness and determination: he learned to write and then to read Latin classics, Greek, and some Hebrew. He apprenticed himself to a rope maker in Zurich and puzzled through Homer by candlelight. Employed in Basel, he read Plautus while twisting hemp, to the irritation of his master. He spent an inheritance from his late, unlamented mother on a Hebrew Bible printed in Venice and kept himself awake to study it by chewing sand and raw turnips. Bit by bit, he acquired a reputation for learning; he took on the occasional pupil, and Erasmus himself once visited him at his rope making. At last, he achieved something like stability and prestige: he became an assistant schoolmaster, then the head of a school, then the founder of a school in Basel. He married a woman named Anna, bought a house, took in boarders, invested in real estate, and acquired a share in a print shop.
Life was not easy. Thomas was heavily indebted and perennially overworked; in the print shop his wife and children—little Felix and his older sister, Ursula—folded paper until their hands bled. The family lost two daughters in early childhood and then Ursula at eighteen to the plague. Reading the plainspoken, unself-pitying account of his travails, one can forgive the nagging letters he sends Felix in Montpellier—anxiously harping on the need for hard work and the unlikelihood of success, they provide a comically dismal counterpoint to the boy’s youthful enthusiasm—and appreciate the meekness with which his son receives them. “From my childhood I had always dreamed of studying medicine and of becoming a doctor,” Felix recalls in the pages of his diary. “My father desired it as much as I did, for he had himself once approached the same study.” He was, and knew himself to be, the beneficiary of his father’s striving and the bearer of his hopes.
All the same, by the time he wrote his Lebensbeschreibung, Thomas’s own life was rich in satisfactions. A sympathizer of religious reform from his youth, he had seen the first edition of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion into print with his own hands. A self-taught member of the humanist avant-garde, he served for more than thirty years as headmaster of Basel’s best grammar school, and his former students held positions of eminence across Europe. Best of all, he lived to see his “dear Felix” flourish in the medical profession, prosperous and influential, “known to princes and lords.” “I suffered very much,” the manuscript concludes, but “however mean my beginning, and however full of danger my life has been, I have notwithstanding, as you see, arrived at a tolerably comfortable position…. God grant me a happy end, through Jesus Christ. Amen.”
“Amen” would have to wait. Two years after completing the record of his life, the seventy-five-year-old Thomas, now a widower, remarried a much younger woman. Over the next eight years, she bore him six additional children. When he died, in 1582, at the age of eighty-three, the care of one of those children, a small boy named Thomas, fell to Felix, by then a married man of forty-five.
Like his much older half-brother, Thomas Platter the Younger grew up to be a doctor after studying medicine in Montpellier. Like his brother, he kept a detailed record of his experiences, not only as a medical student but in his subsequent travels across Europe and into England, where in 1599 he saw a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar at the newly opened Globe Theatre. (He called it an “excellent performance” but seems to have been most impressed by the jig that followed the play.) Like his brother and their father, he possesses many writerly virtues: he is a scrupulous observer and indefatigable chronicler, with a prodigious memory and an eye for picturesque detail. And thanks to the bit about Shakespeare, his diary—which also resides in manuscript at the University Library in Basel and was partly translated into English by Jennett, in 1963, as Journal of a Younger Brother—is relatively well known to Anglophone scholars. But although I can easily imagine quoting from Journal of a Younger Brother in an article, I cannot conceive of pressing it frantically on friends, family, and casual acquaintances, as I’ve been doing with Beloved Son Felix.
Part of the problem is that Thomas the Younger was not inventing a form but adhering to one. By 1595, when he left Basel for Montpellier, the keeping of a travel diary was understood to be an essential component of a young man’s education. Though hedged about with moral apprehensions and prohibitions, the ars apodemica, or “art of travel,” was widely prescribed as a practical complement to the study of books. And like the latter, it was truly useful only if one took careful notes along the way. Encyclopedic guides like Felix’s friend Theodor Zwinger’s four-volume Methodus Apodemica, published in Basel in 1577, when young Thomas was three, supplied travelers with tables of suggested topic headings: geographical features and military fortifications, agriculture and architecture, laws and customs, good manners and bad. Youthful travelers were urged not to let their experiences go to waste by failing to digest them into written order. “If you should travel but to travel, or to say you have travelled, certainly you should prove a pilgrim to no purpose,” wrote Philip Sidney in a 1580 letter to his younger brother Robert, then abroad on the Continent.
Thomas Platter the Younger was a pilgrim to many purposes. In the 1,608 folio pages of his diary, he describes port cities and triumphal arches, statues and their inscriptions, rivers and roadways, local marriage customs and judicial procedures. His observations are concrete, specific, and often objectively interesting: a trip to a spa where elegant ladies take sulfurous waters and enjoy their laxative effects en plein air, a story of twins born eight days apart, descriptions of the salt pans at Peccais, the ritual burning of a Yule log on Christmas Eve, a Shrove Tuesday masquerade, and a fair at which a spectacled Burgundian and his daughter exhibited a troupe of trained fleas.
But interest is not the same as affection. It would never occur to Thomas the Younger to tell us how his father’s voice cracked when bidding him farewell or what he named his dog, about the revulsion he felt wielding the scalpel for his first dissection, his joy in playing the lute, or his embarrassment at splashing muddy water on a girl he was taking to a dance. His half-brother Felix tells us all of those things, and more. Reading Beloved Son Felix, I was reminded of what Virginia Woolf wrote of another early modern doctor-diarist, Sir Thomas Browne, whom she called “the first of the autobiographers”: “He was a character, and the first to make us feel that the most sublime speculations of the human imagination are issued from a particular man, whom we can love.”
Felix Platter is a most lovable and particular boy. Here, for instance, is how he recounts his unhappy first day in Avignon, en route to Montpellier, where he slept in an inn full of French sailors while his companion, Michel Heroard, stayed with a friend:
I rose very early. I was miserable and dejected, knowing no one, with no notion of how to find my travelling companion, and seeing around me none but coarse and rude people. I felt such a desire to return home that I went to the stable to my little horse and threw my arms round its neck and burst into tears. The poor beast, who was also alone, and whinnied plaintively for other horses, seemed to share the sorrow of our isolation. From there I went to a rock that overhangs the Rhône and gave myself up to sad thoughts. I felt myself abandoned by everyone. I blamed Maître Michel for going to Montpellier without me, and in my anger I tore up several pretty perfumed sachets that I had bought to send to my parents, and threw the pieces into the river…. I returned to the inn, and after a lonely meal, not knowing what to do, I threw myself on my bed, and, quite against my custom, fell into a sound slumber. When evening came I went to Vespers, in order to hear a little music, and sat glumly down in a corner; but on my returning to the inn, there was Maître Michel’s lackey…. I recovered my spirits.
In his exegesis of this section of Felix’s diary in The Beggar and the Professor, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie observes that the second-rate suburban inns frequented by sailors were less costly than regular accommodations in town, that Michel Heroard’s friend was master of the Avignon mint, that the total bill for Felix’s stay amounted to twenty-one French sous, “two of which went for a tip,” and that a young boy from a Protestant-leaning family who could nonetheless appreciate the music at a Catholic church service “was not a narrow-minded sectarian.” It is an impressive feat of scholarly archeology.
But the real revelations, here and elsewhere, are sensory and psychological: the little horse’s warm flesh and sympathetic whinnies; the boy’s sense of abandonment and the satisfaction he takes in staging it by the river’s edge; the petulant destruction of the souvenirs for his parents; the relief of a familiar face. It is exceedingly rare to know what happened to a particular person on a particular day nearly five hundred years ago. Rarer still is to know how they felt.
Beloved Son Felix begins with Felix’s departure for Montpellier, which gives it the appealing outline of a proto-bildungsroman, but sacrifices his recollections of early childhood. (That material can be found online, in French, in an 1866 Swiss edition of the Mémoires de Felix Platter, and is summarized in close paraphrase in chapter 3 of The Beggar and the Professor.) It’s a shame to lose those parts of his story. My favorite bits involve local performances of mystery and morality plays, with the citizens and schoolchildren of Basel taking the leading roles. In one memorable production about the conversion of Saint Paul, God—played by a glass-painter—appeared on an elevated round platform representing Heaven; at the climax, he unleashed some sort of incendiary device at the unregenerate Saul, played by a young merchant, whose breeches caught fire as he tumbled from his horse. Ten-year-old Felix watched with his friend, Hans, delighted; later the boys staged their own rendition in the courtyard of Felix’s house. Felix played God; a chunk of wood played the divine thunderbolt; a boy named Roll played Saul and nearly lost an eye.
Given how little we know about the persistence of mystery plays in sixteenth-century England, where Protestant officials made the eradication of liturgical drama a crucial object of reformist zeal, it is extraordinary to read a firsthand account of their flourishing in Lutheran Basel. (Le Roy Ladurie reports that one play Felix saw, based on the story of Esther, “portrayed Mordecai in no uncertain terms as a good Protestant and Haman as a thoroughly wicked Catholic”; Felix recalls that the boy playing Haman’s son nearly hanged himself by slipping on the mock-gallows.) It is no less extraordinary to get a sense of how deeply the pageantry—and potential mishaps—of liturgical drama imbued the imaginations of children; unless we imagine that ten-year-old Felix had already begun to keep his diary, it’s the seventy-six-year-old Felix who remembers Saul’s burning breeches and the hurling of the chunk of wood at poor Roll.
Also missing from Beloved Son Felix, at the other end, is the record of Felix’s years as a young doctor and married man. Jennet’s translation concludes with his return to Basel in May 1557. His parents, he recalls, “wished me welcome and found me grown much bigger. I was, in fact, a whole head taller than I had been when I left.” He dined with friends and visited a pub. His childhood sweetheart, Magdalena Jeckelmann, saw him in the street wearing his new Spanish cloak but was too shy to say hello. His friends “teased [him] greatly on this matter.” The evening drew on, and, he writes, “I returned afterwards to the house.”
The manuscript of the diary continues beyond this point, recounting Felix’s defense of his doctorate, his betrothal and marriage, and the establishment of his medical practice. Magdalena, who is a largely imaginary presence in the diaries from Montpellier, becomes here a very real one, with a strong personality: demure but high-spirited, fond of jokes and indulgent of Thomas the Elder’s frequent ill-temper. On the night of their wedding, on November 22, 1557, the young couple retreated to Felix’s room after a day of reveling and feasting. Felix wore a red silk doublet and a velvet doctoral cap adorned with pearls and flowers, Magdalena a new blouse. They removed their finery and sat side by side on the bed until the cold air forced them under the covers. Later that evening, they heard Felix’s mother, Anna, walk past the room on her way to the privy, singing at the top of her lungs. Magdalena burst into a joyous shout of laughter.
Over time, consumed with the business of adult life, Felix ceased keeping his diary, except to make the occasional note of affairs of public interest: the posthumous conviction of the Dutch Anabaptist David Joris, whose corpse was exhumed from a Basel churchyard and burned in May 1559, three years after his death; the elaborate ceremonies attending a visit from the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand in 1562. He also kept detailed records over the course of seven different outbreaks of plague—a pioneering contribution to the field of public health. For the most part, however, we know the adult Felix Platter only as we know other major and minor eminences of his time: from letters and official documents, the publication of his medical writings, and his intermittent appearances in the writings of others.
There is in the manuscript of his diary, however, one last record of a purely personal occasion: a trip Felix made in the summer of 1563, with his father, Thomas, to the mountain village in the Valais where he had spent his early years tending goats. When they arrived on the outskirts of the village, a distant cousin named Hans rode out to welcome them. Felix was aghast at the narrowness of the path and the sheerness of the drop. Picking his way among the stones, however, Thomas was entirely at home—and seized, Felix reports, by a sudden recollection of a conversation with his grandfather Summermatter, when he was five or so years old and his grandfather, so he claimed, an old man of 126. He asked, “Grandfather, do you want to die?” “Yes, little one,” the old man answered, “if only I knew what kind of food they would cook for me up there.”
The year of the memory was 1504 or 1505; grandfather Summermatter—if we take Thomas’s word for it—had been alive since the 1370s. His grandson would inherit his vigor in old age and his great-grandson his good humor; we, miraculously, have inherited his joke.
English (US) · 