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. People have been called pedants since the early modern period—pedante is a fifteenth-century Italian coinage for a professional teacher of Latin literature and rhetoric—but have been acting pedantically for millennia.
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.
An interesting implication of the broadened definition is that pedantry hasn’t always implied a commitment to knowledge, or even to being right. In classical Athens the playwright Aristophanes attacked purveyors of knowledge for being intellectually untrustworthy, essentially deceitful. Strepsiades, the foolish protagonist of The Clouds (circa 419 BC), studies philosophy in hopes of becoming a “fib-fabricator,” “a castanet, a fox, a loophole,/a slicker, a double-talker, a slippery character, a fraud.” In sixteenth-century Italian pedante comedies, the Latin tutors—always the butt of the joke—are known more for the gaps in their knowledge than for their erudition. “Professor, there are only nine muses, unless you want to add your house-keeper,” the Knight in Pietro Aretino’s The Stablemaster (1533) points out wearily.
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. Even when ideas alone are at issue, propriety and etiquette matter. The main thing wrong with Richard Bentley, the chief representative of the “modern” approach to literary criticism in Jonathan Swift’s satire The Battle of the Books (1704), is that he’s boorish and bad company. “All arts of civilizing others render thee rude and untractable,” one of his intellectual opponents scolds him. “Courts have taught thee ill manners, and polite conversation has finished thee a pedant.”
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. At the end of The Clouds Strepsiades, having gone to school to learn the art of deceitful argumentation, addresses the audience scornfully as a bunch of gulls: “You pitiful saps, why are you sitting there brainless, pure money in the bank for us intellectuals?” In fifth- and fourth-century BC Athens, the Sophists—traveling tutors who visited the city to offer courses in rhetoric and debate, seeking their clientele among the elite—came to epitomize the unscrupulous use of learning. They were like big-game hunters, Plato argued in his dialogue The Sophist (circa 360 BC), preying on “tame animals, man, privately, for pay,” coercing “rich and promising youths,” “merchandising in knowledge.” Lucian’s scrapping philosophers take one another’s venality for granted; the only question is who’s most obvious about it. “But I don’t sell the favours of my own wife as you do,” Cleodemus, the Peripatetic philosopher, says plaintively to Zenothemis, “nor did I take my foreign pupil’s allowance in trust and then swear by Athena Polias that I never had it.”
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.”)
Medieval texts took a moral view, attacking intellectual pretension as one facet of the foolhardiness of ambition. Speculum stultorum, or The Mirror for Fools (circa 1180), a beast fable by the Canterbury monk Nigel of Longchamp, features a donkey, Burnellus, who enrolls in one of the new scholastic academies in Paris in hopes of becoming a revered scholar. The size of his brains is a comic mismatch for the size of his ambitions. Were he to retain just “three or at most four” words of French (not even Latin), Burnellus thinks, no door would be closed to him: “I would be held the equal of Jove or Jove’s superior. I would make Italy tremble with such great fear that the king himself would give me fixed tribute.” Seven years later he has learned no words and leaves unable to remember the name of the city he’s studied in.
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. Noblemen tend not to concern themselves with books; so,
normally there are few left to devote themselves entirely to study except people with no money, who do strive to make their living from it. And the souls of people like that—souls of the basest alloy…—bear but the false fruits of knowledge.
The essay is full of subtle connections between the “base” concerns of those who profess learning and the shape that learning has begun to take. “The care and fees of our parents,” Montaigne observes, “aim only at furnishing our heads with knowledge”—maximally, such that it “is passed from hand to hand with only one end in view: to show it off, to put into our accounts to entertain others with it, as though it were merely counters, useful for totting up and producing statements.” Students are taught to quote for quotation’s sake, parading intellectual wares that aren’t theirs: “Do I wish to fortify myself against fear of death? Then I do it at Seneca’s expense. Do I want to console myself or somebody else? Then I borrow from Cicero.” The sting here is in the metaphors. Noblemen, it’s suggested, don’t typically worry over their accounts, tot things up, or borrow from others. The impression is of a vulgar intellectual culture, presided over by vulgar men, in which more is more and you can never have enough knowledge to wave in people’s faces. Aretino’s pedantic tutor, incapable of using one word where many are possible, falls into the same trap: to him, lists of memorized exempla are like “embroidery” or precious jewels, “so many pearls,” “sapphires,” “rubies.”
Being a pedant, according to the philosopher Margaret Cavendish in her essay collection The Worlds Olio (1655), is “so ill…in man, that it doth as it were degrade him from being Magnanimous and Heroick; for one shall seldome find a generous and valiant Heart, and a pedantical Brain, created and bred in one Body.” All the same, Cavendish adds, “it were worse to be a pedantick woman, than a pedantick man.” She at least is able to lean on her aristocratic credentials to dodge the pedantry charge: she is above “Grammar,” “scholastical Rules,” and other such typically pedantic concerns. But she knows that aspiring to intellectual authority as a woman still leaves her vulnerable to attack.1
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.
A cluster of words emerged for female pedantry in particular, connecting learnedness to either a lack or an overabundance of refinement. Studious women were accused of presumption, preciousness, affectation, impertinence, insolence. In John Gay, Alexander Pope, and John Arbuthnot’s comedy Three Hours After Marriage (1717), the female poet Phoebe Clinket is presented as a spiky, unmarried, “Affected Creature.” Clinket writes plays that are never staged, scatters French expressions around like sweets, and has a habit of interrupting men. “I can find no Denoüement of all this Conversation,” she breaks in at one point. “Where is the Crime, I pray, of writing a Tragedy? I sent it to Drury-Lane House to be Acted; and here it is return’d by the wrong Goût of the Actors.”
In Molière’s play Les Précieuses ridicules (1658) the key word is précieuse (“precious one” or “precocious one”), used in the period to denote a self-consciously intellectual female salon-goer. The main characters are aspiring précieuses rather than actual ones, which makes them easier targets. Magdelon and Cathos, two country girls newly arrived in Paris, dream of being the kind of women who attend refined gatherings and are acquainted with famous writers and never fall into provincial habits of expression. The play mocks them for taking themselves seriously (absurd in any woman), while suggesting that their pretensions are doubly silly in view of their lightweight, decorative interests, which amount to chasing gossip in verse. To Cathos, it is “the height of ridicule for any one who possesses the slightest claim to be called clever not to know even the smallest couplet that is made every day.”
The play manages the sleight of hand of claiming that female learning is both a great threat to patriarchal authority and no threat at all. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century commentators put a remarkable amount of effort into portraying studious women as superficial show-offs. Those who read widely, it was argued, cared only about impressing a beau or humiliating a rival through the deployment of a choice quotation. “To obtain public applause, they are betrayed too often into a miserable ostentation of their learning,” a male observer notes in Maria Edgeworth’s Letters for Literary Ladies (1795). A famous model of correct behavior was the heroine of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–1748), “well read in the English, French, and Italian poets,” but able to keep her learning to herself. “Seldom,” Richardson writes approvingly, “did she quote or repeat from them, either in her letters or conversation…principally through modesty, and to avoid the imputation of…affectation.”
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.
In The Carousal, Lucian reduces a group of self-important intellectuals to scrapping bodies. Cleodemus the Aristotelian is spotted trying to pay for sex with a handsome cupbearer. (“The two drachmas fell and made a noise, and they both blushed very noticeably.”) Zenothemis the Stoic passes extra food surreptitiously to his attendant. Alcidamas the Cynic pisses at the table. By the end they are all locked in a murderous brawl in which Histiaeus the grammarian is discovered “vomiting gore,” several servants are “disabled,” and the poor man whose wedding dinner it is suffers a head wound. Philosophers who make a show of living according to nature and behaving like beasts (as the Cynics proudly did), it’s suggested, needn’t try so hard: their bestiality is real, whether they theorize it or not. But the point may also be that there’s something about the learned that makes them worse than other people, rather than just no better. The high incidence of violence in representations of pedantry is striking. Jim Dixon in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), with his barely repressed homicidal urges—early on, he fantasizes about shoving his department head into a toilet—is one in a long tradition of quiet, studious types whose real natures, it’s hinted, lurk just beneath the surface.
Not all representations of pedants make them this exciting. Among all the savage, lustful, venal, power-hungry, ostentatious, deviant charlatans in the rogues’ gallery, there are plenty of austere, ascetic bores, engrossed by quibbles and refutations and emendations. Their figurehead tends to be the medieval scholastic philosopher. 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.”
Three decades later, when Pope came to write the fourth book of his epic satire on contemporary culture, The Dunciad (1743), he had lost the lighthearted tone. One of the poem’s crucial arguments is that it matters if intelligent people spend their days buried in Latin grammars or the minutiae of natural history. Nothing is more calculated to serve Dulness, the satire’s malevolent deity presiding over cultural decline, than a brain so plied and loaded with scholarly matter that it has lost the ability to think. The more myopic a person’s gaze, Pope says (he compares the “critic Eye” to a “microscope of Wit” that sees only “hairs and pores”), the less he can look around him. And while this might seem like a narrowly intellectual problem, it is really a big political one. “No branch of Learning,” Pope explains in one of his authorial notes,
thrives well under Arbitrary government but Verbal. The reasons are evident. It is unsafe under such Governments to cultivate the study of things of importance. Besides, when men have lost their public virtue, they naturally delight in trifles…. Another reason is the encouragement which arbitrary governments give to the study of words, in order to busy and amuse active geniuses, who might otherwise prove troublesome and inquisitive.
Dulness, in other words, would prefer that we concentrate on Euclid rather than consider “things of importance” or cultivate “troublesome” ideas. If those who rule us are themselves pedants, the game is up. Dulness has fond memories of the reign of James I, known more for his scholarship than for his kingship:
Oh (cry’d the Goddess) for some pedant Reign!
Some gentle James, to bless the land again;
To stick the Doctor’s Chair into the Throne,
Give law to Words, or war with Words alone.
Learning, Pope argues, is not wisdom. “There is a knowledge which is concerned in the gaining ideas of things, and investigating their utility,” explained the writers Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier in 1754.2 “What we generally call learning, is concerned only in gaining the various names for those things.” Early modern critics warned that burying oneself in books meant letting the capacity for moral and political judgment wither, like an atrophying limb. “We know how to say, ‘This is what Cicero said’; ‘This is morality for Plato,’” Montaigne observed. “But what have we got to say? What judgements do we make?” Take the typical humanist pupil, with fifteen years of learning Latin and Greek under his belt: “He ought to have brought back a fuller soul: he brings back a swollen one.”
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?”
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