‘On Pedantry’ by Arnoud S.Q. Visser review

People have never liked lectures from know-it-alls. When the Roman authorities handed over the Christian grammarian Cassian of Imola to his pagan pupils for punishment, they stabbed him to death with the pens they had used in his classes. Arnoud Visser considers Cassian’s macabre end to be emblematic of the hostility intellectuals have attracted throughout the history of the West, especially when they have dared to correct mistakes or challenge received ideas. On Pedantry traces the development of a ‘cultural script’ that has variously represented intellectuals as subversive or futile, shabby or pretentious, effeminate or as exemplars of toxic masculinity. The charges are various and often contradictory, but the base note of annoyance is constant. That script now seems more powerful than ever. Michael Gove spoke for many tribunes of the populist right when he argued in the run up to Brexit that ‘the people of this country have had enough of experts’.

One immediate problem for a history of anti-intellectualism that begins with Socrates and ends with Eddie Murphy’s Nutty Professor is that the term intellectual is a ‘slippery thing’. Visser mainly takes it to mean scholars like Cassian: people whose job it has been to teach other people what to learn and how to learn. The book arises from the history of scholarship, a discipline that was once a worthy but nebbish auxiliary to intellectual history but now aspires to broader impact. Anthony Grafton, Dennis Duncan, and Dmitri Levitin have urged us that the development in early modern Europe of footnotes, indexes, chronologies, and other tools of the scholar’s trade is no merely antiquarian matter: who determines what is reliable information and how it should be transmitted has always been a debate fraught with political, religious, and moral consequences.

The best chapters of Visser’s book make a fine contribution to the scholarship on scholarship. They explain how new breeds of teacher in late medieval and early modern Europe aroused antagonism by threatening the existing distribution of social power. Sometimes the charges of ‘pedantry’ came from other groups of scholars. In early 12th-century Paris Peter Abelard attacked other clerical instructors as woolly bores and promised to make his pupils incisive thinkers and talkers. In return, ascetics such as Bernard of Clairvaux condemned him as a shyster who elevated ‘mere human ingenuity’ over Scripture. At other times, the social pretensions of upstart teachers attracted the hostility of existing social elites. The aristocracy of Renaissance Europe increasingly relied on grammarians to teach them how to polish their spoken and written Latin. But they revenged themselves on their annoying schoolmasters by consuming plays and satirical prints in which they figured as scruffy fools in moth-eaten academic gowns. There was a nasty edge to the comedy: pedants were cast as ‘pederasts’ who molested their boy pupils when they were not beating them up.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, women would be especially vocal in denouncing the pedants who infested Europe’s universities and schools, because this allowed them to lay their own claims to constitute an instructed public. Wealthy and leisured French women invited thinkers to salons in their homes that put a premium on politeness rather than erudition and treated witty French as a more important skill than correct Latin. Their English contemporary Judith Drake attacked scholars as the ‘Ghosts of Old Romans rais’d by Magick’ who could babble in Latin without being able to hold a proper conversation with their peers. All-male schools and universities turned men into crabbed mansplainers with no social smarts: at the age of 17 they ‘are but where Girles were at Nine or Ten’. Her complaints had a racial edge: by demanding scholarly credentials as a condition for participating in intellectual life, pedants condemned women to mental slavery, ‘like our Negroes in our Western Plantations’.

These unedifying wrangles gave way to a broader revolt against expertise in the fledgling United States. Thomas Jefferson thought it important to pull scholars down a peg because in a democracy everyone’s political opinions must weigh the same. In judging a ‘moral case’, the professor had no more authority than the ploughman. That did not stop Jefferson’s rivals from attacking him as an affected reactionary. The intense spiritual egalitarianism of evangelical religion also made Americans suspicious of erudition, especially in the study of the Bible. ‘Atheism is the spirit of pedantry’, thundered the revivalist Charles Grandison Finney, despite his own expensive education. Billy Sunday, a preacher who electrified mass audiences in the early 20th century, warned that ‘you cannot be saved by grammar’.

Visser certainly establishes the inexorable eclipse of the humanist scholar’s intellectual and cultural authority – perhaps almost too well. A final chapter on the mockery of professors in cinema makes for a rather uninvolving footnote, not least because most of the films he canvasses were marginal at the time of their appearance. Visser must be one of the few people to have seen Woody Allen’s Irrational Man (Joaquin Phoenix is a despondent philosophy prof).

The populism of which this book complains will also blunt its impact: few proud know-nothings will be converted by or even get to hear of a rather austere work published by an American university press. Visser’s determination to make intellectual life largely synonymous with scholarship often distorts the material he writes about. It is odd to start the story of pedantry with Socrates, who was put to death as a subversive thinker rather than a scholar. But it also leads to a skewed estimate of our present political moment, which calls for moral courage rather than tightening the lenses in our scholarly microscopes. Visser notes but does not fully heed Michel de Montaigne’s condemnation of humanist scholars in his day, who obsessively studied Cicero or Plato’s thoughts, when they should have been asking: ‘What have we got to say? What judgments do we make? What are we doing?’

• On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-All
  Arnoud S.Q. Visser
  Princeton University Press, 344pp, £25
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Michael Ledger-Lomas is a historian of religion.