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.
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