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.
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. […] 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. […]
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.”) […]
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. […]
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. […]
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.
[…] 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.” […]
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?”
I suspect I’m not the only Hatter who has sometimes felt that Eliot’s portrait of Edward Casaubon hit a little too close to home…
A fun essay! Now, is the pseudo-intellectual the same as the pedant? Is the boundary between it and the intellectual at all well-defined?
Now, is the pseudo-intellectual the same as the pedant?
I think they’re quite distinct: the former knows too little, the latter too much.
Pedant-wise, my high school senior English honors paper was on Housman, emotional poet then barbed classicist, that got me a scholarship to college.
These days, my research includes the switch that R. Morton Smith made from being an ultra Orthodox high church Episcopal priest to an inventively-dismissive hater of Christianity.
Some details here:
https://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2025/12/morton-smith-secret-mark-timeline.html
I was just quite recently reading some other reviews of this book, one of which had the admirable opening “Apart from a minor grammatical error on page 237, I found On Pedantry a worthwhile and enjoyable read ;-).”
Not to pedantically digress, but on Stephen Goranson’s research enthusiasm, presumably Smith’s 1949 piece in the Journal of Pastoral Care is what everyone treats as the landmark evidence of his switch of pathways? Because there isn’t much affirmative evidence offered for prior ultra-orthodoxy and quite a lot of superficially staid and conformist Episcopal clergy of that rough generation turned out to be not particularly orthodox as time went on and social context shifted and I don’t think all of those cases were dramatic crises of faith versus just not bothering to keep wearing a previously-socially-mandated mask.
I should note that while I’m not suggesting that the Journal of Pastoral Care was unusually sex-obsessed, its summer 1956 issue did feature a review of Kinsey et al.’s _Sexual Behavior in the Human Female_, written by a distinguished professor of pastoral theology at what some might have suspected of being at the time one of the more loosey-goosey of the Prot. Episc. Ch.’s seminaries. (The reverend scholar in question was also one of my great-uncles – he went on to review Caprio’s _The Sexually Adequate Female_ in the fall 1958 issue of the same journal.)
If there’s a rustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now, if it’s autumn; in spring it should be a bustle.
> And then how the cucumber would have preached, performed miracles, and been nailed to the cross?
Well-known childrens’ Christian vegetable animation show Veggie Tales was created by Phil Vischer. His mother had a PhD in Christian Education, and she insisted upon two rules: that Jesus must never be depicted as a vegetable, and that vegetables may not have a redemptive relationship with Christ.
So I guess in that sense, the question really did come up in one practical context.
(“rustling” for “rusting”)
Hey, that’s a spoiler! Housman *didn’t say* what he thought the correct word was — if you can’t figure it out yourself, then you’re not bright enough to be reading Housman, are you. Laudator Temporis Acti has a post quoting the original poem, Housman’s comment, a later comment on Housman, and finally a survey of rusting vs. rustling in different printed versions of the poem.
JWB, Morton Smith’s first PhD student at Columbia, Albert I. Baumgarten, now at Bar Ilan, did write (in the comments): “The key to understanding Smith’s life, as well as his work as a scholar, concerns his loss of faith.”
Ariel Sabar, in The Atlantic, April, 2024, gave more on his previous practice.
Smith’s reviews were famously rebarbative, like those of Housman.
Unlike Housman, unless I am mistaken, Smith published a letter he faked as if genuinely by Clement of Alexandria.
Housman could have seen, like Arthur Darby Nock did, on first sight reading, that it was not by Clement.
Back in the 1970’s Neil Young famously asserted that it is better to burn out than it is to rustle. Although with increasing age one does come to wonder if that was really sound advice to give to impressionable young people.
The NYRB review hat linked to is titled “Charlatans and Bores” and Smith does sound (if his critics are right) like a charlatan but not a bore. But if the review title is accurate this tends to suggest that Visser’s book is of perhaps excessively wide scope.* In my estimation one key fact about your prototypical pedant is that he is *not* acting in subjective bad faith but is acting in subjective good faith while being oblivious to the ways in which his perhaps-not-untrue contributions to the discourse are quite predictably found irksome and unconstructive by others. I suspect that careful attention to Gricean maxims might often illuminate why the utterances of pedants cause such reactions, since the Gricean framework helps analyze the specific problem of when it is unhelpful-in-context to utter a given random statement that is not a lie. But I’m not sure that a study that muddles together good-faith-but-cluelessly-irksome actors with bad-faith actors is optimal.
*From a semi-negative review that I thought probably excessively negative: “Despite the author’s meticulous attempts at academic objectivity it’s pretty clear that the publisher’s perceived audience is one likely to think we’ve had enough of insistent experts, or at least to chuckle at the thought. One understands the Princeton University Press’s need to make the book appealing. Still, chapter headings are as follows: Devious Sophists, Imposter Philosophers, Quarrelsome Clerks, Foolish Humanists, Affected savantes, Effete Elitists and Pedantic Professors. There is a risk that less objective readers may be primed to have their prejudices confirmed.”
It’s not by Clement, but Clement and Smith aren’t the only two possible authors.
The Wikipedia article on the Secret Gospel of Mark (the one on the Mar Saba letter says almost nothing) presents the published views in chronological order (the latest is from 2023). It’s quite a rollercoaster, going back and forth on whether the letter and the quotes in it must have been or can’t have been faked by Smith or are pseudepigrapha from late Antiquity…
From reading the article, your blog post and not much else, I figure the Secret Gospel was written to plug the plot and style holes and tie up the numerous loose ends in the canonical Gospel of Mark, around the time the Gospel of John was written; the letter is from late Antiquity, and Smith is off the hook.
The usual account seems to be that the document Smith claimed to have found at Mar Saba in 1958 was seen there in 1976 by three “outside” academics before going missing (or So They Say) after having been relocated to the main library of the Jerusalem Patriarchate. Of those three, one (Flusser, who died in 2000) apparently was convinced that Smith had forged it, one (Stroumsa, who is still alive but maybe did not publish his views until after Flusser was dead?) was convinced that Smith had not forged it although not convinced by Smith’s substantive exegesis of the document, and google isn’t immediately telling me the opinion-if-any of the third, who died in 1990. Or the opinion-if-any of the fourth person who accompanied them (a monk* who was also a grad student at Hebrew University, who may or may not be still alive).
I certainly don’t know how to confidently pick as among these divergent opinions, although of course there may be lots of other potentially relevant evidence out there equally accessible to those who have not seen the physical object. Of course, if the physical document Smith described was in fact written circa the 18th century by a person or persons unknown, that doesn’t tell you much of anything about how likely it was to be a copy of something actually written 16 centuries before that by the putative author.
To circle back to the OP, a scholarly controversy over whether a purported discovery is bona fide or a forgery does not itself seem like much of instance of “pedantry,” although of course some parties to such a controversy may behave pedantically.
*Best as I can tell an “outsider” monk, i.e. not one of the brethren actually residing in or affiliated with Mar Saba as such.
I should also perhaps note that the late “Quentin Quesnell,” one of the early skeptics about the authenticity of Smith’s supposed discovery, sounds exactly like the name of a phony (and possibly quite pedantic?) academic in a work of fiction intended to sound vaguely comical – more like a Pynchon character than one of Lovecraft’s members of the Miskatonic faculty. He reportedly spent much of his life in hat’s neck of the woods, having joined the Smith faculty after he perhaps became too scandalous to continue teaching at a Catholic university what with having left the Jesuits and acquired a wife. (It was the 1970’s, man …)
A. E. Housman’s most harsh remarks were aimed largely at textual emendators he considered inept; at least, his brother Laurence made such a case, revealing his such stored insults with blanks waiting, ready-made.
Morton Smith’s mordant, sometimes misdirecting, humor targeting was more capacious.
I am casually intrigued to learn that before matriculating at Harvard Smith attended the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_of_the_New_Church_Secondary_Schools, one of very few private high schools in the US operated under Swedenborgian auspices. Although that part of the country (environs of Philadelphia) is notably full of well-regarded private schools operated under Quaker auspices that in recentish generations have had a majority of students from non-Quaker family backgrounds, and I don’t knew whether by way of parallel that school did or didn’t enroll a sizable number of non-Swedenborgian students back then.
That Smith from childhood had been a celebrated committed Swedenborgian New Church member is not news.
When JWB, still posting, but just now bothering to get informed, may eventually post a new and useful contribution is still iffy.
It is new and useful to me. You’re not having a private conversation here, you know. You’re in public – your audience is, potentially, everybody with an internet connection who understands English well enough; something like 2 billion people.
I frankly have no particularly strong interest in determining whether or not Smith was a forger. Stephen Goranson does. He’s entitled to his own interests. Does he have anything to say about Visser’s book or Bucknell’s review thereof?
As any old-timer here knows, Hat approves of threads moving to related implications.
If a poster does not wish to own such unreliable comments, I am no Admin.
Some here may recall the excellent sometime poster here–and I hope still–Stephen C. Carlson, who made a fine case that Smith had the means, motive, and the opportunity.
If you prefer, deflect.
Or comment at the linked site.
I wonder, has anyone made a compilation of Smith’s juiciest jokes or his most caustic remarks and published it anywhere for our delectation?
It seems pretty obvious that Smith had opportunity and quite a lot of typical modern academics including Smith could have had motive. Whether he had means (including the ability to plausibly duplicate the specific style of Greek handwriting to be imitated) involves technical knowledge I don’t possess, but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if he did. But my larger question would be how many other “interesting” discoveries of hitherto-unknown old manuscripts in this field of scholarly inquiry were made by scholars with means motive and opportunity to have planted a hoax and then taken credit for its discovery? Is this really the only one? Or do we downplay the omnipresent motives of others because of a fuzzy assessment that they generally seem like good-faith people whereas other things about Smith make him feel (to some, not all) like a presumptively bad-faith person?* Or does there need to be something about the specific discovery that incentivizes skeptics to search out means motive and opportunity that could similarly have been found for other discoveries by other scholars had people been adequately motivated to inquire but wasn’t because they weren’t?
One thing I suppose I would be interested in understanding better (and perhaps I would be better-informed on this if I read any of the multiple book-length treatments of the controversy) is how strong an inference should be drawn from the claim that there’s no affirmative evidence that the volume containing the pages at issue was already in the Mar Saba library prior to 1958, thus leaving open the possibility that Smith himself dropped off the volume having first added the forgery. I myself am quite open to the idea that an old monastery in that part of the world may well have never had its library thoroughly organized or catalogued to modern Western senses of thoroughness and precision and it would thus be perfectly plausible that a late-17th-century printed book could have been there for a few centuries without some other surviving-and-located bureaucratic document confirming that. But I would be open to being shown to be wrong about that in this particular instance.
*To take a secular example, anyone who stands to receive a payout from a large life insurance policy if so-and-so dies has *a* motive (and the same motive) to murder them and one should be careful to avoid muddling that somewhat objective/external fact up with judgments based on other factors about who may be more or less likely to actually act on that motive.
It is new and useful to me.
To me as well.
i’ll model my own flavor of pedantry by saying that to me the word’s semantic center is intellectual nitpicking (though at this point, my sense of it is probably tainted by bleedover from “pilpul”).
fwiw, Mar Saba books were catalogued more than once before 1958, no doubt imperfectly. Many books and manuscripts had been taken to Jerusalem before 1958, where cataloging may have been relatively more complete. Smith’s catalog, published in 1960, has only 76 items, merely a partial list from only one of the two main Mar Saba libraries.
By itself, such lack of previous attestation of the Voss book at Mar Saba–nor of the handwritten penned text in any old copy anywhere else in the world to this day–certainly does not prove a 20th-century origin of the MS..
But it is not by itself. Other reasons are given in the linked timeline and comments.
Xerib, the 2007 Yale U Press book by Peter Jeffery (a MacArthur “genius” Fellow) mentioned in the timeline recounts some of his jokes; most publications by Smith include at least one put-down.
Re Smith’s proclivity for put-downs it is perhaps interesting to note that the proverbial “odium theologicum” which so often disfigured the souls of participants in intra-Church controversies over the centuries has survived secularization and modernity and sometimes manifests in a quite recognizable form among the would be debunkers and demythologizers, just as it does in e.g. factional conflicts among different sects of Marxists. (And of course some of Smith’s defenders seem to accuse Smith’s detractors of similar bad motives and lack of charity and blah blah blah.)
Mention of Housman reminds me that I should link to
https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/housman.html
for the benefit of the three Hatters who have not already seen it.
(It can only be truly appreciated by those who have read Euripedes in Greek, but that is surely almost all of us.)
A true classic; I posted about it back in 2004, and a classicist in the comments linked to “D. S. Raven’s amazing Greek translation of Housman’s Fragment. Greece and Rome 2nd Ser., Vol. 6, No. 1. (Mar., 1959), pp. 15-19,” saying “I don’t know whether it’s a greater proof of Raven’s intimate knowledge of Greek meter or of Housman’s perfect ear for Aeschyean weight.” Alas, his JSTOR link no longer works, and I can’t find the article online. If anyone has access to it, please quote at least the start of the translation!
You can see it through the first eight lines of the choral ode at
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/greece-and-rome/article/abs/version/4D0B180E2D305AB6F08CC5891C8AD40C
I can’t copy from it. Maybe someone with access can see the whole thing.
I have the privilege of living in one! ^_^
Jerry Friedman: Thanks very much!
Aha, and I’ve found a working JSTOR link. (It’s Housman and Raven en face.)
I was hoping to find a non-paywalled source, but Google is no help: “Your search – Ὦ εὖ ποδενδύτοισι δέρμασιν πρέπον – did not match any documents.”
Yes, definitely Aeschylus, not Euripides.
τοφλαττοθρατ τοφλαττοθρατ
“I posted about it back in 2004” — that post’s link is dead, needs replacement. In the post on ANDIGHONI, I linked to an annotated version that explains why being in a well-nightingaled vicinity is “not a good sign”.
In the Internet Archive.
that post’s link is dead, needs replacement
Thanks, it turns out several links were dead, so I replaced them with archived versions.
And thanks to you too, MMcM!
If I correctly remember my long-ago Housman research, with my first inter-library loans in the 1960s, it is not only regrettable that he spent so much time on Manilius, but that he chose to specialize in Latin rather than Greek, because his early publications on Greek were the more interesting ones.
Whether observed by me pedantically or not, Morton Smith did many good things, including in some publications and in donating his fine library to the Jewish Theological Seminary (which had suffered a fire) and in mentoring some excellent (though few) PhD students, but could easily have done more.
If anyone here reads and actually considers the full linked timeline and comments and has corrections, please comment, here or there, please. So far, “blah, blah, blah.”
From reading that, I conclude that it very much is a good sign – it means all the rapists are dead!
As I previously noted about the Mar Saba letter (on one of the previous several occasions when it has come up), it’s almost certainly a forgery. The question is whether it’s an interesting forgery. Personally, I think it would be much more interesting if it were a very old forgery, rather than Morton Smith’s twentieth-century work.
@Brett: By “forgery” do you simply mean “not originally composed by the historical Clement of Alexandria” or something beyond that?
Note FWIW that that Clement was a controversial character and some (not all) of his opinions were widely denounced (in a big cause celebre in the 9th century) as heretical, although the key allegedly-heretical work has (having been so successfully denounced) not survived.* In some circles that might mean that a newly found authentic work from Clement is of somewhat limited use as evidence of the historic belief and teaching of the Church, but probably Morton Smith did not move in such circles.
Ironically, one of the better arguments against forgery-by-Smith may be the nothing-new-under-the-sun argument – claims that Smith was motivated to forge evidence consistent with his own heretical notions often implicitly presuppose that his heresies or personal agendas were uniquely modern ones when it is to the contrary perfectly possible that someone fifteen centuries prior to Smith might have had a quite similar axe to grind.
*Note FWIW that some of the heresies alleged involved Weird Ideas About Sex, with wikipedia’s attempted defense of Clement being that perhaps he had been quoting or paraphrasing Weird Ideas then current among various Gnostics w/o actually endorsing them and was thus wrongfully condemned many centuries after his death by critics who failed to notice a use/mention distinction.
@David M. That Clement and Smith are not the only authors to consider I already explicitly addressed.
@ Brett. You are free to evaluate which possible forger might interest you more, but the prior question is who did, whether interesting to you or not.
@ JWB. Do you actually propose I “implicitly suppose” your irrelevant scenario? As for lawyerly approaches, Stephen C. Carlson also has attorney training and experience, and his case that Smith did it has the advantage of knowing all the available evidence before writing.
I think the letter is overwhelmingly likely to be a forgery, although the original forgery could have happened almost any time in the last two millennia. Smith does seem to be the most likely forger, but there are other scenarios that could also explain so much of the weirdness surrounding both the document’s content and its provenance. Unless the physical document turns up again, none of those questions are likely to be resolved.
I propose nothing about what Stephen Goranson himself may suppose. I am not familiar with Prof. Carlson’s earlier career as a patent lawyer. But I am not particularly impressed by appeals to authority, not least because I’m sure the pro-Smith people have their own glittering CV’s (as did Smith himself) and/or tendentious arguments about why Carlson’s supposed authority is the wrong sort of authority whereas their ally has the right sort.
Separately, and just as an entertaining example of how some participants in these odium-theologicum disputes are sometimes not very mindful of how to appeal to an audience beyond their own factional allies, consider the following stirring conclusion of a very positive review of Carlson’s book (by Prof. Blomberg of Denver Seminary): “What is fair to assume is that if Carlson has not conclusively disproved the authenticity and antiquity of Secret Mark, then the cluster of coincidences he has identified that appear to disprove it rank fairly close to the famous analogy of atheistic evolution standing about as much chance of being true as if a roomful of chimpanzees on typewriters had produced the Encyclopedia Brittanica!”
I assume that Carlson himself believes that he made arguments that could and should convince even believers in conventional-wisdom Darwinism that the document in question was a 20th-century forgery by Smith. But Blomberg is so focused on his own niche that he either doesn’t know that he’s rhetorically undercutting Carlson or doesn’t care. (Please note that criticism of Blomberg is not sub rosa criticism of Dr. Goranson. I am simply amused by Blomberg.)
Ah, the insular world of American creationism.
#cdesign proponentsists
How can I resist passing along this quote from Baudelaire (via Laudator Temporis Acti)?
I note that the French, like les anglo-saxons, now omit the circumflex in sine qua non.
Did les anglo-saxons previously use a circumflex in sine qua non before omitting it? That seems weird, since it’s not generally a Latin thing as opposed to a French thing and why would you use a French orthographic quirk for what’s transparently a borrowing from Latin. Or did I misinterpret hat and he’s just saying that the French are now doing what les anglo-saxons always did?
Did les anglo-saxons previously use a circumflex in sine qua non before omitting it?
They did indeed. Some OED cites:
a1734 The Preliminary Article sine quâ non, was that..he should surrender his Place of Recorder.
R. North, Examen (1740) iii. vii. §64 550
1774 Remember, a brother is the sine quâ non of my reconciliation.
H. Walpole, Letters (1857) vol. VI. 111
1786 Certainty of the property, though one of the sine quâ nons, was wanting.
Lord Kenyon in Brown’s Chanc. Cases vol. II. 46
1854 It seemed a sine quâ non with the gentlemen who superintended the training.
‘C. Bede’, Further Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green (ed. 2) vi. 54
1870 Though acts of assent require previous acts of inference, they require them, not as adequate causes, but as sine quâ non conditions.
J. H. Newman, Essay Grammar of Assent i. iv. 39
If you look at Latin texts printed in the early modern era, you’ll often find the circumflex used for certain long vowels — especially final -a (basically to differentiate nominative and ablative). It’s a convention that made Latin somewhat easier to read.
Linnaeus used it consistently for ablative -a, and my impression is this was very common.
Okay, so perhaps English stopped using it in running English prose at around the same time it stopped being used in printed editions of Latin texts marketed in English-speaking countries? Was the timeline different for printed editions of Latin texts marketed in French-speaking countries? Or did French continue to use it “in French” even after Francophones stopped using it in Latin because circumflexes were (and are, despite various controversial reforms) a standard thing in normal French orthography?
I suspect that people stopped using it in Latin phrases embedded in English because they no longer knew what a Latin ablative actually was. (I meant to work vice versâ in here somehow, but couldn’t see how.)
Nah. It’s not used in Latin phrases embedded in German either anymore, and noticeable sections of the population are still being taught what a Latin ablative is. The circumflex was available the whole time on the German typewriter layout (´` worked beautifully) and is now on the computer keyboard layout (to the left of 1).
Of course, true followers of the mos maiorum spell the first-declension ablative singular ending as -ad anyway.
I don’t hold with this modern sloppiness of omitting the d. I blame Cato the Elder* (who, let’s face it, for all his parade of ancient Roman virtues, was a plebeian, after all.)
* Also, violent video games, and texting.
Whatever percentage of Anglophones are still being taught Latin, they’re being taught Latin from textbooks that generally don’t have circumflexes in their orthography for ablatives or really anything else. At least that’s my sense of things in the U.S. Macrons, yes. You want fancier diacritical marks than that, you better move on to Greek.
Can confirm: Wheelock’s Latin, my high school textbook, uses the macron on ablative endings.
At least that’s my sense of things in the U.S. Macrons
I at first read this as some sort of parallel to the U.S. Marines.
The German textbooks that mark length that I know also use macrons, not circumflexes.
Did the circumflex start as a superscript shorthand for the disappearing d?
The use of macrons in modern textbooks/grammars/dictionaries is standard.
The circumflex is limited to (some) early modern printed texts, mainly to differentiate between nominative and ablative in nouns/adjectives; it’s also sometimes seen to mark when -um isn’t the accusative/neutral nominative ending, but the genitive plural.
Actual ancient Latin had various ways to mark long vowels: doubling the vowel letters (as prescribed by Accius), using a (pseudo-)archaic spelling ei for long i, the I Longa, finally, in good inscriptions (such as the Monumentum Ancyranum) apices (which look like acute accents). But it seems in general Latin speakers found the marking of long vowels in writing superfluous (only the I longa seems to have been somewhat popular).
* Also, violent video games, and texting.
Thanks to modern keyboards/texting, the standard for Māori is to use macrons for long vowels. There was an older standard, much ignored to double the vowel: waahine woman
Lordy! That the Revenue should ever be accused of taking stuff.
Did les anglo-saxons previously use a circumflex in sine qua non before omitting it?
My Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary (1981 reprint of 1972 edition with 1977 supplement) has no circumflex in sine qua non [sv sine] but does have headword via, viâ
to reduce the resemblance of tāke to the English word ‘take’
“Fianna Fáil—The Republican Party”, Ireland’s governingest party, was founded 100 years ago last Saturday. De Valera wanted the name Fianna Fáil because Gaelic derring do, Lemass wanted The Republican Party lest having Fail in the name prove a gift to opponents.