This article is taken from the March 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
A cartoon depicting a mounted rider at the head of a force of medieval knights pops up on social media from time to time. The rider is shown addressing a group of evidently hostile peasants. The dialogue bubble has him saying, “I expected there to be less of you,” to which the rebellious peasants respond, “FEWER!”
The meme, naturally captioned “The Pedants’ Revolt”, demonstrates the popular modern understanding of the notion of pedantry: the nitpicking, sometimes laughter-inducing correction of a perceived grammatical error, often applied quite incongruously and regardless of the broader context.
In On Pedantry, Arnoud Visser extends the notion of pedantry far more widely, as his subtitle “A Cultural History of the Know-It-All” indicates. “Know-it-all” is not an obvious description of the peasants in the cartoon, any more than of the unappealing figure of Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch with which Visser begins his study.
Nor is it a fair characterisation of the worthy 16th century scholar of Ancient Greek, Isaac Casaubon, whose name Eliot adopted for her anti-hero; yet both he and his fictional namesake are lumped in with that appellation. To what extent is it reasonable to conflate genuine intellectual endeavour with the undue and often absurd concern for supposed accuracy?
“What all pedants across the ages share,” Visser goes on to write, “is the tendency to arouse antipathy toward know-it-all behaviour … A recurring set of key grievances includes intellectual pretension, obscure language and jargon, fault-finding and blame-giving, and a preoccupation with trivial or useless knowledge.” The earliest figure Visser uses to demonstrate this feature is, surprisingly, Socrates. The thinker’s earnest striving to discover the truth undoubtedly caused antipathy amongst his detractors, but that hardly merits his being described as a pedant.
Likelier candidates for such a description might well be the new-fangled intellectuals of Socrates’s day, the Sophists of the 5th century B.C., to whom Visser dedicates much of his first chapter. Amongst these were Prodicus of Ceos, the author of a book (unmentioned here) entitled On the Correctness of Terms. That title brings to mind the story told about the lexicographer Émile Littré, whose wife caught him in the act of making love to their housemaid. When she exclaimed, “Oh, I’m so surprised!”, Littré’s alleged response was that of a pedant par excellence: “You mean ‘dismayed’, my dear. It is we who are surprised.”
Littré’s pedantic distinction might have been supported with reference to Prodicus’s threefold assertion that: 1) no two words can have the same meaning, 2) no word can have more than one meaning, and 3) a word’s etymology should be consistent with its meaning. To insist on such propositions, however, would have required the sophist to make arbitrary distinctions of a kind that might well have irritated his ancient hearers. But this was a genuine attempt at verbal and logical analysis at a time when the study of words and their meanings was in its infancy.
Moreover, despite the general disavowal by Plato of sophistry in favour of philosophical questioning, the verbalistic doctrines of thinkers such as Prodicus and Protagoras were accorded considerable respect by intellectuals and were emulated by Plato himself in his Cratylus. The hair-splitting definitions with which the sophists were popularly (if unfairly) associated were to become the target of comic playwrights such as Aristophanes, in whose comedy Clouds of 423 BC Socrates himself is, ironically enough, presented as a sophist and wordsplitter-in-chief.
What, then, of the origins of the term itself? “Pedante” first emerged in mid-15th century Italy, to refer to a professional teacher of Latin. This makes it likely that its source was the Greek word paidagogos, a teacher of young boys or a schoolmaster, whose job it would have been to insist on precision in the use of Latin. Visser adds that “it may derive from Latin pes (foot) to denote the action of accompanying a pupil to school”.
It’s hard not to suppose, however, that “pedantry” has acquired further, phonetically reinforced, associations such as that of pedestrianism — the kind of mental slow-footedness that bespeaks a lack of flexibility or imagination. “Pedantry” certainly often implies an undue heavy-handedness of approach, and one might imagine a commentator punning on “infantry and pedantry” or — on the lines of traditore, traduttore — “pedante pesante”. Unfortunately, no such references are attested.
Starting from Greek antiquity, Visser takes us on a journey through the schools of medieval Europe, the dispute between the brilliant Abelard and the devotional Bernard of Clairvaux, the humanist scholars of the Italian Renaissance, the writings of Erasmus and Montaigne, and the encyclopaedia of Diderot and d’Alembert. We eventually arrive at “the first extensive academic analysis of pedantry, including a historical contextualisation, a critical definition of the term, and an assessment of its meaning”: the Oratio de Pedantismo of 1678, delivered in Latin by the Dutch legal scholar Ulrik Huber.
By the 17th century, pedantry had thrown off the shackles of pedagoguery. Huber traces the flourishing of pedantry to the 12th century, when the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa issued a decree insisting on the freedom of teachers and scholars.
Huber goes on to reject the “ignorant” view that associates all learning with pedantry, that understands it as the contrast between action and study or that uses it simply to characterise professional teachers as useless in practical matters. He defines it instead in terms of how the teachers’ occupation has been deformed, notably by the improper assumption of authority, the hypocrisy of preaching one thing and practising another and the poor judgement of those out of touch with the real world. These attributes were, naturally, “equally rife outside the world of the university, as exemplified by quasi-professorial lawyers, snooty physicians, pompous politicians, and verbose diplomats”.
In the third and final part of this book, Visser brings the consideration of pedantry into the world of American democracy, associating it with the backlash against classical education represented by such men as Massachusetts farmer William Manning (author of The Key of Liberty, 1798) and Benjamin Rush, who wrote in 1789: “were every Greek and Latin book (the New Testament excepted) consumed in a bonfire the world would be the wiser and better for it.”
It would be sad if such anti-intellectualism had found its target owing to the dismal pedantry, rather than the genuine learning, of the educated classes. “If this book has shown anything,” Visser concludes, “it is surely that such anecdotes and examples are powerful, not only as historical vehicles of shifting and enduring values, but also as keys to a fuller understanding of current resentment against intellectuals.”
Since this book is very well written, a pleasure to read, and full of recherché and well-researched details, perhaps it’s not merely a pedantic objection to suggest that it might better have been called “On Erudition and Its Discontents: A Cultural History of Intellectualism”.
