Arnoud S.Q. Visser On Pedantry review, recensie en informatie boek met een culturele geschiedenis van de betweter. Op 4 november 2025 verschijnt bij Princeton University Press het boek van Arnoud S.Q. Visser, de  hoogleraar vroegmoderne letterkunde aan de Universiteit van Utrecht over de geschiedenis van pedanterie en de betweter. Er is geen Nederlandse vertaling van het boek verkrijgbaar.

Arnoud S.Q. Visser On Pedantry review en recensie

• “With élan and erudition (in just the right measure), Arnoud S. Q. Visser is our genial guide through the gentle groves of snobby academe. The mansplainer has been with us forever (or at least since the first guy who said, “actually….”). Here, in diesem herrlichen kleinen Band (as the Rheinisches Museum für Philologie might have styled it, circa Heft 3¾, 1873), we get the know-it-all from Casaubon’s monstrous bladder (yes, the one mocked in Middlemarch) to the guy who tells a NASA scientist (female, of course) to read her own work, to Marshall McLuhan popping up in Annie Hall (Woody Allen name-dropped in an academic book?!). I laughed, I cringed, I learned. (Srsly.)” (Andrew Hui)
• “An elegant and witty history of the overbearing schoolmaster through the ages, On Pedantry wears its vast learning with a stylish lightness (though true pedants will revel in the breadth of Visser’s notes).” (Dennis Duncan)

On Pedantry

A Cultural History of the Know-it-All

• Auteur: Arnoud S. Q. Visser (Nederland)
• Soort boek: geschiedenisboek
• Taal: Engels
• Uitgever: Princeton University Press
• Verschijnt: 4 november 2025
• Omvang: 344 pagina’s
• Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
• Prijs: $ 29,95
• Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris

Flaptekst boek van Arnoud S.Q. Visser over de geschiedenis  van pedanterie

A lively and entertaining cultural history of a supremely annoying intellectual vice.

Intellectuals have long provoked scorn and irritation, even downright aggression. Many learned individuals have cast such hostility as a badge of honor, a sign of envy, or a form of resistance to inconvenient truths. On Pedantry offers an altogether different perspective, revealing how the excessive use of learning has been a vice in Western culture since the days of Socrates.

Taking readers from the academies of ancient Greece to today’s culture wars, Arnoud Visser explains why pretentious and punctilious learning has always annoyed us, painting vibrant portraits of some of the most intensely irritating intellectuals ever known, from devious sophists and bossy savantes to hypercritical theologians, dry-as-dust antiquarians, and know-it-all professors. He shows how criticisms of pedantry have typically been more about conduct than ideas, and he demonstrates how pedantry served as a weapon in the perennial struggle over ideas, social status, political authority, and belief. Shifting attention away from the self-proclaimed virtues of the learned to their less-than-flattering vice, Visser makes a bold and provocative contribution to the history of Western thought.

Drawing on a wealth of sources ranging from satire and comedy to essays, sermons, and film, On Pedantry sheds critical light on why anti-intellectual views have gained renewed prominence today and serves as essential reading in an age of rising populism across the globe.

Arnoud S. Q. Visser is professor of textual culture in the Renaissance at Utrecht University and director of the Huizinga Institute, the Dutch national research school for cultural history. His books include A Cultural History of Fame in the Renaissance, Reading Augustine in the Reformation, and Joannes Sambucus and the Learned Image.

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