This is what​ ‘Listen up’ sounds like when translated into pedantese: ‘Why, you brute nebulons, have you had my corpusculum so long among you, and cannot yet tell how to edify an argument? Attend and throw your ears to me, for I am gravidated with child till I have indoctrinated your plumbeous cerebrosities.’ So speaks one of the earliest representations of the pedant in English literature, the schoolmaster Rombus who appears in Philip Sidney’s The Lady of May. This was an entertainment put on for Elizabeth I in 1578, in which courtiers were invited to laugh at schoolteachers and the queen was encouraged to choose between different styles of rustic suitor for the Lady of May.

Sidney’s playlet was eventually published two decades later, in the same year as Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. That made 1598 the year of the pedant. Shakespeare’s play included a walk-on part for the schoolmaster and turbo-pedant Holofernes. He is right down in Sidney’s groove, so get your plumbeous cerebrosities (leaden brains) in gear or you won’t understand a word of what he says about his rival, the braggart Armado:

He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument. I abhor such fanatical phantasimes, such insociable and point-device companions, such rackers of orthography, as to speak ‘dout’ sine ‘b’ when he should say ‘doubt’, ‘det’ when he should pronounce ‘debt’: d, e, b, t, not d, e, t.

Holofernes’s first sentence here means that Armado talks bullshit, or takes a small hank of raw wool and spins it out into a thread so fine that it loses all substance. There was a strong association in Shakespeare’s period between rough woven native woollen cloth and honest speech, or what Berowne in the same play calls ‘russet yeas and honest kersey noes’. Nasty overspun silks, expensive imports and foreigners like Armado (whose very name reminds you that the beastly Spanish are always ready to send another Armada) are all threats to the solid English of douBts and deBts and honest truths.

The period between 1590 and 1600 was the most extraordinary decade in English literary history. At its start came Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the publication of Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella. At its end, or maybe just after, was Hamlet. It was also the decade in which the word ‘pedant’ first appeared in print in English. There is a deep connection between these apparently unrelated phenomena. The figure of the pedant as a literary character emerged in Italian drama of the 1540s, both in the commedia erudita (which was written down and based on Roman comedy) and in its improv version, the commedia dell’arte. Sidney was doing some Italianate showing off by allowing Rombus in The Lady of May to spin out the thread of his verbosities. He was saying ‘Your Majesty, we English (or at least Sir Philip Sidney) can out-Italian the Italians.’ Shakespeare was doing something similar. There’s a flavour of ‘anything Sidney does I can do better’ about Love’s Labour’s Lost, with its fancy French courtiers and high-flown language. The aspiration to be European was one driver of the literary revolution of the 1590s.

Another was the desire to grow a language which could conquer and absorb foreign terms and styles, while staying recognisably English. That was an inherently unstable duo of ambitions, and the pedant sat squarely on the faultline between them. The polysyllabic shower of Latinate globulosity that eructates from the gobs of early modern pedants shows not only that their authors and creators could be European but also that they have a mocking grasp on all the words, even the words you can’t understand, and that the author is just a little bit uneasy about his own powers of linguistic innovation. Does my love of polysyllabic foreign-sounding words (which were in this period called ‘inkhorn’ terms because they came from people who spent too long scribbling) make me un-English, or even absurd? George Puttenham, whose Arte of English Poesie (1589) was keen to police rhetorical excess in the interests of spare London courtly English, inveighed against the use of ‘words of exceeding great length, which have been fetched from the Latin inkhorn or borrowed of strangers, the use of them in rhyme is nothing pleasant, saving perchance to the common people, who rejoice much to be at plays and interludes’. Creating a pedant was a rhetorically nationalistic act of a curiously double kind. It said: ‘I can entertain you with all the big words; but being solid and English I can also laugh at these obstupefacting excrescences.’

The rise of the Great British Pedant in the 1590s (and both Polonius and Hamlet in their different ways were products of that movement) was driven by wider European currents of thought. Later 16th-century humanist writers were haunted by the fear that almost any form of writing that was not aimed at some strictly functional end (military tactics, or religion, or moral improvement) might be an abuse of the art. The pedant was a scapegoat against that fear. Montaigne’s essay ‘Of Pedantisme’, as translated by John Florio (who, gloriously enough, has sometimes been thought of as the origin of Shakespeare’s Holofernes), is partly a meditation on what Montaigne himself was up to when he wrote discursively impractical essays. Why should he be spinning out those fine threads of verbosity from the staple of a single word like ‘pedantisme’, rather than describing the art of war, or doing logic, or resolving key points of theology? Why is he presenting, as Florio puts it, ‘the imposture and amphibology of words, captiously interlaced together’ rather than pursuing what he terms the ‘assay of action’. ‘Assay’ here means ‘doing, attempt’ or even ‘attack’, and so is gently nudging the verbal self-indulgence and inaction of an ‘essay’ towards military action. Guilt and pleasure are often codependent addictions, but for early modern authors the two were inextricable. The pedant offered the pleasure of verbal excess along with a guilty acknowledgment that the author himself might be no more than a generator of verbal excess.

The pedant remained a component, though often a literally marginal component, of the literary imagination right up to the middle of the 18th century. The mad annotator who obfuscates a text by elucidating it witters away in the margins of Alexander Pope’s Dunciad. The fictional pedantic scholar-annotator Martinus Scriblerus, for whom mad theories and painful overstatements of the obvious were more or less indistinguishable, was at once a representation of everything that Pope and his friends hated about pedantic scholars and a projection of their own fascination with learning and its absurdities.

Was there something worth calling pedantry before the word ‘pedant’ and the character of the pedant gained currency in the 16th century? Can the history of pedantry tell us anything about the world today, in which politicians say they’ve had enough of experts, and in which epidemiologists are often represented as pointy-headed geeks who understand nothing about the world as it is? Arnoud Visser thinks so. He gives a learned and extended history of pedantry, which begins with what he terms pedants avant la lettre, the Sophists in fifth-century Athens, and ends with bad films about mad scientists and nutty professors. He argues that the figure of the pedant is a recurrent cultural product, which usually emerges when one group of thinkers wants to close down or curb the activities of another. Its goal is ‘the puncturing of intellectual pretensions, the exposure of vanity and the protection of moral boundaries’. So he argues that St Bernard of Clairvaux represented the new scholastic learning of Peter Abelard as pedantry, which encouraged ‘curiosity, novelty and a dangerous reliance on human reason’, while ‘the figure of the humanist pedant developed into a negative stereotype that highlights the antisocial characteristics of these learned men.’

There are some juicy details along the way: the pedagogue (and pedagogues have often been portrayed as pedants) Cassian of Imola was supposedly murdered in 363 ad by his pupils, who stabbed him with their writing implements. That might make him the patron saint of pedants, though Vilgard of Ravenna has a claim to that title too: he had a dream in which demons disguised as Virgil, Horace and Juvenal told him that every word they wrote was true, and he was condemned to death for heresy in 970. By 1678 Ulrik Huber had produced the first full-length Latin treatise on pedantry, which he defined as ‘learning that is corrupted by arrogance, feigned virtue and impertinent judgment’. In the elegant salons of late 17th-century France, the pedant ‘became a model of excessively masculine boorishness’. In the battle of the Ancients and Moderns (between those who thought antiquity was the best source of knowledge and those who trusted modernity to produce new ideas), both camps ‘used the label of pedantry to discredit each other’s approach’.

The most illuminating section of Visser’s book describes attitudes to pedantry during and after the American Revolution. The plain style of Thomas Paine initiated a wave of resistance to small cliques of classically educated rulers, who might unite pedantry with tyranny and irreligion. The key question became: ‘What was useful knowledge for the new nation?’ And the answer to that question was often: ‘Knowledge that isn’t pedantic’, in various senses. Religious leaders could insist, as one anonymous preacher put it, that ‘larnin’ isn’t religion, and eddication don’t give a man the power of the Spirit.’ In the presidential election contest of 1828 between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams, a farmer asked which was ‘the best dictionary man?’ On being told it was Adams he declared his intention of voting for Jackson, on the grounds that ‘dictionary men’ get everything wrong. This strain of hostility to pedantry had some positive consequences: in 1897 the Episcopalian abolitionist Alexander Crummell argued that the Black community in the United States needed intellectual leaders, insisting that knowledge of Latin, Greek and science would be mere pedantry if such leaders were ‘not inspired with the notion of leadership and duty’. But it also established a convention. Anyone whose learning served no self-evidently useful function could be called a pedant. It is not hard to see affinities between these early American reformers (or indeed the farmer who voted for Jackson) and loud voices in the United States today, for whom the enemy is all too often those over-sophisticated college-educated know-nothings who think they know it all.

Mildly pedantic​ readers of Visser’s book – those who might want to understand the historical reasons that they shop at Waitrose because it has a queue for customers with ‘ten items or fewer’ (rather than less), who love an Oxford comma, and who reserve ‘like’ for explicit statements of comparison rather than using it as a filler for not quite knowing what to say next – may find this history of pedantry, elegant though it is, a little disappointing. The reason for this is that Visser’s book is more a history of anti-intellectualism than of pedantry. He presents the pedant as ‘a model of how not to behave as an intellectual, of how not to use knowledge’. So rather than seeing pedantry as something that changes radically over time, or indeed as something that blooms in a particular microclimate such as England in the 1590s, he sees it in structural terms as the thing that others are often accused of when something new happens in intellectual history.

It is true that self-consciously new movements of thought and teaching – Ramist logicians in the 16th century, Sophists in the fifth century bc, literary theorists in the 1980s – prompt accusations from established practitioners that the new form of learning is only verbiage and absurdity, though often, perhaps, those are more like accusations of charlatanism than pedantry. They also may bring with them the counter charge from the advocates of those new forms of learning that the old-style philosophers or theologians or literary critics are boring or pointless or concerned only to enumerate angels on the head of a pin or to count variants in the texts of Piers Plowman. Accusations of pedantry or pointlessness are indeed in this respect part of a ‘cultural script’ that ‘regulates the acceptable use of brainpower according to prevailing social norms’.

So yes, pedantry can be externally imposed by unsympathetic audiences: ‘You nasty new-style logicians/humanists/post-structuralists/gender-critical theorists are just so many pedants piddling with words.’ Or its flipside: ‘You nasty old-style Scholastics/Ciceronians/textual scholars are dead as dust pedants with your quapropters and logical categories and scholastical nincompooperies.’ But the more curious and psychologically interesting form of pedantry grows from within. We’ve all met them: people who have lost sight of the reasons for doing what they do but who carry on doing it anyway, at length. People whose pedantry is internal rather than externally imposed are often academics or schoolteachers like Holofernes, and that’s for a reason: some people in these professions start off wanting to do something bigger than teach 17-year-olds how to do calculus or Latin grammar (they might want to produce the great physicists of the future or historians who can understand how civilisations grow and fall), but the process of teaching the basics makes them lose sight of their original higher objectives.

Someone who has spent a long time teaching Shakespeare might find their mind sticking on the question of whether Hamlet wishes his ‘too-too sallied’, or is it ‘sullied’, or is it ‘solid’ flesh, would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew (note for the non-pedantic reader: this is one of the most tricky textual variants between the second Quarto of Hamlet and the Folio text), rather than wondering what it might mean to think about your flesh as being a dirty or detachable or meltable part of yourself and what that might say about being embodied and miserable, or indeed about what it is to be Hamlet. An externally generated pedant is created by a reader for whom the whole question of whether it’s ‘solid’ or ‘sallied’ flesh is simply a pointless one to ask, and for whom even reading Hamlet at all is for losers. But an internal pedant comes into being when someone becomes obsessed with the means and mechanics rather than the ends of learning. Sometimes they have just spent too long arguing with their colleagues and have forgotten that there are other people out there who might speak a different language or have different priorities. Often these real-life pedants are angry with the world as a proxy for being angry with themselves at having lost the point of their own being.

Externally​ imposed and internally generated forms of pedantry have one thing in common: a shortfall or misrelation between an intellectual activity and its ends. That’s why there is often a generational element in accusations of pedantry. People’s perception of the point of learning changes over time. A new generation can’t see why the old is hung up on distinctions between substance and essence, or between a God whose three persons are homoousion (of the same substance) or homoiousion (of similar substance). Why would you burn someone for that? A belief system or a practice becomes fragile when its ends no longer seem self-evident, or when those ends no longer emerge naturally from or alongside its methods. When a practice is happy with itself the ends and the means do not seem separate: you do logic because doing logic is a good thing. It’s logical. You read Shakespeare because Shakespeare is good. When the means and the ends start to unravel from each other, the practice may carry on, though it will begin to look like pedantry to hostile outsiders, and it may feel that way to a number of more or less tortured insiders too. The rhetorical wheels spin but the machine no longer seems to be moving forwards. It’s at this point – when someone has forgotten the end but keeps on elaborating the means in more and more detail in order to occlude the loss of the end – that academic activity looks like pedantry both from within and from without. And that is a dangerous moment: it lets the anti-intellectual vampires suck the blood out of all intellectual activity by representing the whole bang shoot as pedantry, or wokery, or as just plain pointless. Are we now at that moment? Sometimes it seems that way.

But pedantry is always a matter of perspective (sometimes the loss of it), and usually of multiple perspectives. That’s true of the ultimate literary representation of a pedant: George Eliot’s Casaubon in Middlemarch. Eliot named him, cruelly, after the great humanist scholar Isaac Casaubon, who was a brilliant editor of classical texts, but (whisper it) possibly a bit of a pedant too. Casaubon’s endless labours in Middlemarch to complete his ‘Key to All Mythologies’ are not simply misguided. He kind of knows that in noting variant forms of Dagon and other fish deities, he has, like many a pedant before and since, ‘lost sight of any purpose which had prompted him to these labours’. But the only person in Middlemarch who explicitly refers to Casaubon as a ‘pedant’ or as ‘pedantic’ is the (to pedants like me) tiresome sub-Byronic dolt Will Ladislaw. Even for Will, though, the pedant arouses mixed emotions, which include sexual jealousy:

But the idea of this dried-up pedant, this elaborator of small explanations about as important as the surplus stock of false antiquities kept in a vendor’s back chamber, having first got this adorable young creature to marry him, and then passing his honeymoon away from her, groping after his mouldy futilities (Will was given to hyperbole) – this sudden picture stirred him with a sort of comic disgust: he was divided between the impulse to laugh aloud and the equally unseasonable impulse to burst into scornful invective.

‘Groping after his mouldy futilities’ is particularly cruel because so brilliantly put: in Will’s eyes the pedant is the auto-groper, the man who spends his hours wanking when he should be rising to the challenge of a honeymoon. But the pedant isn’t just a cultural trope here. He’s the product of a complex interplay of forces. Casaubon is a scholar who’s forgotten the ends of learning. His generational difference from Will is amplified by the distinct forms of knowledge they each embody (sexy German Romantic philosophy as against antiquarian comparative religion). But the actual accusation that he is a pedant comes about because Will is envious of Dorothea’s love for Casaubon.

Visser’s pedants are the products of big and persistent structures rather than of shifting and delicate perspectives. That has downsides and upsides. His wider aim to use a history of pedantry to help us understand the structural characteristics of the anti-intellectualism that is rife in our own age has an obvious value. But it has risks too. His argument implicitly cedes a vast amount of ground to the enemies of thinking, because it in principle accepts the notion that any kind of intellectual activity which is perceived as undesirable could be thought of as pedantry. So: a scrupulous international lawyer who insists that assassinating or kidnapping a head of state contravenes Article 51 of the UN Charter unless there is an imminent threat of armed attack might be dismissed as a mere pedant. The people who describe lawyers in that way are not going to read Visser’s book. They might even take a bit of solace from his argument, since he makes it appear that the pedant is not the product of precise historical circumstances or perspectives, or of a particular kind of scholarly life that’s gone wrong, but, potentially, could be any kind of intellectual whom someone else does not like or whom they can’t be bothered to understand, or perhaps even any kind of intellectual at all. There are certainly pedants out there (I name no names). There are also people who engage in scrupulous intellectual activity who are deliberately misrepresented by anti-intellectuals or self-interested politicians as pedantic idiots. There is of course a zone of overlap between those who are pedants and those who are maliciously described as pedants, but the distinction between the two is nonetheless substantive and should not be dissolved.