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On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-it-All
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 savants 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.
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 savants 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.
- GenresHistoryNonfictionScience
344 pages, Hardcover
Published November 4, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 6, 2025
A very interesting premise. The book situates pedantry within a broader history of anti-intellectualism, something the author connects to the rise of Trump, even bringing up the Hadith interpreters (who never appear again in the book) as an example of how pedantry and the façade of intellectualism can do harm. While the book is good and contains many interesting facts and insights, the main issue lies in the formulation of its thesis as well as the narrative. We are never told why groups such as the sophists, scholastic thinkers, or cornificians are chosen to carry the narrative. We are never told what kind of pedants they are. And there are clear missed opportunities to connect different historical pedants with one another. Perhaps it’s the autism in me speaking, but I think the book is missing some kind of pedantry taxonomy; had the author developed one, the book would not only have been a clearer and easier read, but the thesis would have made far more sense and felt more relevant.
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January 12, 2026People have never liked lectures from know-it-alls. When the Roman authorities handed over the Christian grammarian Cassian of Imola to his pagan pupils for punishment, they stabbed him to death with the pens they had used in his classes. Arnoud Visser considers Cassian’s macabre end to be emblematic of the hostility intellectuals have attracted throughout the history of the West, especially when they have dared to correct mistakes or challenge received ideas. On Pedantry traces the development of a ‘cultural script’ that has variously represented intellectuals as subversive or futile, shabby or pretentious, effeminate or as exemplars of toxic masculinity. The charges are various and often contradictory, but the base note of annoyance is constant. That script now seems more powerful than ever. Michael Gove spoke for many tribunes of the populist right when he argued in the run up to Brexit that ‘the people of this country have had enough of experts’.
One immediate problem for a history of anti-intellectualism that begins with Socrates and ends with Eddie Murphy’s Nutty Professor is that the term intellectual is a ‘slippery thing’. Visser mainly takes it to mean scholars like Cassian: people whose job it has been to teach other people what to learn and how to learn. The book arises from the history of scholarship, a discipline that was once a worthy but nebbish auxiliary to intellectual history but now aspires to broader impact. Anthony Grafton, Dennis Duncan, and Dmitri Levitin have urged us that the development in early modern Europe of footnotes, indexes, chronologies, and other tools of the scholar’s trade is no merely antiquarian matter: who determines what is reliable information and how it should be transmitted has always been a debate fraught with political, religious, and moral consequences.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Michael Ledger-Lomas is a historian of religion.
One immediate problem for a history of anti-intellectualism that begins with Socrates and ends with Eddie Murphy’s Nutty Professor is that the term intellectual is a ‘slippery thing’. Visser mainly takes it to mean scholars like Cassian: people whose job it has been to teach other people what to learn and how to learn. The book arises from the history of scholarship, a discipline that was once a worthy but nebbish auxiliary to intellectual history but now aspires to broader impact. Anthony Grafton, Dennis Duncan, and Dmitri Levitin have urged us that the development in early modern Europe of footnotes, indexes, chronologies, and other tools of the scholar’s trade is no merely antiquarian matter: who determines what is reliable information and how it should be transmitted has always been a debate fraught with political, religious, and moral consequences.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Michael Ledger-Lomas is a historian of religion.
December 26, 2025
I knew I was going to read this the second I heard of it. And: I very much liked it, but I wanted to unreservedly love it. It traced the history of pedants all the way back to ancient Greece and Rome, then through the early and high middle ages with the fussy scholastics, through the renaissance and enlightenment and industrial revolution, and finally into the modern world. This was really impressive in its depth and covered in a unique to me manner (and, FWIW, I consume a fair amount of nerd stuff like this), since the author traced both the hard philosophy as well as fiction such as plays and movies, since the latter is where the pedants get mocked for being insufferable.
My complaint is that I wanted more: I think there was a section on the internet sitting right there waiting to be written at the end. In fairness to the author, this book was already quite dense, and such a chapter would have presumably been a quite different researching and writing experience than the historical approach he took. The book is titled On Pedantry, and his pedantic meta-joke secondary title is *Or, On Being Pedantic. I elected to not dock a star because I met his pedantry and read onto the subtitle, A Cultural History of the Know-It-All, and so I grudgingly acknowledge that he scoped himself to history. But, still! When I think of pedants, I think of people online – full disclosure, sometimes myself – getting annoyed at minor usage errors (they’re their there, your you’re, its it’s), being mortified by typos in their own writing, scolding people for being narrowly wrong in their area of special interest, throwing dictionary definitions around during arguments, etc. Writing a big ol’ citation-filled book on pedants and leaving out those (us?) persnickety folks feels like leaving a ton of meat on the bone. Hopefully someone picks up this baton and writes a sequel to fill this [citation needed] gap. I hope to read Pedantry 2: Electric Boogaloo someday!
My complaint is that I wanted more: I think there was a section on the internet sitting right there waiting to be written at the end. In fairness to the author, this book was already quite dense, and such a chapter would have presumably been a quite different researching and writing experience than the historical approach he took. The book is titled On Pedantry, and his pedantic meta-joke secondary title is *Or, On Being Pedantic. I elected to not dock a star because I met his pedantry and read onto the subtitle, A Cultural History of the Know-It-All, and so I grudgingly acknowledge that he scoped himself to history. But, still! When I think of pedants, I think of people online – full disclosure, sometimes myself – getting annoyed at minor usage errors (they’re their there, your you’re, its it’s), being mortified by typos in their own writing, scolding people for being narrowly wrong in their area of special interest, throwing dictionary definitions around during arguments, etc. Writing a big ol’ citation-filled book on pedants and leaving out those (us?) persnickety folks feels like leaving a ton of meat on the bone. Hopefully someone picks up this baton and writes a sequel to fill this [citation needed] gap. I hope to read Pedantry 2: Electric Boogaloo someday!
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