The Persistence of the Pedant

Abstract

This chapter examines how the figure of the pedant persisted as a caricature of the intellectual in premodern Europe. It traces its beginnings as a stock character in Italian comedy and subsequently analyzes three mechanisms that facilitated its continued use in changing intellectual contexts: its literary versatility as a comic stock character, sustained theoretical reflection on the concepts of pedant and pedantry (here analyzed in the cases of Michel de Montaigne and Ulrik Huber), and the practice of semantic linking. Moving from mechanisms to motives, the chapter concludes by considering two functions of the type, as an instrument of social control and a polemical device within scholarly circles.