Arnoud S. Q. Visser, "On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-it-All" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Feb 2, 2026

Arnoud S. Q. Visser, professor of textual culture and director of the Huizinga Institute, explores the long history of pedantry. He traces irritating know-it-all behavior from ancient sophists to Renaissance caricatures and modern culture wars. Short, lively takes cover language, conduct, education, gendered stereotypes, and why anti-intellectualism keeps resurfacing.

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INSIGHT

Pedantry As Perceived Excess

Pedantry is the perception of excessive use or display of learning that evokes irritation.
Arnoud Visser shows this irritation appears already in ancient Greece toward sophists and Socrates and can have serious consequences.

ANECDOTE

Socrates Seen As Annoying And Dangerous

Socrates was satirized in contemporary comedies as extremely annoying and his conduct provoked real hostility.
Visser notes that irritation toward him even contributed historically to his execution.

INSIGHT

Origin Of The Pedant Stock Character

The word 'pedant' originated in 15th-century Italian to mean a Latin teacher and quickly gained negative connotations.
By the 16th century the pedant became a stock comic figure as an incompetent, pretentious teacher.

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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: A Cultural History of the Know-it-All (Princeton University Press, 2025) 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.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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