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, discusses his book On Pedantry. He traces pedantry from ancient sophists to modern culture wars. Topics include satire of learned types, Christianity’s ambivalence toward knowledge, education and social status, gendered portrayals of intellectuals, and why anti-intellectual sentiment keeps resurging.

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INSIGHT

Pedantry Exists Before The Term

Pedantry predates the word and appears when people perceive excessive displays of learning as irritating.
Arnoud Visser traces this from sophists to Socrates, showing long-standing cultural annoyance with showy knowledge.

ANECDOTE

Socrates As An Early Know-It-All

Socrates often provoked irritation and satire for exposing others' ignorance.
Visser notes that this irritation contributed to the dangerous outcome of Socrates' execution.

INSIGHT

Origin Of The Pedant Stock Character

The word 'pedant' originated in 15th-century Italian as a neutral term for a Latin teacher.
By the 16th century the figure turned into a comic, negative stock character of the 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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