In October 1552, fifteen-year-old Felix Platter left Basel for Montpellier to study medicine — and kept a diary about everything that happened to him. He later reworked that teenage daybook into a memoir, now republished as Beloved Son Felix: Coming of Age in the Renaissance (translated by Seán Jennett). Erin Maglaque reviews it in the London Review of Books, reading the diary as both a record of adolescent appetite and a document of the confessional age.

Felix’s diary is a feast of sensory detail:

  • He ate a pâté his friends swore was rabbit (it was cat), drank a wine so thick “that I wrote in my notebook with it,” and badly missed cheese during his first Catholic Lent
  • He stole pears laid out in his dead sister’s death chamber and hid behind the stove to eat them; he played the lute for friends and took payment in almonds
  • He learned to cook eggs on paper during Lent rather than risk contaminating a pot — small acts of navigation in a city where what you ate revealed what you believed

That last point matters. Felix was a Protestant lodging in Catholic Montpellier with Catalan, a converso landlord, and he watched dissenters burned and bodies hung from olive trees. The diary’s jarring contrasts — executions one entry, pomegranate blossom the next — are, Maglaque suggests, the natural dissociative texture of a near-daily teenage diary, not a failure of feeling.

Maglaque also places the diary in historiographic context: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s microhistory The Beggar and the Professor made the Platter family famous, and the Burckhardt debate over whether the Renaissance invented the individual lurks behind any reading of early modern selfhood. Felix became a professor, collector, and botanist whose nine-volume herbarium survives — its green stems faded to gold over centuries, the living landscape of the Mediterranean South pressed into pages. That image gives the essay its title and its quiet thesis: the diary, too, is a herbarium, pinning the intensity of adolescence — “that feeling of seeing the world for the first time” — to the page.