Culture

By 1600 nearly fifty Italian plays featured a pedant as a main character — a vain, irascible schoolmaster who mangled Latin and vernacular into incomprehensible gibberish, wore a moth-eaten toga while claiming the dignity of Cicero, and was reliably incompetent at his own profession. Arnoud Visser traces this stock figure from Francesco Belo’s El pedante (1529) — the first play to put a pedant center stage — through Pietro Aretino’s Il marescalco (where the pedant counts Venus among the nine Muses) to Giordano Bruno’s Il candelaio (whose Manfurio offers a fake etymology of “pedant” that a painter gleefully demolishes: “pe” for pecorone (idiot), “dan” for da nulla (worthless), “te” for testa d’asino (donkey head)). The satire’s target was not learning itself but the humanist claim that scholarship constituted a superior form of nobility — a direct challenge to hereditary aristocracy. The courtly audiences who laughed at these parodies were, in effect, putting social climbers in their place. The pedant was also associated with sexual deviancy (sodomy and pederasty) despite thin historical evidence — a potent slander that weaponized masculine virtue against the new intellectual class. From Shakespeare’s Holofernes to Molière’s female pedants, the figure spread across Europe, a lasting monument to the tension between erudition and pretension. ...

Louis Pope Gratacap (1851–1917), curator of mineralogy and conchology at the American Museum of Natural History, was the kind of polymath whose commute — three hours round-trip from Staten Island — he spent reading voraciously. His novel The New Northland (1915) is arguably the first work of fiction to feature a Tyrannosaurus rex, beating Burroughs’s The Land That Time Forgot by three years. The story follows Americo-Nordic adventurers who discover a warm Arctic realm called Krocker Land (a barely disguised nod to the AMNH-sponsored Crocker Land Expedition, which was still in the field when the novel hit shelves) where they find prehistoric animals, lush valleys, and a decaying race called the Radiumites who transmute base metals with radium. The novel is so thick with metafictional play — a yellow-journalist editor named Azaziel Link frames the narrative, characters debate serialization rights and movie potential, and the text is flagged as having been “substantially emended” — that it nearly collapses under its own cleverness. Yet it was precisely Gratacap’s perch at the museum, under Henry Fairfield Osborn (who had named T. rex in 1905), that gave him access to paleontological knowledge unavailable to Doyle or Haggard. Richard Fallon rescues this eccentric, overstuffed novel from obscurity, showing how a museum curator’s serious play produced the first fictional roar of the tyrant lizard king. ...

The Public Domain Review’s collection on the Mâr-Nâmeh — a late-15th-century Zoroastrian Persian text that lists the thirty days of the Zoroastrian calendar and what seeing a snake on each day portends. The contradiction at its heart is what makes it fascinating: Zoroastrians held snakes in absolute contempt. Snakes are khrafstar — the baneful spawn of Ahriman, the sole origin of evil — and killing one was meritorious; the “snake-killer” stick even doubled as the instrument for punishing criminals. Yet the book is full of auspicious snake omens: “If you see a snake on the day of Sheherivar, you will soon find an absent friend in your arms.” Scholars suspect echoes of pre-Zoroastrian snake veneration (Martina Palladino: “in pre-Zoroastrian Iran, these animals were not perceived negatively”) or Egyptian influence on the text. The source is a 1911 Bombay anthropological lecture by British surgeon George Waters, who translated the text with footnotes; the original scan lives on the Internet Archive, public domain. Like the poems of Hafez and Turkish coffee grounds, the book’s favorable omens were a source of solace in divination — even if you’d just stumbled on some fork-tongued fiend. ...