The Beggar & the Professor: A Sixteenth-Century Family Saga.

Ladurie has written a book which could be read as a historical novel. Taking the autobiographical writings of two generations (father and son) of a Swiss family and using his own unparalleled knowledge of European social history, he has produced a remarkable and highly reliable social history. The result is an intriguing story played out against the great events of the Renaissance and the Reformation.

Thomas Platter (born 1499) left his peasant home to wander Europe, barefoot and poor, until he finally settled in Basel. By dint of his own tenacity and native wit, he not only acquired an excellent humanist education (with the three obligatory languages of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew), but skill as a printer in a town famous for Renaissance printers such as Frobenius. Platter himself printed the first edition of John Calvin's Institutes (1536) and a few years later met the future leader of Geneva for a discussion of its contents. His commitment to scholarship and its dissemination did not stop him from also investing in land, homes, and farms. He also found time to teach and, with the aid of his wife, run a hostel for students.

Platter's son, Felix (born 1536), went to Montpellier in France as a young man to study medicine (and kept a journal of his travels). Upon his return to Basel, Felix embarked on a splendid career as a professor of medicine. He maintained a private museum filled with books, a herbarium, seeds, stuffed crocodiles, antiquities, artifacts from the new world, and a "live elk which kept the lawns mowed."

This bare-bones account of the Platters is only a skeleton upon which Ladurie hangs wonderful discussions of the age of humanism, the conditions of towns and cities in sixteenth-century France and Switzerland (Paris had, according to Felix, 1,100 tennis courts!), menus at inns, public executions, the tensions between Catholics and Protestants, farming, trade, the theory and practice of medicine (appalling by our standards), and city planning. A complete menu for the wedding feast of Felix and his bride, a true gastronomic extravaganza, allows the author to create a schema to describe the wedding meals and compare them to the sumptuary laws of the day.

One can read Ladurie purely to become informed about sixteenth-century European life, especially the interplay of religious strife and humanism. But The Beggar & the Professor is also an extremely well-written saga (ably translated by Arthur Goldhammer), and one of those books which I portioned out a few pages a day for the sheer pleasure of its company.

Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame