The Beggar and the Professor: A Sixteenth-Century Family Saga - Hardcover

Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226473236 ISBN 13: 9780226473239

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1997

Synopsis

From a wealth of vivid autobiographical writings, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie reconstructs the extraordinary life of Thomas Platter and the lives of his sons. With masterful erudition, Le Roy Ladurie deepens and expands the historical contexts of these accounts and, in the process, brings to life the customs, perceptions, and character of an age poised at the threshold of modernity.

"Le Roy Ladurie paints a remarkably contemporary picture of life in the sixteenth century. . . . It's a good story, told with a deft narrative touch."—Michael S. Kimmel, The Nation

"Le Roy Ladurie is a master of the representative detail and uses the Platters' lives as a means to see a whole century 'through a glass, darkly'."—The Independent

"Le Roy Ladurie has not only thoroughly sketched out the Platters' particular brand of gusto, he has also made it seem a defining characteristic of the sixteenth century."—The New Republic

"All [of] the drama and pathos of a Disney film."—Emily Eakin, Lingua Franca

About this title

Review:

In The Beggar and the Professor, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie makes the Platter family the nexus of his fascinating exposition of the 16th century. In and of themselves, the Platter men were intriguing fellows; the fact that they were also prolific writers, filling diaries, memoirs, and correspondence with the details of their lives, makes them a godsend to historians. Following the Platters' paper trail, Le Roy Ladurie fashions an engaging portrait of a remarkable family. Thomas Platter Sr., for example, started life as an unlettered shepherd, spent his childhood roaming central Europe in a gang of thieves and panhandlers, and managed to pick up both literacy and a trade in his travels. By turns a printer, landowner, healer, and teacher, Platter was the embodiment of a Renaissance man. His eldest son, Felix, became a well-respected doctor, as did his youngest surviving boy, Thomas Jr.

Using the private lives of the Platters, Le Roy Ladurie illuminates the dangerous times in which they lived. Martin Luther precipitated a violent religious reformation; brigands ran wild through the countryside, and medical students crept into graveyards by night to dig up newly buried bodies for dissection. On this wild ride into history, the author's insightful observations guide the reader unerringly through the customs, practices, and upheavals of the times.

From the Back Cover:

In 1499, high in the remote and bitterly impoverished mountains of the Valais, Thomas Platter was born and quickly abandoned, left to make his way among the crags as a herder of goats and sheep. At the age of ten, mustering the ferocity of will that would serve him throughout his life, Thomas walked barefoot and alone out of the hills and into the glorious turbulence of the sixteenth century. For nearly ten years, he wandered the breadth of Western Europe, throwing in his lot with nomadic gangs of beggars and thieves, scraping and fighting for food and survival, until a chance encounter sparked a stunning humanist conversion, propelling him from illiterate pauper to esteemed professor, printer, and, ultimately, patriarch. From a wealth of vividly autobiographical writings - diaries, travel journals, memoirs - Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie reconstructs the extraordinary life of Thomas Platter and the lives of his sons as well. Together their rich careers spanned the entire sixteenth century, and their far-flung and often perilous journeys carried them through countrysides and kingdoms, into cathedrals and plague houses. These personal narratives, among the first to have authors of rural or peasant origin, constitute a rare and intimate portrait of the emergence of early modern European society. With masterful erudition, Le Roy Ladurie deepens and expands the historical contexts of these accounts and, in the process, brings to life the customs, perceptions, and character - the very dialogue - of an age poised at the threshold of modernity.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0226473236
• ISBN 13: 9780226473239
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416