The Diaries of Felix Platter: Coming of Age in the Renaissance

“Like the diary of Samuel Pepys or the memoirs of François-René de Chateaubriand, Beloved Son Felix [is] an invaluable and entertaining firsthand exploration of a bygone era . . . We are allowed a rare glimpse into the street-level experiences of a common Renaissance man.” —Michael Patrick Brady, The Wall Street Journal

The wildly vivid, rare, and revealing journals of a sixteenth-century medical student.

In 1552, sixteen-year-old Felix Platter left Basel, Switzerland, and journeyed 370 miles to Montpelier, France to study medicine. His journals chronicle five astonishing years of youth in a time of plague, war, and awakening. A Protestant in a Catholic kingdom, Felix witnessed blood-chilling executions and engaged in secret religious discussions with his landlord, a Marrano Jew. He learned to play the lute, tasted olive oil for the first time, and swam in the sea. He flirted (unsuccessfully) and danced (disastrously), fled from highway robbers, saw John Calvin preach, survived an outbreak of the bubonic plague, joined in a massive, orange-throwing food fight, acquired a dog, and spent one Christmas Eve alone and afraid of the dark.

Most astonishing of all, he wrote it down.

As Stephen Greenblatt writes in his introduction to this new edition, “Keeping diaries and writing autobiographies did not become a widespread practice until the mid-seventeenth century”—but Felix created an astonishing document: an intimate, sometimes hilarious chronicle of Renaissance adolescence from the inside, whose “vividness, intimacy, candor, and charm” lend it an “altogether rare and revealing character.”

Felix Platter (1536–1614) was a Swiss anatomist and professor of medicine and a pioneer in the field that would become neuroscience.

Stephen Greenblatt is an American literary historian and author. He has served as the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University since 2000. His books include Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.