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

Ladurie is best known for books that have centered on a town (Montaillou) and on an event (Carnival in Romans). Now the eminent French historian focuses on a family, the Platters, a family famed for their journals reflecting the century's religious and political shifts. The paterfamilias, Thomas Platter, was born dirt-poor in the Swiss state of Valais in 1499 and by the time he was 11 had joined the youthful vagrants (whose number once included Luther) wandering Europe in a search for food and the occasional lecture. Thomas's education was spotty until 1521, when he finally learned to read. Latin was followed by Hebrew and Greek, and after years of subsidizing his academic career by working as a shepherd, beggar, rope maker and typographer, he settled in Basel as a schoolmaster and a confirmed Protestant. By contrast, his son Felix had an easier time of it, attending the prestigious medical school at Montpellier and becoming, by the age of 25, the dean of the faculty of medicine in his native town. He would later be named Basel's municipal physician, a position occupied 50 years before by the peripatetic physician/chemist Paracelsus. There are some problems, particularly in lengthy sections on Felix's early life and on journeys to and from Montpellier, which can be too sketchy or too repetitive to really inform--especially given that much more could have been made of the journals of Thomas Platter Jr., the son born to Thomas in his 75th year and later adopted by Felix. Still, there are many admirable features: the insights into the life of traveling academics and the makeshift constructions of families; Ladurie's always interesting take on the complex relations between Catholics and non-Catholics living in close proximity; and the author's always accessible, often wry tone. (Mar.)