Vive Le Roy Ladurie
WEINSTEIN, KENNETH R.
VIVE LE ROY LADURIE A Peasant Boy's Journey Through War and Plague By Kenneth R. Weinstein Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is a master of the annates school of history, whose adherents have been...
...Le Roy Ladurie provides us with no adequate understanding of the spiritual difficulties Thomas must have faced in leaving the Catholic Church...
...Felix traveled home through Toulouse, Bordeaux, Poitiers, Tours, Orleans, and finally Paris—already famed as Christendom's most populous city (with 350,000 residents) and as the site of Notre Dame and the Louvre (which Francois I had recently transformed into a stately palace...
...He also took in dozens of students as boarders, and his renown as a lecturer on Aesop, Homer, Cicero, and Erasmus spread across Europe...
...The night before his departure, Felix's German classmates held a going-away party at which they mischievously served pate prepared from a cat they had skinned...
...At 16, Felix Platter, like his father 43 years before, crossed Europe in search of learning...
...The Sorbonne, alas, was too overrun by Papists...
...The Reformation had taken hold, the churches of Lausanne had been "depapalized," and Geneva was now Calvin's fortified city...
...At the unbelievable age of 10, malnourished and bored with the idiocy of rural life, Platter walked out of his village, barefoot, in search of schooling...
...By May 1557, Felix returned to Basel to marry and pass his doctoral exams...
...But in Avignon, Felix was surrounded by Catholics, whom, to his great surprise, he found sympathetic...
...Thomas wanted Felix (1536-1614) to become a physician...
...After five years of medical discovery and Mediterranean climate, Felix graduated from Montpellier in January 1557...
...Over the next decade he would wander through central Europe, from Fran-conia to Bavaria, Saxony, and Silesia, traversing Germany several times, begging or working for room and board, and living on onions, crabap-ples, and raw turnips...
...On the road to Montpellier, Felix encountered both Catholics friendly to Protestantism and Protestants on their way to being burned at the stake—although it would be two decades before the Protestants of Paris were rounded up and massacred in 1572...
...Danger was ever-present: The plague struck that year and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V besieged Metz with an army of 60,000 men...
...Le Roy Ladurie himself is best known for his work on artisans, witches, the Lan-guedoc peasantry, and the climate of Europe since the year 1000, nearly all of which have become, incredibly enough, bestsellers in France...
...Platter dodged mountain snows, highway robbers, murderers, famine, lice, pestilence, and wars...
...VIVE LE ROY LADURIE A Peasant Boy's Journey Through War and Plague By Kenneth R. Weinstein Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is a master of the annates school of history, whose adherents have been criticized for shunning politics and focusing instead on demography, social history, and various other minutiae...
...At 45, he was appointed headmaster of the Basel gymnasium...
...His account of the travels of Thomas and Felix makes the reader feel the fear of highwaymen, the joy of finding rare flowers, the excitement of entering the walls of Paris...
...Yet, almost as soon as he became a learned man, Platter abandoned the Catholicism of his youth, converting to Protestantism in 1522, just five years after Luther posted his 95 theses...
...These German texts include the first autobiography ever written by a man of peasant origin Kenneth R. Weinstein directs the Government Reform Project at the Heritage Foundation...
...Felix, who had no desire for martyrdom, made no effort to inform anyone that he was a dissenter...
...After all, as Felix himself noted, one of his professors, a certain Monsieur Rondelet, had honored his first wife and his stillborn son by dissecting them shortly after their funeral masses...
...By avoiding these deeper questions, Le Roy Ladurie gives the reader a more comfortable journey, but a less edifying one...
...Yet Felix, unlike his father, was able to travel by horse, in respectable clothes, to a great university: the medical faculty of Mont-pellier...
...With Thomas Platter fully ensconced in Basel's intelligentsia, Le Roy Ladurie turns his attention to the life of Thomas's son, Felix, born in 1536...
...Married in 1529, he made his career in Protestant Zurich and Basel, where he saw the horrors of the wars of religion firsthand...
...What's more, the plague made many visits to Switzerland, where it would take four of Platter's children...
...Thomas Platter, the family patriarch, was born in 1499 of illiterate parents in southern Switzerland...
...Thanks to Felix's passion for collecting skeletons, bone fragments, stuffed animals and shells, the Platter household became one of Europe's most impressive natural history museums...
...Le Roy Ladurie has produced a fascinating history that reads like a novel...
...Aside from brief interludes on 16th-century politics, Le Roy Ladurie has tailored the text to modern sensibilities...
...Likewise, he fails to explore the intellectual links between anti-religious skeptics, scientific materialists, and Spanish marranos (Jews publicly professing Catholi-cism)—all of them part and parcel of Felix's world at Montpellier...
...Felix spent much of his time in the Latin Quarter, visiting its bookstores and the great medical scholars at the College Royal, now the College de France...
...And on the 450-mile journey from Basel, he saw a radically different world from that which his father had seen...
...Later, as a medical student, he and his colleagues would rob graves to obtain cadavers for study...
...And yet in this very eagerness to accommodate, he has short-changed his most interesting subject: the difficult intellectual questions faced by the Platters, who, after all, lived in the midst of the great theological and political ferment of their day...
...After dozens of odd jobs and false academic starts from Ulm to Dresden to Munich, he learned to read at the age of 21...
...One frequent visitor was the mother of an executed man whose cadaver Felix dissected, and whose bones he exhibited...
...He would publish John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion...
...But unlike his colleagues, Le Roy Ladurie is also a noted political historian, which makes him a natural guide to a subject that has fascinated historians for generations: the diaries left by the Platter family of 16th-century Basel...
...Nor does he explain why Thomas was so dedicated to his Latin, Greek, or Hebrew masters...
...By 25, he was so versed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew that he could teach them...
...Left fatherless at 6, he began work as a goatherd...
...He had no qualms dissecting dogs, whose cadavers he kept in the closet...
...He would gaze intently as butchers removed the entrails of slaughtered animals, and spent much of his childhood dissecting insects and mice...
...And Felix, whose appetite ran to the macabre, gladly accommodated his father's wishes...
...Platter soon took his place among the Protestant humanists who sought to use ancient history and Biblical exegesis to separate "true Christianity" from the "pagan rites" of Rome...
...and one of the few pre-Enlighten-ment accounts of childhood...
...Yet he courageously avoided mass and refused to dissect Protestant cadavers...
...His earliest memories were of distinguished guests, including Calvin, who visited in 1541...
...With Protestants dying in religious warfare, Catholic priests in flight, and many on both sides killed by the plague, social mobility (for the survivors) increased dramatically, and Platter moved quickly from a job as ropemaker's assistant to set himself up as a printer...
...The younger Platter's early years could hardly have differed more from his fathers...
Vol. 2 • April 1997 • No. 29
