Academics like few things more than to complain about the state of their profession. A recurrent gripe is that their fields have descended into hyper-specialisation, with an overload of knowledge – books, articles and now various forms of digital material – leading to the death of the great generalists of yesteryear, who were able to leap bravely between fields and even departments. In my own field, history, the complaint was recently synthesised by two high-profile historians in a provocative book, The History Manifesto, the title of which was deliberately chosen to mimic Marx and Engels’s call to arms. The book, heavily promoted on social media, was full of seemingly authoritative graphs demonstrating how historians had become overspecialised pedants, the periods they studied growing ever shorter since the 1970s.
Unfortunately, other historians soon revealed that the authors of The History Manifesto had misinterpreted their own data: the periods studied had in fact grown longer. What was interesting was what the episode revealed about the self-identity of the profession. In the words of Ian Tyrrell, who has offered examples of historians lamenting specialisation from the 1890s to the 1990s, ‘So common have criticisms of overspecialization been that their continuing appearance registers a failure of … historians to examine the history of historical practice.’
With that lament in mind, it is most welcome to find a great historian, Peter Burke, tackling the history of the intellectual persona who refuses to be stymied by disciplinary boundaries: the ‘polymath’. Burke has compiled a list of five hundred individuals. Pleasantly, it has an even wider chronological range than (in the words of the subtitle) ‘Leonardo to Sontag’, beginning with Filippo Brunelleschi and ending with the American evolutionary biologist Stephen J Gould and the Bulgarian literary critic and essayist Tzvetan Todorov (here misnamed ‘Tristan’). In between we have a mesmerising array of philosophers, scientists, anthropologists, economists, artists, engineers, physicians, lawyers and men and women of letters from across Europe and the Americas.
Given this range, it would be impossible not to find something interesting in this book. Particularly welcome is Burke’s coverage of figures from Spain and Latin America, such as the remarkable 17th-century Mexican nun Juana Inés de la Cruz, and the 18th-century Jesuit palaeographist Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro. But with range comes an inevitable lack of depth. Burke’s approach is typically to assign one paragraph to each of his putative polymaths, consisting of a pithy biography, a list of their interests and a remark to the effect that their learning went beyond their primary interests. So we read, for instance, of Philip Melanchthon: ‘now remembered as a theologian, Luther’s right-hand man in Wittenberg, studied or taught not only rhetoric and Greek but also mathematics, astronomy, astrology, anatomy and botany’. The result is that the book has a somewhat encyclopedic quality, with many of the descriptions being summaries of other summaries, in the case of scientists usually from the Dictionary of Scientific Biography. There are also errors, even with respect to the early modern period in which Burke specialises. The great 16th-century Spanish biblical scholar Benito Arias Montano was not a member of the Family of Love sect; the Huguenot encyclopedist Pierre Bayle did not leave his academic post in 1684 but almost a decade later – nor did he ‘give it up’, but was rather forced out of it for political reasons.
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