Beloved Son Felix: Coming of Age in the Renaissance
Felix Platter
Foreword by Stephen Greenblatt
Edited and translated by Seán Jennett
The exceptionally vivid, rare, and revealing journals of a sixteenth-century medical student.
COMING FEB 17, 2026
Felix Platter
Foreword by Stephen Greenblatt
Edited and translated by Seán Jennett
The exceptionally vivid, rare, and revealing journals of a sixteenth-century medical student.
COMING FEB 17, 2026
Felix Platter
Foreword by Stephen Greenblatt
Edited and translated by Seán Jennett
The exceptionally vivid, rare, and revealing journals of a sixteenth-century medical student.
COMING FEB 17, 2026
In 1552, at the age of sixteen, Felix Platter left his home in Basel, Switzerland, and journeyed 370 miles to Montpelier, in the south of France. There he spent the next five years studying to become a physician. It was an extraordinary education—and not only in medicine. A Protestant in a Catholic kingdom, Felix witnessed blood-chilling executions and engaged in secret religious discussions with his landlord, a Marrano Jew. He also learned to play the lute, tasted olive oil for the first time, and had his first swim in the sea. He flirted and danced (and once got his spur tangled in a lady’s skirt), he 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.
The notes that Felix Platter kept on his day-to-day life are unique in European history. A century before the novel was invented, The Diaries of Felix Platter capture the texture of Renaissance life and youth from the inside. As Stephen Greenblatt observes in his awestruck introduction, “Keeping diaries and writing autobiographies did not become a widespread practice until the mid-seventeenth century. But it is not merely the relative paucity of such documents from earlier periods that makes Platter’s journal so unusual. It is its vividness, intimacy, candor, and charm that confer upon it an altogether rare and revealing character.”
“In recalling the scenes of his youth, he did something extraordinary: he set aside his years of experience and knowledge of the world, and recovered what it felt like to be a naïve, untested teenager venturing out into unfamiliar and often dangerous territory . . . The result reflects rare gifts of inexhaustible curiosity, sharp intelligence, and a canny eye for detail.”
—Stephen Greenblatt, from the Foreword
© Hans Bock 1584
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.
Seán Jennett (1912–1981) was a poet, typographer, production manager, editor, and travel writer. The author of three volumes of poetry, he also wrote guides to many cities and regions around the world, as well as The Making of Books, which stood for years as the definitive work on printing, binding, and book design, going through numerous editions.
Beloved Son Felix: Coming of Age in the Renaissance • ISBN: 9781961341685
Pub: Feb 17, 2027 • $18.00 • McNALLY EDITIONS no. 49
Paperback with flaps • 5” x 8.5” • 192 pages
eBook ISBN: 9781961341692
UK Pub: Apr 2, 2026 • UK Price: £12.99
