Beloved Son Felix: Coming of Age in the Renaissance

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.”

“The diary of the sixteenth-century physician Felix Platter is without precedent in early modern literature . . . The transparency and force with which it conveys, across centuries, the discombobulating intensity of adolescence itself—Felix Platter’s diary is, as Greenblatt suggests, not ‘remotely comparable’ to anything in the early modern archive. The claim rings true . . . Reading Beloved Son Felix, I was reminded of what Virginia Woolf wrote of another early modern doctor-diarist, Sir Thomas Browne, whom she called ‘the first of the autobiographers’: ‘He was a character, and the first to make us feel that the most sublime speculations of the human imagination are issued from a particular man, whom we can love.’ Felix Platter is a most lovable and particular boy . . . The real revelations, here and elsewhere, are sensory and psychological: the little horse’s warm flesh and sympathetic whinnies; the boy’s sense of abandonment and the satisfaction he takes in staging it by the river’s edge; the petulant destruction of the souvenirs for his parents; the relief of a familiar face. It is exceedingly rare to know what happened to a particular person on a particular day nearly five hundred years ago. Rarer still is to know how they felt.”

—Catherine Nicholson, New York Review of Books

“Like the diary of Samuel Pepys or the memoirs of François-René de Chateaubriand, Beloved Son Felix, first published in 1840, is an invaluable and entertaining firsthand exploration of a bygone era. But unlike those later writers—elites who served as government functionaries—Felix is merely ‘the son of a poor schoolmaster.’ Through him, we are allowed a rare glimpse into the street-level experiences of a common Renaissance man . . . Though an ordinary man, Felix lived in extraordinary times. In the course of his travels, he heard John Calvin speak, had his horoscope read by Nostradamus and witnessed the French dauphin toss a small dog out of a high window. (Don’t worry—the dog was caught safely by an attendant below.) And thanks to his keen eye and meticulous attention to detail, we’re granted the privilege of sharing these rich, formative experiences with him—at a comfortable remove.”

—Michael Patrick Brady, The Wall Street Journal

“Felix Platter, who bequeathed us Beloved Son Felix: Coming of Age in the Renaissance, the titillating diary of his education in Montpellier, France . . . We’re fortunate that Platter lived to remember any of this, and fortunate, too, that he thought to write it down. Keeping a diary was an uncommon habit in his day; reading Beloved Son Felix feels like peeping through a forgotten keyhole into the sixteenth century . . . What a strange comfort it is to read of this long-dead man’s soggy pillows, his heartaches and stomachaches, the terrace with a view of the sea where he liked to study; to know that he enjoyed a good mackerel and a pair of green leather breeches, that he once tripped over his spurs and nearly fell down a flight of stairs, and that his father was so sad to bid him farewell that he couldn’t get the words out. Life seeps out of Platter’s diary in the most unexpected places . . . This is why historians adore primary sources. These are the things we’re meant to remember.”

—Dan Piepenbring, Harper’s Magazine

“Beloved Son Felix: Coming of Age in the Renaissance compiles Felix’s meticulous documentation of some five years of his life in the sixteenth century as a medical student, Protestant, and capital-P Person in a country marred by religious persecution and plague . . . This gorgeous reissue from McNally Editions features illustrations from Platter’s own diaries along with woodcuts by the Swiss-German artist Jost Amman . . . Felix’s keen eye for beauty keeps one teetering between the sublime and the gruesome . . . Felix renders his surroundings with pointillistic pleasure.”

—Luke Gair, The Sewanee Review

“Felix Platter’s Beloved Son Felix offers rare first-hand insight into the everyday violence and the confluence of religions in Renaissance Europe. By the end of his life, Swiss anatomist Felix Platter was a renowned professor and a pioneer in the field that would become neuroscience. But in 1552, at the age of just 16, he travelled from Basel to Montpellier to begin his studies. The Diaries of Felix Platter are exceptional not just for their vivid descriptions of everyday violence and the confluence of religions in Renaissance Europe, but also because diaries and autobiographies such as these would not become common for another century.”

—Kismet

“As delightful to the ordinary reader as it is useful to the social historian . . . A translation which perfectly captures the freshness and character of the original.” 

—C. V. Wedgwood, Sunday Times

“A lively glimpse of a slice of sixteenth-century European life . . . The work does give some nice insight into life in those times, as well as Platter’s character. He plays the lute, goes to dances, and is perhaps a bit of a dandy . . . Beloved Son Felix [offers] a nice and quite far-ranging slice and tour of life in those times . . . It all makes a fun (and sometimes grisly) tour of the times.”

—Michael Orthofer, The Complete Review

“An excellent English translation . . . the well-chosen illustrations, which include a number of drawings by Jennett and two portraits of Platter, add to its attractiveness.” 

—W. T. Stearn, British Journal for the History of Science

“One of the earliest travel diaries of its kind and surely one of the most truthful. It is also one of the most interesting, its only fault being that it is too short. It has now been admirably translated into English in its entirety.”

—Geoffrey Keynes, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts

“His description of his lectures and practical work is absorbing . . . I laugh out loud at his antics to impress girls when he buys himself new red breeches, slashed, and lined with taffeta . . . I shudder at the public executions he witnesses, including the gruesome description of the burning of a man found guilty of heresy.  Then I smile as Felix is caught out eating eggs cooked in butter during Lent - despite trying to hide the eggshells in his room. This is such a readable book. You are drawn into his life and are able to see how and why his opinions are formed.  I felt I’d shared Felix’s life and his youth and his rite of passage to adulthood as he slowly matures during the time of his university course.”

—Theresa Breslin, The History Girls

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: Mar 3, 2026 • $19.00 • McNALLY EDITIONS no. 49

Paperback with flaps • 5” x 8.5” • 192 pages

eBook ISBN: 9781961341692

UK Pub: Apr 16, 2026 • UK Price: £13.99