Beloved Son Felix

The wildly vivid, rare, and revealing journals of a sixteenth-century medical student.

In 1552, sixteen-year-old Felix Platter left Basel, Switzerland, and journeyed 370 miles to Montpelier, France to study medicine. His journals chronicle five astonishing years of youth in a time of plague, war, and awakening. A Protestant in a Catholic kingdom, Felix witnessed blood-chilling executions and engaged in secret religious discussions with his landlord, a Marrano Jew. He learned to play the lute, tasted olive oil for the first time, and swam in the sea. He flirted (unsuccessfully) and danced (disastrously), 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.

As Stephen Greenblatt writes in his introduction to this new edition, keeping diaries and writing autobiographies did not become a widespread practice until the mid-seventeenth century, but Felix created an astonishing document: an intimate, sometimes hilarious chronicle of Renaissance adolescence from the inside, whose vividness, intimacy, candour, and charm lend it an altogether rare and revealing character.

Beloved Son Felix is not just a record of events, but a window into the heart of a young man navigating the complexities of life and identity during a period of profound cultural change.