Get ready for the real-life diaries of a teenage boy in the 16th century. It’s everything you can imagine, especially if what you imagine involves a lot of public torture. The diaries begin with his journeying to Montpellier to study. Coming into Nantua, they see bodies hanging from trees. “The night came upon us as we descended the mountain,” he writes, “and it became so dark that we only just missed bumping into a corpse that was hanging from a branch.” A few days later, coming into Lyon: “we saw several men hanging from gibbbets and others exposed on wheels.” And then at Nimes, they passed an execution ground. “Pieces of human flesh hung from the olive trees, and the sight gave me a curious sensation.”
It’s sometimes quite Adrian Mole, except if Adiran Mole dined with Nostradamus (which this guy did!). Lots of classic teenage stuff: they find “an infallible recipe for making the hair grow,” and smear it on their chins every day. They then razor their bare chins every day and astoundingly, this does not work. It’s also touchingly honest – about how frightened he is of the dark, about the pressure from his dad about his studies, even about his medical issues – e.g., 29 May 1553: “I purged myself with pilulas coccias, which sent me to stool sixteen times and left me very weak. My master was sent for and was very alarmed.”
I am also now annoyingly bursting with info about the 16th century, so I would avoid dinner parties with me for a while. That they had flocks of peacocks from the Indies, that they burnt huge bushels of rosemary to keep warm, that the apprentice program was basically a swap of sons between houses, and etc.
But mostly what I take from these diaries is the life of an ordinary sixteen year old boy. How unique and not unique everybody’s little experience is. It feels weird to think he’s dead, and has been for four hundred years.