Tristram Shandy · Treatise
Slawkenbergius's Treatise on Noses
Slawkenbergius
A vast Latin work on noses, from which Tristram lifts one tale — a stranger, a long nose, Strasbourg in uproar — because his own biography has got stuck on the same organ.
de Selby has theories about night. Slawkenbergius has theories about noses. Both men are what happens when a novel needs a philosopher and does not want a plausible one.
Sterne is doing the eighteenth century’s favourite joke — the learned fool — at a length the century also loved. The treatise is ten folios because a short treatise would not have been learned. The tale Tristram translates is the one chapter a reader might actually want, which is Sterne admitting the joke and then telling the story anyway, nuns and all. Casaubon’s Key is tragic because Casaubon believes it. Slawkenbergius is comic because Tristram does not, and quotes him all the same.
A catalogue of imagined knowledge that skipped the noses would have skipped the moment the English novel learned to swallow a fake book whole and keep walking.
On the readability rating. One tale, given at Sterne’s leisure. Ten folios untranslated. The ratio is the joke.
In-world history
Cited as if every gentleman already owned him. Tristram, whose accidental circumcision and whose father's systems have made noses the family subject, translates a chapter. The stranger rides into Strasbourg; the nose is discussed by nuns, scientists, and the Inquisition; the tale is longer than it should be and shorter than Slawkenbergius. The rest of the ten folios remain, correctly, unopened.
Why it matters
Sterne needed a learned authority so swollen that it would make Casaubon look concise. Slawkenbergius is that authority: ten folios, a name like a sneeze, and a single story worth stealing.
Appearances
- The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1761) — Laurence Sterne Volume IV; a "tale of a nose" extracted from the great Slawkenbergius, whose ten-folio work is the authority on the subject
Connected volumes
- Related to The Key to All Mythologies · Middlemarch
- Related to Golden Hours · The Fictions of Flann O'Brien
Catalogue record
- Category
- Treatise
- World
- Tristram Shandy
- Imagined by
- Laurence Sterne
- Language
- Latin, in the original; Tristram translates a tale from it
- First appearance
- Tristram Shandy, vol. IV (1761)
- Readability
- Extensive excerpts
Sources
- Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, volume IV (1761), the Slawkenbergius interpolation.
Added by house · last checked 2026-09-06