Table Talk

Table talk is a book of recorded informal conversation, usually put together by a friend, disciple, or servant who kept notes on what a notable person said at meals and over drinks. The genre has a long history — Plutarch's Table Talk (Quaestiones Convivales) is one of its ancestors — but its modern English form is defined by three great examples: John Selden's Table Talk (posthumously published 1689), Martin Luther's Tischreden (compiled by his students, 1566), and Coleridge's Table Talk (edited by his nephew, 1835).

The form's evidentiary value is precisely its informality. What a philosopher writes for publication is polished; what the same philosopher says over dinner may be sharper, funnier, or more revealing. Selden's Table Talk contains political and legal aphorisms that Selden the scholar would not have committed to print. Luther's Tischreden contains theological opinions delivered with a bluntness his treatises could not have accommodated.

The evidentiary risk is equally clear. Table talk is filtered through a listener — memory is imperfect, and the compiler's agenda shapes what gets recorded. Modern editions of Luther's Tischreden mark the specific compiler of each entry, because different students heard different Luthers and each version has its own bias.

Common mistake: quoting table talk with the same confidence as published writing. A remark in Coleridge's Table Talk is Coleridge as remembered by his nephew a decade after the fact; a sentence in the Biographia Literaria is Coleridge as edited by Coleridge. Both are useful; they are not interchangeable, and the citation should make clear which is which.