The Historians Curse
After reading and imagining oneself in different era's, time's, etc the historian loses a sense of reality and literally, everything becomes relative. Human suffering isn't as bad as others across history have suffered. You borrow words, speech patterns, and mannerisms from other cultures in a different time. You find it hard to interact with people in present society as you present yourself as someone from the past you hold in esteem. You cannot escape the fruits of your own knowledge and are cursed to be a weird unknown thing. An amalgamation of unrelated things without any unifying idea to hold itself together, making it preposterous in the extreme.
Being affected by the Historians Curse the professor was seen as a lunatic as he constantly presented himself as knowing everything whilst acting like a 13th-century townsman looking for God amongst the dead.