The Rabelais encyclopedia

THERABELAIS

ENCYCLOPEDIA

THE

RABELAISENCYCLOPEDIA

EDITED BY

Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

GREENWOOD PRESS

Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Rabelais encyclopedia / edited by Elizabeth Chesney Zegura.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0–313–31034–3 (alk. paper)

1. Rabelais, Francois, ca. 1490–1553?—Encyclopedias. I. Chesney, Elizabeth A., 1949–

PQ1694.R32 2004

843'.3—dc22 2004042479

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.

Copyright � 2004 by Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be

reproduced, by any process or technique, without the

express written consent of the publisher.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2004042479

ISBN: 0–313–31034–3

First published in 2004

Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881

An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.

www.greenwood.com

Printed in the United States of America

TM

The paper used in this book complies with the

Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National

Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Krista

Contents

Introduction ix

Chronology xiii

Abbreviations xv

Alphabetical List of Entries xvii

Topical List of Entries xxi

The Encyclopedia 1

Selected Bibliography 267

Index 273

About the Contributors 285

Introduction

The very thought of a Rabelais encyclopedia is somewhat daunting to anyone familiar

with the Renaissance physician’s fiction. Not only would the project be gargantuan if

every name, theme, rhetorical device, and learned reference in the Five Books of Pan-

tagruel were included, but the sheer hubris of attempting to catalog the “living waters”

(3BK prol.—see Abbreviations) of this self-styled alchemist’s cauldron seems worthy of

Rabelais’s trickster, Panurge, or even the fool Triboullet. The Pantagrueline tales are

themselves encyclopedic, not just in the hyperbolic curriculum that Gargantua sets forth

for his son (P 8), urging him to become an “abyss” of knowledge, but also in the

compendium of allusions to navigation, theology, music, art and architecture, philosophy,

medicine, and other disciplines that Rabelais amasses in his magnum opus. His interests

and areas of expertise are vast, in keeping with the ideal of the uomo universale or

Renaissance Man; one goal of this volume is to showcase the fascinating array of topics

that are grafted onto the mock-epic framework of the chronicles, transforming them into

a richly textured tapestry of life in the sixteenth century.

Some would argue that this richness is a double-edged sword: not only a treasure trove

of laughter, mind teasers, mock-epic hijinks, and insights into the French Renaissance,

Rabelais’s hybrid and multifaceted discourse also offers a host of lexical and interpretive

challenges. For readers accustomed to well-defined genres, classically crafted plots, and

transparent meanings, the hodgepodge of ingredients that make up Rabelais’s fiction,

ranging from genealogies, lists, and a library catalog to surrealistic battle narratives, a

flying pig, and the chatter of drunks, can at times be overwhelming. True, works of

fantasy requiring leaps of logic and a suspension of disbelief abound in modern culture,

as evidenced by the enormous popularity in film and fiction of Tolkien’s Lord of the

Rings, a saga often likened to Rabelais’s magnum opus for its epic proportions and

inspiration, or even the Harry Potter books, similar to Rabelais’s earliest chronicles in

their focus on children, games, education, and magic. Adding more fuel to the narrator’s

claim that Pantagruel is “incomparable” (prol.), however, these modern works of fantasy

lack the verbal prolixity, rapid shifts in tonality, and distinctive blend of high and low

culture, scatology and learned references, piety and irreverence that keeps readers off

balance in Rabelais.

Not accidentally, given the risk of arrest and execution that faced humanists in Ren-

aissance France who were too outspoken, Rabelais’s encyclopedic text is itself a literary

shape shifter, at least from the reader’s standpoint. Depending on our familiarity with

Rabelais’s learned allusions, the particular thematic threads we follow as we navigate his

prose, and the critical apparatus or perspective we bring to the interpretive process, the

unstable admixture of ingredients he includes in the crucible of his fiction seem to com-

bine and recombine in a host of different patterns, which vary from one reader or reading

to the next. The result is a Rabelais who is many things to many people: both a “mad

dog” and a “refined genius”; a good Catholic, an Evangelical, and an atheist; a misogynist

and a closet feminist.

x Introduction

At least to some degree, Rabelais foresaw and orchestrated this plural response to his

chronicles. In addition to being a literary pack rat, whose cornucopian text overflows

with marketplace invective, scatology, riddles, and classical references, Rabelais also

dabbles in verbal magic, offering us a polysemic work that he likens to a bottomless

barrel: replicating the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the Gallic physician intentionally

fashions an interpretive wellspring so rich in conundra, multiple entendres, polyvalent

symbols, and connections between episodes that the “joyeusete et raillerie” (3BK prol.)

never run dry. Suspending us between the positivistic lure of hidden messages about

“religion,” “politics,” and “economics” (G prol.) on the one hand, and hints, on the other

hand, that his text is purely ludic and has no meaning, Rabelais beckons and eludes us

at the same time, whether we are first-time readers or longtime aficionados of his work.

Like any complex varietal, Rabelais’s overflowing wine cask brings the reader back

for repeated tastes: but while his text’s complexity makes the work mesmerizing, at least

for those willing to linger and “gnaw the marrowbone” (G prol.) or look beneath the

surface of his fiction, his chronicles also resist the neatly circumscribed categories, au-

thoritative definitions, and claims to comprehensiveness that we often associate with

encyclopedias. To borrow a metaphor from Rabelais himself, one might just as easily

paint the “Ideas of Plato,” the “Atoms of Epicurus,” or even the invisible Echo (4BK

2). Despite the host of containers he invokes as metaphors for his book, including a box,

bone, cask, and bottle, the Gallic physician’s ideas, imagery, themes, style, and verve

can by no means be summed up “in a nutshell.”

By the same token, few texts cry out for an encyclopedia or dictionary as the Panta-

grueline tales do. Rabelais is a notoriously challenging author, especially for those who

read him in English translations without extensive footnotes to help them navigate his

“motz epaves” or “strange and unusual” words (P 6). And while he resists our efforts to

pin him down, we might recall that his own Fourth Book is accompanied in some editions

by a dictionary of sorts, the Brief Declaration. Although the authorship of this glossary,

which may or may not be in the Gallic physician’s own hand, is questionable, its very

existence acknowledges the difficulty of his chronicles and lays the groundwork for future

reference works designed to make his world more accessible. It is probable, of course,

that one function of the author’s verbal roadblocks is to exclude the “hypocrites” (“ca-

gotz”) and “humbugs” (“caphars” [GP 247; P prol.]) bent on censuring him. Yet Rabelais

himself seems to encourage, both in his marrowbone analogy and through his own use

of dialogic processes, any type of exercise, dialogue, or discussion that promotes under-

standing: “When did it ever hurt,” asks Pantagruel during the Third Book, when Panurge

balks at consulting a sibyl, “to keep acquiring knowledge, whether from a sot, a pot, a

bottle, a feather, or shoe leather?” (GP 285; 3BK 16). By putting our heads together, he

implies, and weighing perspectives other than our own, we increase the probability of

learning and growing.

This volume, a compilation of readings by more than seventy contributors, is based

on a similar premise: that our own understanding of Rabelais will be enhanced if we

pool our resources and approach his text dialogically. Although this dictionary may not

solve every riddle, explain every unfamiliar word, or settle all the controversies surround-

ing Rabelais’s work, it is intended to furnish general readers with both a basic historical

framework that will allow them to appreciate the Gallic physician’s fiction within the

context of sixteenth-century France; and with several hundred articles, contributed by

scholars representing a variety of critical perspectives and methodologies, on selected

characters, episodes, and textual references in Rabelais. Far from offering either a com-

plete Rabelais concordance or a single, definitive interpretation of any individual episode,

the goal of the volume is to open the Gallic physician’s world to new readers, provide

Introduction xi

a forum for differing approaches to the chronicles, trigger new debate among veteran

readers, and serve as an informational resource for students and teachers of his work.

Of all the goals represented here, the first may be the most critical: to help realize

Rabelais’s own hope, expressed in the prologue to Pantagruel, that even if “we forgot

the art of printing, or all the books in the world were destroyed,” his chronicles would

“forever and forever” be passed “down from hand to hand” (GP 133). Despite the pri-

macy of electronic texts and cyberspace learning in our own era, of course, Rabelais

continues to be read by new generations of students, suggesting that our concern about

the future of his text is oddly placed. After all, excellent editions of his opus abound in

France, including the recent 1994 Pleiade offering edited by Mireille Huchon (Gallimard

1994); the Livre de Poche version (1994) edited by Jean Ceard, Gerard Defaux, and

Michel Simonin; and the highly regarded critical editions of Pantagruel (1959), Gar-

gantua (1970), the Third Book (1964), and the Fourth Book (1947) in the Textes Litter-

aires Francais series, edited by Verdun Saulnier, Ruth Calder, M. A. Screech, and Robert

Marichal, respectively. In English, moreover, translations of his mock epic are relatively

plentiful and easy to obtain: versions by Sir Thomas Urquhart and Peter Motteux (En-

cyclopedia Britannica “Great Books” 1955), Jacques LeClercq (Everyman’s Library:

Random House), John Michael Cohen (Penguin Classics 1955), Donald Frame (Univer-

sity of California 1991), and Burton Raffel (W.W. Norton 1990) are currently in print;

and while they may not appear among the holdings of all public libraries, the volumes

are readily accessible at university libraries and through major booksellers. Although

each of these translations—ranging from the archaic but poetic English of Urquhart to

LeClercq’s flavorful attempt to capture Rabelais’s word play, Cohen’s more direct trans-

lation, and Frame and Raffel’s renderings of the text in Americanized English—has its

strengths and weaknesses, all are generally faithful. Even more dramatically, Internet

access to electronic versions of the Rabelaisian chronicles is readily available in both

French and English thanks to the Gutenberg Project, Athena, and the Great Books col-

lection.

When we speak of making Rabelais’s works accessible, then, something more than

mere “availability” is at stake. To borrow a metaphor from the Frozen Words episode,

where cries from a naval battle months earlier are miraculously reconstituted, it is a

question of “thawing” the chronicles, of bridging the distance between Rabelais’s world

and our own. Constructing his text as a “source vive” or living monument, the author

urges readers to approach his wine barrel or banquet not in the manner of “graveyard

ghouls” (GP 247; 3BK prol.) who censor, plunder, and deaden works of literature, but

rather as fellow tipplers willing to linger over his banquet, let the wine breathe, and savor

its full body and complexity. Thus, while the length constraints of this volume require

the simplification of topics that merit much richer treatment, its overall goal is not to

reduce the play of signifiers or strip the text of its life: on the contrary, the aim is to

help perpetuate the Rabelaisian colloquium, not just by encouraging readers to revisit the

text and reflect on its paradoxes and challenges, but also by renewing dialogue on its

controversies, and by providing suggestions for further reading about Rabelais and his

world.

In terms of its organization, this Encyclopedia offers an alphabetized collection of

short articles on selected topics pertaining to Rabelais: on literary and philosophical

movements, characters and episodes in his text, political and religious figures from his

era, Renaissance and classical authors with whom he shares similarities, and on related

cultural manifestations of the Renaissance, such as art and architecture, music, and print-

ing. Particularly to assist those who might otherwise be perplexed by the interpretive

differences of opinion in this volume, there are also entries on the major movements in

xii Introduction

Rabelais criticism, which provide an overview on traditional and more recent approaches

to his text. Although as many terms as possible are alphabetized under the English version

of their name, with the original French in parentheses, to facilitate the access of English

speakers to his text, episodes and characters whose names vary significantly from one

English translation to the next remain in French. For readers unfamiliar with the French

text of Rabelais or, alternatively, with terminology used in its English translations, an

extensive set of cross references in both languages and a comprehensive index at the end

of the volume will allow readers to locate items more easily. As for quotations of Rabelais

in this reference work, those in French are consistent with the text established by Mireille

Huchon in the 1994 Pleiade edition of the Oeuvres completes; and the English translations

provided, unless otherwise indicated, are those of the contributors and editor. As noted

in the text, translations not furnished by the authors are most often taken from Burton

Raffel’s Gargantua and Pantagruel. In instances where the spellings used are inconsis-

tent, this typically stems from Rabelais’s own fluid orthography, a tendency that is com-

mon among French humanists of the sixteenth century.

Finally, a number of important terms, episodes, and characters in the Pantagrueline

Tales receive less attention than they deserve in this volume, and some necessarily go

untreated, not because they are without interest, but because the material is so vast that

only selected topics could be accommodated. Particularly in the case of the Fifth Book,

whose authenticity is disputed, the number of entries is quite limited: but for those who

wish additional information, either on the Cinquiesme livre or on other books in the

Pantagrueline chronicles, we have included numerous suggestions for further reading.

Indeed, this volume should be viewed not as an end in itself, but rather as the stimulus

for a more in-depth investigation of Rabelais, his chronicles, and his times.

Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to everyone who has participated in this

project. A word of thanks, first of all, to the extraordinarily diverse range of rabelaisants

who were willing to share their talents, knowledge, and expertise, many of them on very

short notice. What began as a project firmly rooted in the United States, purely for reasons

of practicality, has crossed oceans and bridged generations of scholars, not unlike the

Rabelaisian text itself: to all of these colleagues, ranging from veteran Pantagruelistes,

whose enthusiasm for Rabelais has not waned in “retirement,” to young scholars who

combine flawless erudition with new critical approaches, and to those in midcareer as

well, who so graciously agreed to make time for this project when they had none to

spare, I am most grateful. Thanks are due as well to Dr. George Butler at Greenwood

Press, who first broached the idea of this reference work, for his continued assistance

and immense patience; and for his guidance and support in bringing this project, unfin-

ished though it may be, to its conclusion. To my family, finally, there is no need for

words—instead, let us toast the journey’s end, savor the marrowbone, and enjoy the

banquet!


Chronology

c. 1483–94 Francois Rabelais, the fourth son of a successful lawyer named Antoine, is born at La

Deviniere near Chinon. Some scholars maintain he was born as early as 1483, while

others place his date of birth a good deal later, possibly in 1494.

1510–11 Enters a Franciscan monastery at Fontenay-le-Comte, where he remains for well over a

decade.

1520 Wrote a letter, now lost, to Guillaude Bude.

1521 Sends a second letter to Bude, who replies.

1523–24 Involved in translations of Herodotus and Lucian into Latin. With Pierre Amy, encounters

difficulties over his study of Greek.

1525 Becomes a Benedictine during this time period, moving to Saint-Pierre-de-Maillezais.

1527–30 Natural children Junie and Francois are born. Rabelais may have studied medicine in

Paris during this period.

1530 Registers on September 17 for school of medicine at the University of Montpellier, where

he receives a bachelor’s degree in medicine on November 1.

1531 Lectures April 17 to June 24 on Hippocrates and Galen. While in Montpellier, either

during the fall or early the next year, performs in Farce of the Man who Married a

Dumb Wife.

1532 Named as the physician at the Hotel-Dieu in Lyon (November 1). Pantagruel first appears

in print, possibly at the Lyon fair in November. In late 1532, or early the next year, the

Pantagrueline Prognostication and Almanac for the Year 1533 are published. Rabelais

dedicates his Epistolae Medicinales by Manardi to Tiraqueau, Hippocratis ac Galeni

Libri Aliquot to Bishop Geoffroy D’Estissac, and Lucii Cuspidii Testamentum to Amaury

Bouchard.

1533 Pantagruel reportedly denounced by Sorbonne theologian Nicolas le Clerc on October

23.

1534 Rabelais leaves for Italy in January as the personal secretary and doctor to Jean du Bellay,

bishop of Paris. Remains in Rome during February and March before returning to Lyon

in May. At Rabelais’s behest, Sebastian Gryphius publishes Marliani’s Topography of

Ancient Rome, dedicated to Jean du Bellay; and later in the year, the Almanac for 1535

appears in print. Gargantua is probably published sometime later in 1534 or early in

1535.

1535 Death of Antoine Rabelais. Francois makes his second trip to Rome with Jean du Bellay,

who is appointed to the College of Cardinals in May. Rabelais’s son Theodule is born

in 1535 or 1536.

xiv Chronology

1536 Returns to Lyon, then departs for Paris with Cardinal du Bellay, who is in charge of

fortifying the capital against Charles V.

1537 Receives M.D. degree at Montpellier. Dissects the body of a hanged man.

1538 Third illegitimate child, Theodule, dies, at age 2.

1540 Surviving children, Francois and Junie, are legitimized. Rabelais goes to Turin with

Guillaume du Bellay, Sieur de Langey and the cardinal’s eldest brother.

1542 Returns to France in December with Langey, who dies in January 1543 before reaching

their destination.

1543 The Sorbonne censures Gargantua and Pantagruel.

1545 Francis I licenses Rabelais to publish another work.

1546 Third Book published. New censure, refuge at Metz.

1547 Returns to Paris, but leaves for Rome in July with Jean du Bellay. While passing through

Lyon gives first 11 chapters of Fourth Book to publisher.

1549 In September sends Sciomachie back to French court. Description of Roman festivities

celebrating birth of Louis d’Orleans, second son of Henry II.

1550 Official license for Fourth Book.

1551 Given vicarship of two parishes and financial security. Receives help from Cardinal du

Bellay.

1552 Fourth Book published. The Sorbonne renews its harassment.

1553 Resigns vicarships. Dies in March or April.

1562 L’Isle Sonante published, usually attributed to Rabelais.

1564 Fifth Book is published.

Abbreviations

AJFS Australian Journal of French Studies

ASMAR Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

BAARD Bulletin de l’association des amis de Rabelais et de la Deviniere

BHR Bibliotheque d’humanisme et Renaissance

CI Critical Inquiry

CL Comparative Literature

CLS Comparative Literature Studies

EC Esprit createur

ER Etudes rabelaisiennes

FF French Forum

FR French Review

FS French Studies

JMRS Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies

KRQ Kentucky Romance Quarterly

MLN Modern Language Notes

MLS Modern Language Studies

PMLA Proceedings of the Modern Language Association

RAR Renaissance and Reformation

RER Revue des etudes rabelaisiennes

RHLF Revue d’Histoire litteraire de la France

RHR Reforme, Humanisme, Renaissance

RN Romance Notes

RQ Renaissance Quarterly

RR Romanic Review

SCJ Sixteenth Century Journal

SEDES Societe d’Edition d’Enseignement Superieur

SF Studi Francesi

THR Travaux d’humanisme et Renaissance

TLF Textes litteraires francais

YFS Yale French Studies

xvi Abbreviations

G Gargantua

P Pantagruel

PP Pantagrueline Prognostication

3BK Third Book (Tiers livre)

4BK Fourth Book (Quart livre)

5BK Fifth Book (Cinquiesme livre)

GP Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. B. Raffel

OC Oeuvres completes, ed. M. Huchon

AlphabeticalList of Entries

Agrippa, Henry Cornelius, of Nettesheim

Alchemy

Alcofrybas (Alcofribas) Nasier

Allegory

Almanacs (Almanachs)

Alterity or Otherness

Anarche

Andouilles (Chitterlings, Sausages)

Androgyne

Animals

Aristotle

Art and Architecture

Asclepiades

Astrology

Bacbuc

Badebec

Baisecul and Humevesne

Bakhtin, Mikhail

Basche (4BK 12–15)

Beda, Noel

Body, representations of

Bottle, Divine or Holy (Dive Bouteille)

Briconnet, Guillaume

Bridoye

Brief Declaration (Briefve Declaration)

Bringuenarilles (4BK 17)

Bude, Guillaume

Calumny

Calvin, Jean or John

Carnival

Cartier, Jacques

Castiglione, Baldassare

Censors and Censorship

Cervantes, Miguel de

Chaneph (4BK 63–64)

Charity

Charles V

Cheli (4BK 10)

Chicanous (Chiquanous) (4BK 12–16)

Cicero, Marcus Tullius

Clothes

Codpiece (Braguette)

Colonna, Francesco

Colors

Community, portrayal of

Coq-a-l’ane

Cornucopia

Correspondence

Couillatris (4BK prol.)

Critical Theory

Cuckoldry, fear of

Death, treatment of

Debt or Debtors, praise of (3BK 2–5)

Decretals (Les Decretales) (4BK 48–54)

Des Periers, Bonaventure

Devils and Demonology

Dindenault (4BK 5–6)

Diogenes the Cynic

Dipsodes

Disciple of Pantagruel (Le Disciple de Pantagruel)

Dogs

Dolet, Etienne

Doribus (D’Oribus, Dorisius)

Dream of Pantagruel (Le Songe de Pantagruel)

Dreams

Du Bellay, Guillaume

Du Bellay, Jean

Ecolier Limousin (Limousin schoolboy) (P 6)

xviii Alphabetical List of Entries

Economy, in Renaissance France

Education

Emblems

Encyclopedism

England

Enigmatic Prophecy (Enigme en Prophetie) (G 58)

Ennasin, or Island of the Alliances (4BK 9)

Epistemon

Erasmus, Desiderius

Eudemon

Eulogy, Satirical (Eloge Paradoxal)

Evangelism

Fanfreluches Antidotees

Farce, elements of

Fezandat, Michel

Ficino, Marsilio

Fifth Book (Cinquiesme Livre)

Folengo, Teofilo

Food

Fools and Folly

Forests

Fourth Book (Quart Livre)

Francis (Francois) I

Frere Jean (Frere Jan, Friar John, Brother John)

Friendship

Frozen Words (Paroles Gelees) (4BK 55–56)

Galen

Games

Ganabin (4BK 66–67)

Gargamelle

Gargantua

Gargantua

Gargantuan Chronicles (Chroniques Gargantuines)

Gaster, Messere (4BK 57–62)

Gastrolatres

Genealogies

Geography

Giants

Golden Age

Grace and Free Will

Grandgousier

Gross Medlars (P 1)

Grotesque Realism

Haughty Parisian Lady (Haulte Dame de Paris)

(P 21–22)

Hebrew Language and Culture, references to

Hell, depiction of

Henry II

Her Trippa

Heresy

Hero

Heroet, Antoine

Hieroglyphs

Hippocrates

Hippothadee (3BK 30)

Homenaz (4BK 49–54)

Homer

Hotel-Dieu de Lyon

Humanism

Humor

Idleness

Illustrations

Imitation and Parody

Interpretations

Irony

Italy

Janotus de Bragmardo

Jews

Judiciary

Juste, Francois

Kabbala (Cabala, Qabbalah)

Knowledge

Language

Lanternois

Law

Lefevre d’Etaples, Jacques

Letters

Lists

Loup Garou

Lucian

Luther, Martin

Lyon

Machiavelli, Niccolo

Macreons

Macrobe

Major (Maioris, Mair), John

Alphabetical List of Entries xix

Mardigras

Marguerite de Navarre

Marot, Clement

Marriage

Marrow or Marrowbone

Medamothi (4BK 2)

Medicine

Menippean Paradox

Mercury

Moderation (Mediocritas)

Money

Monsters

More, Sir Thomas

Mouth, World in Pantagruel’s

Music

Narrator, figure of

Nature

Nazdecabre (3BK 19–20)

Neoplatonism

Niphleseth

Nourry, Claude

Novel

Nursemaids

Orlando Furioso (Roland Furieux)

Pan, death of

Pantagruel

Pantagruel

Pantagruelion (3BK 49–52)

Pantagruelism

Panurge

Papacy

Papimanes and Papefigues (4BK 45–48, 49–54)

Paris

Parlement

Paul, Saint

Petrarch and Petrarchism

Philautia (Self-love, amour de soy) (3BK 29)

Physetere (4BK 33–34)

Physis and Antiphysie (4BK 32)

Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni

Picrochole

Placards, affair of (L’Affaire des Placards, October

17–18, 1534)

Plague

Pliny, the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus)

Plotinus

Popular Culture

Power, discourses of

Printing

Prognostications

Prologue, to Pantagruel

Prologues, Fourth Book

Prophecy and Divination

Propos des Bien Yvres, Les (G 5)

Quaresmeprenant

Queneau, Raymond

Quintilian

Raminagrobis (3BK 21–23)

Ramus, Peter

Reading, portrayal of

Reception and influence in France

Reformation

Religion

Renaissance

Rhetoric

Ringing Island (L’Isle sonante)

Rondibilis (3BK 31–34)

Ronsard, Pierre de

Ruach

Saint-Gelais, Mellin (or Merlin) de

Saint-Victor, library of (P 7)

Saints, imaginary

Saints, real

Salmigondin

Satin/Ouy-Dire (Hearsay)

Satire (satyre)

Scatology

Scholasticism

Science

Shakespeare

Sibyl (3BK 16–18)

Sileni (G prol)

Skepticism

Social Class

Sophists

Sorbonne

xx Alphabetical List of Entries

Sporades

Symbolic System

Syphilis (La Verole)

Tahureau, Jacques

Tarande (4BK 2)

Tartareti (Tartaret, Tateret), Pierre

Tempest, or Storm (4BK 18–24)

Tempete, Pierre

Thalamege

Thaumaste (P 18–20)

Theleme, Abbey of (Abbaye de Theleme)

Thenaud, Jean

Third Book (Tiers Livre)

Thirst

Tiraqueau, Andre

Translations, Dutch and German (16th–17th centuries)

Translations, English

Travel Literature

Trent, Council of

Triboullet (Triboulet)

Trickster

Trouillogan (3BK 29, 35–36)

Turks

Urquhart, Sir Thomas

Utopia

Villon, Francois

Violence

Virgil

Voyage

Warfare

Wechel, Chretien

Wine

Women

Xenomanes

TopicalList of Entries

BROAD CATEGORIES

Characters

Alcofrybas

Anarche

Andouilles or Chitterlings

Bacbuc

Badebec


Basche

Bridoye

Bringuenarilles

Chicanous

Couillatris

Dindenault

Dipsodes

Ecolier Limousin

Epistemon

Eudemon

Gargamelle

Gargantua

Gastrolastres

Giants

Grandgousier

Her Trippa

Hippothadee

Homenaz


Lanternois

Loup Garou

Macreons

Macrobe

Mardigras

Mercury

Nazdecabre

Niphleseth

Nursemaids

Pantagruel

Panurge

Papimanes and Papefigues

Picrochole

Quaresmeprenant

Raminagrobis

Sibyl

Sophists

Episodes

Andouilles


Bridoye

Bringuenarilles

Chaneph

Cheli

Chicanous

Debts or Debtors, praise of

Dindenault

Ecolier Limousin

Enigmatic Prophecy

Ennasin

Frozen Words

Ganabin

Gastrolastres

Gross Medlars

Haughty Parisian Lady

Her Trippa

Hippothadee

Homenaz


xxii Topical List of Entries

Lanternois

Medamothi


Pan, death of

Pantagruelion


Physetere

Physis and Antiphysie

Propos des bien yvres

Quaresmeprenant

Raminagrobis

Ruach

Satin/Ouy-Dire

Sibyl

Sophists

Tempest, or Storm

Theleme

Historical Figures

Aristotle

Asclepiades

Beda

Briconnet

Bude

Calvin

Cartier

Castiglione

Cervantes

Charles V

Colonna

Des Periers

Diogenes

Dolet

Doribus

du Bellay, Guillaume

du Bellay, Jean

Erasmus

Fezandat

Ficino

Folengo

Francis I

Galen

Henry II

Heroet

Hippocrates

Homer

Juste

Lefevre d’Etaples

Lucian

Luther

Machiavelli

Major

Marguerite de Navarre

Marot

More

Nourry

Paul

Petrarch

Pico della Mirandola

Pliny the Elder

Plotinus

Queneau

Quintilian

Ramus

Ronsard

Saint-Gelais

Shakespeare

Tahureau

Tartareti

Tempete

Thenaud

Tiraqueau

Triboullet

Urquhart

Villon

Virgil

Wechel

Literary Figures and Devices

Allegory

Body, representations of

Colors

Coq-a-l’ane

Cornucopia

Encyclopedism

Eulogy, satirical

Topical List of Entries xxiii

Farce, elements of

Genealogies

Grotesque Realism

Hero

Humor

Imitation and Parody

Irony

Language

Letters

Lists

Menippean Paradox

Narrator, figure of

Novel

Prologues

Rhetoric

Satire

Scatology

Symbolic System

Trickster

Renaissance Culture and Civilization

Alchemy

Art and Architecture

Astrology

Calumny

Carnival


Clothes


Dreams

Economy, in Renaissance France

Emblems

Encyclopedism

Evangelism

Food

Fools and Folly

Games

Genealogies

Humanism

Italy

Judiciary

Knowledge

Law

Lyon

Money

Music

Neoplatonism

Papacy

Paris

Parlement

Petrarchism

Placards, affair of

Popular Culture

Printing

Religion

Renaissance

Scholasticism

Science

Social Class

Trent, council of

Turks

Texts and Books

Almanacs

Brief Declaration

Correspondence

Decretals

Disciple of Pantagruel

Dream of Pantagruel

Fifth Book

Fourth Book

Gargantua

Gargantuan Chronicles

Illustrations

Orlando Furioso

Pantagruel

Printing

Prognostications

Ringing Island

Third Book

Translations

Themes

Alterity or Otherness

Astrology

Calumny

xxiv Topical List of Entries

Charity


Cuckoldry

Death

Debts or Debtors

Dogs

Education

Food

Fools and Folly

Forests

Friendship

Genealogies

Giants

Golden Age

Grace and Free Will

Idleness

Marriage

Moderation

Money

Pantagruelism

Philautia


Reading, portrayal of

Religion

Skepticism

Social class

Thirst

Violence

Voyage

Warfare

Women

SMALLER CATEGORIES

Magic and the Occult

Alchemy

Astrology


Dreams

Enigmatic Prophecy

Hieroglyphs

Monsters

Prophecy and Divination

Medicine

Asclepiades

Galen

Hippocrates

Hotel-Dieu de Lyon

Medicine

Mercury

Plague

Syphilis

Navigation, Exploration, and Invention

Andouilles

Animals

Bringuenarilles

Cartier

Dindenault

Forests

Frozen Words

Geography

Lyon

Medamothi

Monsters

Nature

Pantagruelion

Paris

Physetere


Pliny the Elder

Printing

Ruach

Salmigondin

Science

Sporades

Tarande

Thalamege

Travel Literature

Utopia

Voyage

Reception, Influence, and Interpretations

Bakhtin


Critical Theory

Topical List of Entries xxv

Interpretations

Queneau

Reception and Influence, in France

Translations, Dutch and German

Translations, English

Religion

Beda

Briconnet

Bude

Calvin


Decretals

Evangelism

Grace and Free Will

Hell, depiction of

Heresy

Homenaz

Kabbala

Luther

Papacy


Reformation

Religion

Saints, imaginary

Saints, real

Sorbonne

Turks

Symbols and Symbolism

Allegory

Androgyne

Bottle, Divine

Clothes

Codpiece (Braguette)

Colors

Cornucopia

Emblems

Frozen Words

Hieroglyphs

Marrow and Marrowbone

Sibyl

Sileni

Symbolic System

Thaumaste

Wine

Community, Society, and Politics

Calumny


Charles V


Debts or Debtors

Dipsodes

Economy

Francis I

Friendship

Henry II

Judiciary

Law

Marriage

Moderation

Money

More

Panurge

Parlement

Picrochole


Social Class

Thalamege

Theleme

Utopia

Warfare

Exploring Otherness

Alchemy

Alterity

Andouilles

Androgyne

Animals

Astrology

Bacbuc

Badebec


Bringuenarilles

Carnival

xxvi Topical List of Entries

Cartier

Chicanous


Dreams

Fools and Folly

Geography

Giants

Grotesque Realism

Hell, depiction of

Jews

Loup Garou

Monsters


Nature

Physetere


Plague

Popular Culture


Ruach

Scatology

Sibyl

Sileni

Syphilis

Tarande

Travel Literature

Triboullet

Trickster

Turks

Violence

Voyage

Women

A

AGRIPPA, HENRY CORNELIUS, OF NET-

TESHEIM (1486–1535) One of the most elu-

sive figures of the Renaissance, Henry Cornelius

Agrippa of Nettesheim (Heinrich Cornelius

Agrippa von Nettesheim), a magus and skeptic

philosopher born near Cologne, is chiefly asso-

ciated by Rabelais scholars with Her Trippa, the

comic astrologer and cuckold in the Third Book

(3BK 25). The name of Her Trippa may in fact

be an amalgam of Agrippa and Trithemius, a

German occultist to whom Agrippa dedicated his

Of Occult Philosophy (De occulta philosophia

[1533]). Although the fictive character bears little

likeness to the real Agrippa, nearly all the divi-

nation methods with the aid of which Her Trippa

predicts that Panurge will be cuckolded, robbed,

and beaten by his future wife are listed in

Agrippa’s Of Occult Philosophy, a compendium

of Renaissance magic and occult sciences, and in

his equally well-known On the Vanity and Un-

certainty of Arts and Sciences (De incertitudine

et vanitate scientiarum et artium [1526]), a dec-

lamation denouncing all worldly wisdom. As

well as being an attack on the occult philosophy

of the magus, the unsympathetic portrayal of Her

Trippa could equally be seen as a rejection of

Agrippa’s support of love marriages—explicitly

denounced by Gargantua (3BK 48)—in Dec-

lamation on the Sacrament of Marriage (De sa-

cramento matrimonii declamatio [1526]).

Agrippa’s On the Nobility and Preeminence of

the Female Sex (De nobilitate et praecellentia

foeminei sexus [1529]) is also linked to the theme

of marriage and women in the Third Book. Ref-

erences to Agrippa’s works abound in the Third

Book, and Abel Lefranc claims that the two men,

both free thinkers who had sympathies for re-

formed ideas, may have met in Lyon or in Gre-

noble, when both took refuge from persecution

in Francois de Vachon’s household.

Readings: Jean Ceard, La nature et les prodiges.

L’insolite au XVIe siecle, en France (Geneva: Droz,

1977); Abel Lefranc, “Rabelais et Cornelius Agrippa,”

Melanges offerts a M. Emile Picot (Paris: Librairie Da-

mascene Morgand, 1913); Charles Nauert, Agrippa

and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought (Urbana: Uni-

versity of Illinois Press, 1965).

Agnieszka Steczowicz

ALCHEMY The pseudoscience of transform-

ing base metals into gold or other riches. Even

without evidence from the body of his work, we

can be relatively certain that Rabelais would

have been familiar with the practices of alchemy.

The process of extracting a precious substance

through the repeated heating and distilling of or-

dinary matter had been of interest since antiquity.

From ancient and Hellenic Greece through the

Islamic enlightenment a large body of technical

manuals, philosophical treatises, and occult lore

concerned with alchemy had passed into the six-

teenth century. By this time the practice had also

come under the influence of Christian Neopla-

tonism and had become associated with the re-

demption of fallen matter and transubstantiation.

Alchemy offered the promise of producing a fifth

essence, or quintessence, in the form of a pre-

cious metal or a life-giving elixir known as the

philosopher’s stone (pharmakon athanasias). Al-

though judging by satirical accounts of Chaucer,

Erasmus, Jonson, and others, one can surmise

that alchemy attracted charlatans who would prey

on gullible victims in search of a short cut to

wealth or longevity, the techniques of alchemical

transformation were, nevertheless, evolving in

the sixteenth century into the modern practices

of pharmaceutical medicine. Distilled substances

were thought to provide more effective medicinal

remedies than the more natural material medica

catalogued in medieval herbals. Rabelais would

2 Alcofrybas Nasier

have been familiar not only with the humbug of

alchemy but through his medical training, with

its legitimate possibilities.

References to alchemy are scattered through-

out the Five Books of Gargantua and Pantagruel

and appear in a variety of settings. In Book 5,

Pantagruel and Panurge arrive in a land of al-

chemy, the Kingdom of Quintessence or Land of

the Fifth Essence, and encounter a group of royal

abstractors. Some are drawing water from pum-

ice by pounding it in a marble mortar. A spodi-

zateur or metal oxidizer is extracting “farts from

a dead monkey” (GP 5BK 22; OC 5BK 23), and

Panurge becomes physically ill upon observing

another “putrefying a great potful of human urine

with horse dung” into a “sacred distillation” (GP

5BK 22; OC 5BK 23). Something of the same

mocking attitude is expressed through Panurge’s

extended justification for borrowing and spend-

ing in Book 3. Panurge argues that the human

body is a microcosm of an economic system

based upon credit borrowing and is analogous to

an alchemical furnace (see Debts or Debtors,

Praise of). In the human body base matter is

transmuted into blood, a restorative even greater

than any known by the alchemist, which in turn

lends itself to all parts of the body in order to

sustain life. Panurge incorporates the specious

arts of alchemy into his own specious justifica-

tion for self-indulgence. Moreover, the argument

is itself a parody of the alchemical model of the

universe in which microcosms form a complex

system of analogies (see Imitation and Parody).

Rabelais’s attitude is less clear, however, when

he offers alchemy as a metaphor for the produc-

tion of his own text. On the title page of both

Gargantua and Pantagruel and the end page of

Pantagruel, Rabelais refers to his persona, M.

Alcofrybas, as the “abstractor of the fifth es-

sence.” This suggests that the text is the end

product of an alchemical distillation. This im-

plicit claim is elaborated upon in the prologue to

Gargantua. The narrator compares his work to

a Silenus Box in which are contained “fine

drugs” which one might find in an apothecary’s

shop and which will cure digestion and provide

bodily comfort (see Sileni). In short, this text

possesses the curative powers of the philoso-

pher’s stone. The seriousness of this metaphor,

however, is undermined by the voice of this car-

nival barker hawking the text in the hyperbolic

language of the marketplace. Our uneasiness

over these claims is strengthened in the final

chapter of Pantagruel. The narrator asserts that

one should read his text for “mere amusement”

and nothing else. Bad readers are compared to

those who “rake through” the excrement of chil-

dren searching for the pit of a digested cherry so

that it might be distilled into “pomander oil.” If

one were searching for some magical panacea,

some nugget of truth hidden beneath the surface

of the narrative and revealed through exegetical

distillation, Rabelais would seem to suggest that

one would not find it here. “Never trust in men,”

he concludes, “who peer from under a cowl,” be

they academics, evangelists, or alchemists.

Readings: Roland Antonioli, Rabelais et la mede-

cine (Geneva: Droz, 1976); Carl G. Jung, Psychology

and Alchemy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press, 1968); Douglas McFarland, “Rabelais and Al-

chemy,” Rabelais in Context (Birmingham: Summa,

1993); Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to

Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance

(New York: Karger, 1982).

Douglas McFarland

ALCOFRYBAS (ALCOFRIBAS) NASIER

The first two of Rabelais’s five books were pub-

lished under the pseudonym of Alcofrybas Na-

sier. This anagram of Francois Rabelais was

wonderfully well suited to the character of the

works, with its combined suggestions of mysti-

fication and broad humor. The first syllable, Al-,

suggests a derivation from Arabic and hence a

deep knowledge of science, while “fry” and

“bas” have much more homely associations (fry-

ing, lowness). Nasier suggests noses (Latin na-

sus), a traditional subject for humor.

Maistre Alcofrybas first presents himself to us

(P prol.) as a trusted retainer of the Grandgou-

sier/Gargantua/Pantagruel royal family. He is

a kind of tame scholar, family historian, or

praise-singer: sometimes he describes events as

an eyewitness, and at others he cites written his-

tory, family documents, folk tales, or even ar-

chaeological remains as his sources. Rabelais

cheerfully defies consistent chronology, since

each generation of giants lives several hundred

years, but Alcofrybas, a human being, manages

to have known them all (for example, to have

Allegory 3

acquired inside information from Gargantua’s

nursemaids). On the title page of the second edi-

tion of Gargantua, the work is ascribed to

“l’abstracteur de quinte essence,” a phrase nor-

mally meaning an alchemist, and later title pages

make reference to “Maistre Alcofribas, abstrac-

teur de quinte essence,” but we do not see him

engage in any alchemical pursuits in the actual

story.

His function is to be a highly visible narrator,

to engage in imaginary disputes with the readers

(always imagined as a merry group of listeners),

and to provide ostensible evidence for the verac-

ity of the story. His language is a rich mixture

of learned, popular, and vulgar elements, with

recurring emphasis on wine and drinking.

On the title pages of the later books he is re-

placed by Maistre Francois Rabelais, but the

style of this new narrator, particularly in the pro-

logues, shares many features with that of Alcof-

rybas.

Readings: Dorothy Gabe Coleman, Rabelais: A

Critical Study in Prose Fiction (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1971); Gerard Defaux, “So-

phista loquitur: Rabelais et son masque comique,” ER

11 (1974): 89–135; Pierre-Paul Plan, Bibliographie ra-

belaisienne: les editions de Rabelais de 1532 a 1711

(Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1904).

Carol Clark

ALLEGORY The Renaissance inherited three

basic types of allegory from the Middle Ages.

First, the extended metaphor, such as Pilgrim’s

Progress or Le Roman de la Rose, consists of a

story (fabula) that represents another order of

meaning. For example, Guillaume de Lorris’s

Garden represents the attributes of his lady’s

beauty, and the Rose, her love, while Mr. Chris-

tian’s journey enacts the passage of the Christian

through life to salvation. Rabelais’s giants and

the multitude of symbols in his chronicles cor-

respond to this type.

Second, there is the exegetical allegory, de-

vised as an instrument to interpret the Bible. The

story (historia) is subjected to three or more in-

terpretative processes: allegory, or doctrinal ex-

tensions (quid credas—what you believe); tro-

pology, or moral considerations (quid agas—

what you do); and anagogy, the implications of

the story for salvation (quo tendas—where you

are heading). Rabelais indicates in the prologue

to Gargantua that this type of allegory is appli-

cable to his chronicles; and in the Third Book

prologue he hints that his wine is “living water”

like the Bible and that his works are to be inter-

preted in like manner.

The third traditional type of allegory is prefig-

uration, consisting of words and acts in the Old

Testament which, according to Christian theol-

ogy, prefigure the coming of Christ. From this

perspective, Moses leading the Israelites across

the Red Sea prefigures the action of Jesus in re-

deeming humanity. In Rabelais, the incidents of

the fabula look back in the person of the replicate

Christ, Pantagruel, to the acts of Jesus, partic-

ularly the forgiving of Panurge’s debts/sins

(3BK 5), the surviving of a storm (4BK 18–24),

and the overcoming of death (4BK 34). Rabe-

lais’s chronicles also look forward to the Second

Coming and the transcendence of humanity (e.g.,

the evocation of Armageddon in Gargantua and

the concatenation of marriages which signals the

Second Coming after the Bottle episode in the

Fifth Book).

To the aforementioned systems Rabelais adds

two more hierarchies implicit in the allegorical

tradition, the first of which is a movement from

the particular to the general: for example, in Gar-

gantua the Abbey of Seuilly is a part of Rabe-

lais’s environment in the fabula; at a higher level

of significance (allegory and tropology) the at-

tack on the Abbey represents the Sack of Rome

as indicated by the reference to the plague (G

45); and at the highest level (anagogy) the Abbey

is the Church on earth, assailed by the forces of

evil. The second system extension is Neoplatonic

and is based on the theory of emanation and re-

turn. (See Neoplatonism.) It is essential to an

understanding of the Third Book, the Fourth

Book, and the Divine Bottle episode in the Fifth

Book, followed by the return of the companions.

Within this system, Goodness, Truth, and Beauty

stream from the Divine and are replicated at the

levels of Intellect, Soul, and Matter, at each level

retaining the characteristics of the level above but

diminished until at the level of Matter the qual-

ities of the source are almost lost. This outward

movement is mirrored in an urge to return in love

up the stages of the emanation until fused back

into the Divine from which all derived. Human-

4 Allegory

ity, caught in the toils of Matter, is too self-

preoccupied to heed the longing for union with

the Divine unless started from its lethargy by one

of the four Frenzies: Madness (Triboullet [3BK

37–38, 45–46]), Drunkenness (Rabelais’s theme

of wine), Prophecy (e.g., the Sibyl, [3BK 16–

18]), and Love (cf. the marriage theme).

Rabelais’s chronicles are a virtuoso display of

allegorization. From Gargantua on, all episodes

contain a mixture of all these types, creating a

multilayered text carrying multiple meanings si-

multaneously. Often one level of text is paradox-

ically opposed to another. A relatively simple ex-

ample is the pilgrim episode in Gargantua (38,

45). At story level, the pilgrims are mistaken for

snails by Gargantua and eaten; they escape by

means of their staves but are nearly washed away

by the giant’s piss, following which they are

snared in nets, captured by Picrochole’s rabble,

and freed by Frere Jean who brings them into

the giant’s household. They are given a good ser-

mon by Grandgousier and sent on their way on

horseback with provisions for their journey.

Reform commonplaces—such as the literal

exegesis of Psalms which the story seems con-

trived to expose, superstition about saints, and

the uselessness of pilgrimages—are garnered

from the allegorical (doctrinal) and tropological

(moral) levels. But the pilgrims’ naıve attitude to

the Bible, which is ridiculed at the lower levels,

is affirmed and praised in the anagogy (pertain-

ing to salvation). The ignorance of these com-

mon folk exposes them to grave dangers in the

encounter with the new Church (Gargantua), but

they are saved and healed by their pilgrim’s

staves (bourdons), that is, by their faith. By their

faith they are saved from the consequences of

their ignorance or the river of piss, brought into

the communion of the true Church, and sent on

their way rejoicing.

Allegory has three principal purposes: to goad

the sincere searcher to penetrate below the sur-

face of the text, to exclude those who are un-

worthy from that same kernel of significance (see

the exclusions from Theleme and in the prologue

to the Third Book), and to give delight in the

solving of riddles. Paradoxes are frequent in Ra-

belais’s chronicles and a key tool in their deci-

pherment. To state the paradox is the first step to

solving the enigma. For example one of the keys

to Books 3, 4, and 5 is the paradox that marriage

is problematical for Panurge and proper for Pan-

tagruel.

Numerous signs point to the presence of alle-

gory. For example, the walls of Paris, constituted

of human genitalia (P 15), are revoltingly ob-

scene until it is noted that minds and ideas and

the interaction between them are a better defense

of what Paris stands for than inert stone. Simi-

larly, the brutal butchery effected by Frere Jean

at Seuilly is morally unacceptable. But when

seen as the unremitting combat waged against

evil by the Church, armed with a symbolic cross

and braquemard representing the “Sword of the

Spirit” or the Word of God, it becomes appro-

priate. The exegetical tradition within which Ra-

belais has chosen to create his text has rules to

guide the interpreter. Clear passages are used to

interpret difficult ones; Rabelais guides us to key

passages by small clues, which are often remote

from the episode they reveal: “Du passe je vous

delivre” (“I free you from your past” [3BK 5])

signals Pantagruel’s status as a replicate Christ;

the Y of 3BK 26 explains Pantagruel’s bizarre

naval strategy in 4BK 34; and the two appear-

ances of Gargantua’s little dog in the Third Book

direct the reader to the Book of Tobit, which de-

scribes the program of the Fourth and Fifth

Books. A triangle links the condemnation of fac-

tionalism in the 4BK Prologue 2 with the empty

words of the Island of Ennasin (4BK 9), the

death of the Physetere (4BK 34) and the Frozen

Words episode (4BK 55–56), inviting the atten-

tive reader to make comparisons and draw con-

clusions. Other episodes are grouped in proxi-

mate clusters around common topics and need to

be seen against each other to release their secrets.

Such is the group constituted by the Physetere,

the Isle Farouche, Papefiguiere and the Papi-

manes. As relationships between episode and ep-

isode are established, themes such as material-

ism, death, factionalism, and the fulfillment of all

things in time emerge, defining the structure of

the chronicles as understanding is deepened.

Studying Rabelais requires the “careful reading

and frequent meditation” which he counsels in

the prologue to Gargantua.

The principle of the Forest of Meanings is im-

portant. No single meaning is to be derived from

a biblical (and by analogy Rabelaisian) text. Ra-

Almanacs 5

belais says as much in the prologue to Gargan-

tua. Two powerful constraints on the interpretive

liberty suggested by this textual polyvalence,

however, are, first, the sensus germanus, or the

meaning that fits the context, requiring each part

to be interpreted as a function of the whole; and

second, Rabelais’s own contention that his “mys-

teries” are “living waters” to be read within the

context of his faith. Amid their baffling copia,

viewed by scholars such as Terence Cave as an

attempt to bamboozle the reader by offering false

paths that lead nowhere, and which ultimately

have no meaning, Rabelais’s chronicles hold for

other readers the allure of a coded and esoteric

text, which he intended to be deciphered by

“Gens de Bien” or right-minded initiates, while

erecting barriers against the arrogant and unwor-

thy. Indeed, for 450 years Rabelais’s allegories

have tempted people to seek la sustantificque

mouelle or marrow; and whether revealing or

concealing their meaning, they continuously ex-

emplify the dedicatory assertion (G) that “laugh-

ter is the characteristic of humanity” (“le rire est

le propre de l’homme” [G “To My Readers”]).

Readings: Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously

Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Al-

legorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Balti-

more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970); Terence

Cave, The Cornucopian Text (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1979); Henri De Lubac, Exegese medievale: Les

Quatre Sens de l’Ecriture, pt. 1, bk. 1, vol. 1 (Paris:

Aubier, 1959–64); John MacQueen, Allegory, Critical

Idiom Series (London: Methuen, 1970); Fred W. Mar-

shall, “Les symboles des allegories de Rabelais,”

BAARD 5.2 (1993): 86–102; Fred W. Marshall, “The

Allegory of Rabelais’ Gargantua,” AJFS 24.2 (1987):

115–54; Fred W. Marshall, “The Great Allegory,”

AJFS 26.1 (1989): 12–51.

Fred W. Marshall

ALMANACS (ALMANACHS) Widely con-

sulted calendars based on astrology and folklore,

almanacs constitute a medieval text that Rabelais

disparaged and yet copied. He composed a total

of five such works—three called almanacs and

the other two, prognostications—between 1533

and 1544. The Prognostications and Almanachs

reveal the unorthodox literary style and complex

philosophical grounding found in Rabelais’s Pan-

tagruelian chronicles for which he is better

known.

Ptolemy of the second century initially distin-

guished two facets of the science of astrology:

judicial astrology—that is, the prophetic qualities

of the heavenly bodies—and natural astrology,

or the study of their physical properties. Rabelais

was well versed in the latter category, and his

astronomical knowledge is demonstrated in his

single nonsatiric almanac of 1541. This two-page

work is distinctive from the others in that it con-

tains no prose but consists instead of an iconog-

raphy of zodiac signs indicating celestial

phenomena throughout the course of the year.

According to available historical evidence, only

two astronomical errors exist in this diagram. Ra-

belais’s satirization of predictive astrology was

most likely influenced by Pico della Miran-

dola’s fifteenth-century, twelve-volume opus en-

titled Arguments against Astrology.

Rabelais’s Pantagrueline Prognostication

(1533) is a concise six-page tract narrated by his

pseudonym Master Alcofrybas Nasier. Its intro-

duction and ten chapters treat the same topics

addressed in prophetic almanacs: the predomi-

nant sicknesses of the coming year, the most

fruitful crops, the fate of various countries, and

the coming meteorological conditions. The first

chapter succinctly sums up Rabelais’s objections

to claims of the prognosticators: “Whatever you

may be told by those crazy astrologers . . . don’t

believe that this year there will be any governor

of the universe other than God the Creator, Who

by His divine Word rules and moderates all . . .

not Saturn, nor Mars, nor Jupiter nor any other

planet, certainly not the angels, or saints, or men,

or devils, will have any virtue, efficacy, or influ-

ence, unless God, in His good pleasure, gives it

to them.” Rabelais guardedly excuses believers

of the almanacs as they may be dimwitted but

not malicious. The remainder of the text consists

of broad, whimsical truisms. The accumulation

of obvious conditions, along with the occasional

insult to narrow-minded scholars, makes for a

surprisingly funny text. In contrast to prophetic

almanacs, Rabelais’s parody foretells the future

of the lower classes rather than that of the pow-

erful or noble. Rabelais’s subsequent parodies

are much shorter. His final New Prognostication

for 1544 (Pronostication nouvelle pour 1544) is

6 Alterity or Otherness

an amalgam of vague prophecy and serious

study of lunar eclipses.

Composed during his first, and some would

claim finest, creative period, Rabelais’s almanacs

and prognostications have been overshadowed by

his longer and undoubtedly superior works. Ra-

belais was attracted to the medieval tradition as

a literary source while still critical of the igno-

rance of figures of medieval authority—notably

the Sorbonne theologians who themselves would

not categorically reject the claims of prophetic

astrologers. The composition of his almanacs al-

lowed him to simultaneously challenge lax the-

ological tenets and to expand his experimentation

with French prose.

Readings: Eugenio Garin, Astrology in the Renais-

sance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983);

Margaret Harp, “Francois Rabelais’s Almanachs,”

Halcyon 16 (1994): 223–34; Francois Rabelais, Pan-

tagrueline prognostication (1533), Almanach de 1533,

Almanach de 1535, Almanach pour 1541, Pronosti-

cation nouvelle pour 1544.

Margaret Harp

ALTERITY OR OTHERNESS The concept

of “alterity” or “otherness” originates in psycho-

analytical literary theory. Broadly speaking, in

the context of Rabelais it is the way in which a

dominant discourse constructs another (usually

subordinate) group or idea as being different

from itself by projecting its own fears, desires,

rejections, and frustrations onto it. Sexual, geo-

graphical, and ethnic differences are therefore not

so much represented as reconstructed from the

repressed and subsequently rediscovered experi-

ence of writer and reader. Recent criticism has

enabled Rabelais to be reevaluated in the light of

theories such as alterity, signaling a shift in crit-

ical interest away from debates that privileged

the importance of the rise of Protestantism. In

Rabelais, the encounter with the “Other” has

three primary manifestations: the Turk (Panta-

gruel), the discovery of the New World (Fourth

Book), and the representation of women

throughout the work. Feminist critics have used

the concept of “otherness” extensively to de-

scribe the position of the female reader. In his

first meeting with Pantagruel (P 9) Panurge al-

ludes briefly to his imprisonment in Turkey,

where we later (16) learn he was placed on a spit,

wrapped in bacon, and almost roasted alive be-

fore escaping. For Timothy Hampton, Panurge’s

escape shows the language difficulties experi-

enced by the Christian humanist community

when faced with cultural difference. The anec-

dote is peppered with elements that highlight

Panurge’s awareness of the differences between

Christians and Turks such as the continued

references to drinking wine and eating bacon.

Furthermore, the clear evidence of the Turks’

kindness and charity is negated by their trans-

formation from figurative to literal dogs at the

end of Panurge’s account, highlighting the dan-

gers of an overly reductive reading and revealing

the need to state a moral message that privileges

Christian values.

“Otherness” is also apparent in the marvels

and monsters represented in the strange world of

voyage and adventure in the Fourth Book. For

Kristeva, although it develops the theme of

travel, the Fourth Book does not so much de-

scribe the wonders of foreign lands as give shape

to the “excess” that originates in the dreams and

political conflicts of the reader’s world. Further-

more, Rabelais succeeds in provoking a sense of

strangeness and disquiet in the reader, which pre-

figure Freud’s work on the “Unheimliche” (un-

canny). Carla Freccero has explained how the

Haughty Lady of Paris’s resistance to Panurge

constitutes an “alien voice” in the text. Similar

observations can be made about other female

characters concerning the way in which they re-

sist description or are excluded from the narra-

tive. Freccero has also used “otherness” to elu-

cidate the particular problems experienced when

reading Rabelais’s text as a woman, when one

might be unable or unwilling to acquiesce with

the dominant ideological and narrative dynamics.

Readings: Carla Freccero, “Damning Haughty

Dames: Panurge and the Haulte Dame de Paris (Pan-

tagruel, 14),” JMRS 15 (1985): 57–67; Timothy

Hampton, Inventing Renaissance France: Literature

and Nation in the Sixteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cor-

nell University Press, 2001); Timothy Hampton,

“ ‘Turkish Dogs’: Rabelais, Erasmus, and the Rhetoric

of Alterity,” Representations 41 (1993): 58–82; Julia

Kristeva, Etrangers a nous-memes (Paris: Folio,

2001).

Pollie Bromilow

Andouilles 7

ANARCHE From the Greek a¬ narxoz (“with-

out authority”). King of the Dipsodes (the

“Thirsty”), who invade the Amaurotes in the

“Dipsodic Wars” (P 23, 25–32), leading to yet

another illustration of Pantagruel’s title of

“King of the Thirsty” on the title page. It is again

Panurge, however, whose initiative seals the fate

of the defeated “antiprince.” Whereas Pantagruel

treats the defeated army in a humane fashion,

even bringing a new “Golden Age” to the lib-

erated countries, Panurge, inspired by Episte-

mon’s account of the inverted destinies in the

underworld (P 30), is bent on humiliating Anar-

che by taking away his splendid clothes, marry-

ing him to an old repulsive woman, who will end

up beating her emasculated husband, and turning

him into a hawker of “green sauce” (P 31). Most

importantly, the symbolic killing of the bad ruler,

Panurge’s final victim in Pantagruel, foreshad-

ows the trickster’s own destiny in the Third

Book, where he, too, will sing the praise of the

“green sauce” in an effort to justify his bad man-

agement of the Castellany of Salmigondin (3BK

2). This praise will ultimately lead to the pivotal

and unconvincing paradoxical Praise of Debts,

the beginning of Panurge’s decline. The behavior

of Anarche’s wife will also come back to haunt

Panurge, as his main concerns are to be assured

that he will not be beaten or cuckolded by a fu-

ture wife. The trickster’s new clothes in the

Third Book provide an additional hint: as in An-

arche’s new garb, the predominant colors blue

and green (pers et vert) seem to indicate the di-

minished status of both characters. They no

longer fit in the respective “new worlds” and rep-

resent a ridiculed, perverted example of outdated

modes of ruling, thinking, and behaving.

Readings: Gerard Defaux, “De Pantagruel au Tiers

livre: Panurge et le pouvoir,” ER 13 (1976): 163–80;

Edwin Duval, “Anarche in Utopia: The Political Di-

mension,” The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel, ch. 5

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).

Bernd Renner

ANDOUILLES (CHITTERLINGS, SAU-

SAGES) Chapters 35–42 of the Fourth Book

are devoted to the Pantagrueline encounter with

the Andouilles. Literally tripe sausages, meta-

phorically andouille designates the phallus and/

or a fool. Probably because andouille is gram-

matically feminine, Rabelais’s warlike, phallic

creatures are all females, including Niphleseth,

their queen, whose Hebrew name means “phal-

lus.”

These creatures, hereditary enemies of Quar-

esmeprenant, attack Pantagruel’s company,

mistaking them for their foe. An earlier peace

treaty between Quaresmeprenant and the An-

douilles was frustrated when Quaresmeprenant

refused to accept the “Boudins saulvaiges” (“sel-

vaticques”) and the “Saulcissons montigenes”

(4BK 35) as allies of the Andouilles. Alban

Krailsheimer identifies the boudins or blood sau-

sages as inhabitants of the Black Forest; Bucer’s

adherents, the saulcissons or large sausages as

the Swiss, or Zwingli’s adepts; Quaresmepren-

ant, as Charles V. The Andouilles, he believes,

are Lutherans: Rabelais chose to represent them

as tripe sausages after witnessing the intrafaith

conflict at Schmalkalden. (Schmal � narrow �

Kaldaunen � small intestines or tripe � an-

douilles). The carnal hordes are revealed as the

Protestants allied against the emperor.

Barbara Bowen and Walter Kaiser show that,

although the struggle resembles the traditional

battle between Lent and Carnival, neither side

represents Lent or Carnival unequivocally. The

Andouilles are compared with eels, Lenten food,

and Quaresmeprenant presents certain traits com-

mon to Carnival.

Pantagruel’s ships, after defeating the Physe-

tere, land on the Isle Farouche, where they cel-

ebrate a thanksgiving banquet. Rabelais’s ban-

quets can generally be interpreted as informal

masses. During the “second service,” Pantagruel

sees Andouilles climbing a tree near the “retraict

du guobelet,” the tabernacle where the Chalice is

kept. They are observing Pantagruel’s style of

celebrating the Eucharist, the sacrament causing

the greatest friction between Christian factions.

The Andouilles attack and are winning until

Frere Jan and the cooks appear on the battlefield

in a huge Truye (sow), a tanklike vehicle like the

Trojan horse, containing two hundred combat-

cooks (note the similarity between Troie/Troye

and Truye). The Andouilles are decimated.

Arriving in time to save them is the deity and

source of all Andouilles, “un grand, gras, gros,

8 Androgyne

gris pourceau”: a gigantic winged hog, whose

wings and eyes are red, ears green, teeth yellow,

tail black, transparent feet, and a collar bearing

the motto “HUS ATHENAN, a pig teaching Mi-

nerva” (4BK 41). This absurd figure comes from

“la Transmontane,” across the mountains. For

Rabelais in Lyon, these would be the Alps: the

flying hog could be flying from Wittenberg. If

Andouilles are Lutherans, their “deity” and

source would be Martin Luther, characterized

as a hog in the opening sentence of Pope Leo

X’s Bull of excommunication, Exsurge Domine:

“Arise, O Lord, and judge thy cause. A wild boar

has invaded thy vineyard.”

The red, green, yellow, black, and transparent

colors of the pig (named Mardigras) are iden-

tified with precious stones: eyes like rubies, ears

like emeralds, teeth like topazes, tail like Lucul-

lian marble, feet like diamonds. These colors and

stones contain religious symbolism: ruby � di-

vine love, emerald � hope, diamond � faith,

black stones and the color black � penitence and

humility. Topaz (yellow) is an antivenom, per-

haps an antidote for Luther’s invective. Thus, the

hog incarnates faith, hope, charity, the cardinal

virtues, plus resistance to poison—spreading

twenty-seven barrels of mustard over the battle-

field. This mustard acts as a healing and resur-

recting balm for the Andouilles—their

“sangreal” (holy or royal blood—another Eucha-

ristic metaphor). However, mustard is a common

Rabelaisian and contemporary symbol for fecal

matter. The number 27 is a composite of 9s (the

number for theology, as seen in Dante): 27 is 9

� 3; 2 � 7 � 9. Rabelais lampoons Lutheran

theology as “mustard.”

The Andouilles have Mardigras in common

with Pantagruel’s company, whose password is

also Mardigras—both parties accept and partici-

pate in bodily life and its pleasures. However,

the Andouilles represent a fleshly extreme; the

Pantagruelistes embody moderation.

Readings: Barbara C. Bowen, “L’Episode des An-

douilles (Rabelais, Quart Livre, chapitres XXXV–

XLIIII), esquisse d’une methode de lecture,” Cahiers

de Varsovie 8 (1981): 111–26; Barbara C. Bowen,

“Lenten Eels and Carnival Sausages,” L’Esprit crea-

teur 21 (1981): 12–25; Edwin M. Duval, “La messe,

la cene, et le voyage sans fin du Quart Livre,” ER 21

(1988): 131–41; Walter Kaiser, Praisers of Folly:

Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1963); Alban Krailsheimer,

“The Andouilles of the Quart Livre,” Francois Ra-

belais: Ouvrage publie pour le 4e centenaire de sa

mort, 1553–1953 (Geneva: Droz, 1953); Robert Mar-

ichal, “Rabelais et les censures de la Sorbonne,” Le

Quart livre de 1548, ER 9 (1971): 138–41; Florence

M. Weinberg, “Strates de prose emblematique: L’Isle

des Andouilles,” Rabelais et les lecons du rire (Or-

leans: Paradigme, 2000): 181–93.

Florence M. Weinberg

ANDROGYNE The first use in French litera-

ture and the only direct reference to the Andro-

gyne in the works of Rabelais occurs in the de-

scription of the badge on young Prince

Gargantua’s hat (G 8). Rabelais refers the

reader to the myth of the Androgyne as it is

found in Plato’s Symposium and creates his own

variant Androgyne for the prince’s device. The

ideal reader presumably recalls that Plato’s orig-

inal Androgynes are Janus-faced, gender-marked

combinations specifically precluded from carnal

union: Plato explains that after they were parted

at the belly Zeus “turned the parts of generation

round to the front for this had not always been

their position, and they sowed the seed no longer

as hitherto like grasshoppers in the ground, but

in one another” (Symposium 191). Rabelais’s

changes are deliberate. He turns the heads 180

degrees so that they look at, not away from, each

other and turns Plato’s gendered figure into one

with “deux culz” (“two pairs of buttocks”). This

now apparently copulating Androgyne is to be

combined with the badge’s Pauline motto, “car-

itas non quaerit quia sua sunt” (“charity seeketh

not her own” [1 Corinthians 13.5]), given only

in Greek.

Some critics consider Rabelais’s Androgyne to

be just another comic obscenity. But Gargantua’s

device, a defining hieroglyphic self-representa-

tion, the other half of which is Pauline, invites

interpretation. A device was personal, its visual

element hieroglyphic, so that only properly tuned

minds would understand. The difficulties critics

have had with Gargantua’s Androgyne speak to

its hieroglyphic nature as does Rabelais’s choice

to present the motto only in Greek, which in

Animals 9

1535 was a way of severely limiting those who

could interpret the badge. The altered head po-

sition has been seen as a reference to Marsilio

Ficino’s treatment of love as a first step toward

the contemplation of the Divine; the heads gaze

at one another in order to rise to the Idea of

Beauty and beyond, toward God, toward the time

when we will be able to contemplate the Divine

face to face (1 Corinthians 13.12), although Fi-

cino’s commentary (4.3) dismisses the physical,

and nothing suggests that Rabelais was influ-

enced by Ficino.

A solution that follows from Schwartz,

Screech, Masters, and others is that Gargantua’s

Androgyne is intended to evoke marriage, to

join Plato and Moses (Genesis 2.24: “erunt duo

in carne una”) to show “human nature at its mys-

tic beginning” (G 8). On Gargantua’s hat, along-

side the badge, there is a “grande plume bleue,

prinse d’un Onocrotal” (“a big blue feather taken

from an onocrotal”), the strange name veiling the

nature of the bird, a kind of pelican, just as the

Greek letters do the message of charity on the

badge. The pelican, thought to feed its young

from its breast, was a symbol of charity. As a

marriage impresa, a statement of what one in-

tended to do, the badge is not controversial. The

young prince will one day marry—Pantagruel,

published two years earlier, put this beyond

doubt, and the place given to marriage in the

Third Book is worth recalling here. Marriage

may also be understood in a figurative sense: the

young prince will embrace, cleave to, his evan-

gelical Christian faith, based on the principle of

charity; as a ruler, he will be married to his peo-

ple, as Christ did the Church, and as the Christian

faithful espouse Christ. Taken in the broadest

sense, image and motto together, the badge lays

forth a program appropriate for the young prince.

Readings: Guy Demerson, Francois Rabelais

(Paris: Fayard, 1991); G. Mallary Masters, “Rabelais

and Renaissance Figure Poems,” ER 8 (1969): 58–68;

Marian Rothstein, “Gargantua: Agape, Androgyny and

the Abbaye de Theleme,” FF 26.1 (2001): 1–19; Mar-

ian Rothstein, “The Mutations of the Androgyne: Its

Functions in Early Modern France,” SCJ 34.2 (2003):

407–34; Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London:

Duckworth, 1979); Jerome Schwartz, “Scatology and

Eschatology in Gargantua’s Androgyne Device,” ER

14 (1977): 265–75; Jerome Schwartz, “Gargantua’s

Device and the Abbey of Theleme: A Study in Ra-

belais’ Iconography,” YFS 47 (1972): 232–42.

Marian Rothstein

ANIMALS The standard definition of “ani-

mal” for Rabelais is based on Aristotle’s “that

which moves by itself” (GP 5B 26; OC 5BK 25),

or that which is inhabited by an “animus,” soul.

The boundary between human and nonhuman an-

imals is thus fluid, as many of Rabelais’s tales

witness. The “Turkish dogs” in Pantagruel 14

who are both insulted Turks and actual dogs, the

liveryman called Malicorne in the Fourth Book

(3) who returns to Gargantua with three licornes

or unicorns, and the fables of metamorphosis in

the Third Book (3) all evoke a metamorphic

world of transformation—linguistic or literary—

between human and animal. The moving roads

(GP 5B 26; OC 5BK 25) are also declared to be

animals, as are the trees of the Isle des Ferre-

ments (Toolmaking Island [5BK 9]). Ongoing

teratological debates also influence many of Ra-

belais’s animal scenes—Gargantua’s mare is

certainly a monster both in its size and appear-

ance. For our purposes, we will limit ourselves

here to the common modern understanding of

“animal.”

Animals are both a theme and an important

narrative tool in the Rabelaisian corpus. Their

representations and functions are as multifaceted

as the texts themselves. Rabelaisian animals can

be quotidian, exotic, monstrous, fantastic, bibli-

cal, fabled, literary, or scientific, vacillating be-

tween realism, improbability, and pure fantasy.

This constant variety and permeability is not only

at the heart of Rabelais’s conception of nature,

but is also a reflection of the diversity and con-

tradictions of the discourses on animals in the

sixteenth century. Rabelais seems to delight in

the narrative possibilities offered by the conflu-

ence of different systems of zoological knowl-

edge, and tales of animals, that characterize his

period. For in the sixteenth century, animal lore

(pagan and Christian) and authoritative classical

texts coexist with humanistic textual criticism

and a spirit of experiential enquiry. It would be

simplistic to present sixteenth-century zoology as

an abandonment of medieval “fables” in favor of

10 Animals

a new rationalism, or as a clean transition from

textual authority to direct observation. Rather,

the animal world was for a long time understood

and interpreted with varying ideological struc-

tures: rational-observational, theological, classi-

cal, teratological, occult. Rabelais’s animal world

is refracted through all of these lenses.

Classical zoological works were widely avail-

able in sixteenth-century France, including Ar-

istotle’s treatises on animals and Pliny’s Natural

History, although sometimes subject to chal-

lenges based on direct observation. Also widely

read were Christian moralizing treatises on the

animal world, such as the Natural Mirror of Vin-

cent de Beauvais or the many bestiaries. Tera-

tological texts from antiquity to Ambroise Pare

were frequently reprinted. In the second quarter

of the sixteenth century, there was an increased

philological interest in animals, and attempts

were made to bridge the cognitive gap between

Latin zoological vocabulary and observed reality

by providing glossaries or dictionaries: for ex-

ample, Charles Estienne’s On Greek and Latin

Names of Trees, Fish . . . (1536). This etymolog-

ical quest is an important component of Rabe-

lais’s animal world: the physetere (4BK 33–34)

is, among many other things, an exploration of a

neologism from Pliny.

The 1550s—the decade of Rabelais’s Fourth

and Fifth Books—was a landmark decade for the

publication of vernacular natural history works,

many in French: Conrad Gesner’s encyclopedic

Histories of Animals (first volume 1551); Pierre

Belon’s History of Strange Seafish (1551) and

History of the Nature of Birds (1554); and Guil-

laume Rondelet’s On Marine Fish (1554). A

voyage to the Near East prompted Pierre Gilles

to write a New Description of the Elephant

(1562), which the compiler of the Fifth Book al-

most certainly read. Another important develop-

ment was the influence of accounts of New

World voyages, in which creatures were de-

scribed whose very existence was nowhere pos-

ited in classical texts: Andre Thevet, The Sin-

gularities of Antarctic France (1558). All of

these works often relied heavily on classical

sources, while also challenging or adding to them

to some degree (see Travel Literature).

Rabelais’s animals are often dialogic sites for

these varying systems of knowledge. A letter

from Pantagruel to his father accompanying the

gift of the Tarande and three unicorns chal-

lenges Pliny’s assertion that no man has ever

seen a live unicorn (4BK 4). (It is typical of Ra-

belais that the “new” information is by no means

less dubious than the old!) At the climax of the

Dindenault episode, the narrator assures us that

Aristotle (4BK 8) affirms the stupidity of sheep

(4BK 8). The fauna of the Pays de Satin (5BK

29) forms a veritable compendium of contem-

porary zoological knowledge, opinions, and leg-

ends. A description of elephants that borrows

from Pliny is also used to refute Pliny and Ar-

istotle on the question of elephants’ joints; a con-

temporary debate on whether tusks were horns or

teeth is also evoked. Yet the discourse of direct

observation is only one of many discourses that

compete cacophonously for space. The animals

of this country are, for example, all made of tap-

estry but are nevertheless invoked as evidence

against the opinions of those who have only seen

such creatures “in the land of tapestry.” De-

scribed as being “just like” familiar animals “ex-

cept for” some more or less incredible difference,

these creatures—like the Tarande (4BK 2), a sort

of reindeer-moose with chameleonlike proper-

ties—are suspended indefinitely in the Rabelai-

sian imaginary between worlds, discourses, and

knowledges.

Animals provide comic effect, often obscene—

the goslet “torchecul” or arse-wipe (G 13), the

fable of the fox and the lion (P 15)—or used as

a measure of gigantism, for example, Pantagruel

eating cows and a bear (P 4), or Gargantua’s

mare drowning Picrochole’s men in her urine (G

36). Fantastic or monstrous animals also provide

some of Rabelais’s most biting satire: the An-

douilles (4BK 35–42) or the Siticine birds (5BK

2).

Contemporary accounts of travel to the New

World influence the descriptions of animals in

the Fourth and Fifth Books. The sightings of fly-

ing fish (4BK 3), almost a cliche of New World

travel writing, are mentioned by many explorers,

from Jacques Cartier to Jean de Lery. Panta-

gruel’s gift to his father of the Tarande and three

unicorns (4BK 4) reflects the common practice

of European explorers sending exotic beasts back

to their kings with instructions on how to tend to

their needs. Like many animals in reality, the An-

Aristotle 11

douilles that were sent to the king of France via

Gargantua (4BK 42) die owing to a change of

climate and diet.

A certain pragmatism is involved in the use

made of some animals in the Fourth Book. The

Gozal or homing pigeon (4BK 3) allows political

news to fly across the world faster than is pos-

sible with a boat. Even the physetere (4BK 33–

35), which partakes not so much of contempo-

rary travel accounts as of long-standing literary

and biblical traditions, is gutted and dissected, its

kidneys harvested and declared “most useful” for

profit. Consideration of ways in which animals

could be profitable was rather novel in zoological

works. Rabelais is up to date with contemporary

debates and even anticipates them: in Rome,

three years after the publication of Rabelais’s

fourth book, Olaus Magnus will insist in his His-

tory on the utility of certain animals to human-

kind, including whales, considered both highly

dangerous and useful.

Rabelais’s baffling animal world may be read

as a metaphor for Rabelais’s own conception of

his “monstrous” and hybrid text, a reading en-

couraged by Rabelais himself: the prologue to

Gargantua describes the exterior of the Sileni as

painted with fantasy animals such as harpies and

flying goats. And in the prologue to the Third

Book, the narrator frets about scaring his read-

ers in the same way that Ptolemy of Egypt

shocked his subjects by presenting them with a

Bactrian camel. As well as serving as sources of

comedy and satire and as vehicles for the pres-

entation of multiple discourses, animals, then, are

also coterminous with the “ugly surface” of Ra-

belais’s text, whose amusing aspect hides the se-

rious hidden content.

Readings: Marie Madeleine Fontaine, “Une Narra-

tion biscornue: Le Tarande du Quart Livre,” Poetique

et narration: Melanges offerts a Guy Demerson, ed.

Francois Marotin and Jacques-Philippe Saint-Gerand

(Paris: Champion, 1993): 407–27; Bernard M. Henry,

“Sur la jument de Gargantua,” BAARD 2 (1969): 244;

Laurent Pinon, Livres de zoologie de la Renaissance,

une anthologie (1450–1700) (Paris: Klincksieck,

1995); Lazare Sainean, L’histoire naturelle et les

branches connexes dans l’œuvre de Rabelais (Paris:

Champion, 1921); Verdun-Louis Saulnier, Rabelais

dans son enquete. Etude sur le “Quart” et le “Cin-

quieme” livre (Paris: SEDES, 1982); Paul J. Smith,

“Aspects du discours zoologique dans le Cinquiesme

Livre,” ER 40 (2001): 103–14; Marcel Tetel, “Le phy-

setere bicephale,” Writing the Renaissance (Lexington,

KY: French Forum, 1992); Florence Weinberg, “Lay-

ers of Emblematic Prose: Rabelais’ Andouilles,” The

Sixteenth Century Journal; Journal of Early Modern

Studies 26.2 (1995): 367–77.

Louisa Mackenzie

ANTIPHYSIE See Physis and Antiphysie

ARIOSTO See Orlando Furioso

ARISTOTLE (384–322 B.C.) Although Plato

is more in evidence in Rabelais’s works, the

French author shares the traditional view that Ar-

istotle was the “paragon of all philosophy, and

first among men” (GP 563; 5BK 19), and Aris-

totelian thought patterns inevitably suffused his

writing. Aristotle’s emphasis on man’s natural

desire for knowledge which opens the Meta-

physics seems to have appealed to him (Alman-

ach pour l’an 35), and he gives prominent place

to “Rire est le propre de l’homme” (G ded.), or

“laughter is the characteristic of humanity.” Ar-

istotle is depicted sympathetically, carrying a

lantern and “watching, examining, and writing

everything down” (GP 5BK 31; OC 5BK 30).

Rabelais often refers to him directly (everywhere

except in Pantagruel) and indirectly, ranging

over most of the corpus, especially the Organon,

the Problems, the scientific works, the Politics

and the Ethics, appealing to him as an authority,

for example, on natural history (GP 5BK 30; OC

5BK 29), meteorology (4BK 17), physiology

(eleven-month pregnancies [G 3], the insatiabil-

ity of women [3BK 27], the origin of sperm

[3BK 31]), optical questions (G 10), and meta-

physics (Entelechy, GP 5BK 19; OC 5BK 18).

The references are at times purely facetious, such

as a nonexistent text on the art of invisible writ-

ing (G 1) or Gargantua’s assertion that the prob-

lem of the freshness of a young girl’s thighs is

not to be found in his works (G 39); and even

when they are real and pertinent, the learning is

rarely to be taken seriously. In spite of Rabelais’s

knowledge of Greek, he was working from Le-

fevre d’Etaples’s translation, compendia such as

Erasmus’s Adages, or secondary authors such as

Andre Tiraqueau. Moreover, his knowledge of

12 Art and Architecture

Aristotle often comes from the scholastics whom

he has studied deeply and whom he despises, and

he does not seem particularly affected by the

neo-Aristotelianism of his day.

Readings: Gerard Defaux, Rabelais agonistes: Du

rieur au prophete. Etudes sur Pantagruel, Gargantua,

Le Quart livre (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Alban J. Krailsh-

eimer, Rabelais and the Franciscans (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1963); Jean Plattard, L’oeuvre de Ra-

belais (Paris: Champion, 1967).

Peter Sharratt

ART AND ARCHITECTURE Rabelais wrote

at a moment of artistic transformation in France

that saw the building, decoration, and furnishing

of royal and princely chateaux in a classical man-

ner derived from Italy, and, in painting, the es-

tablishing of the School of Fontainebleau, with

the arrival of Rosso (1530) and Primaticcio

(1532). Rabelais’s friendship with Philibert de

l’Orme, “grand architecte du roy Megiste” (4BK

61), responsible for Chambord and Anet, and

with Guillaume Philandrier, pupil and friend of

Serlio and editor of Vitruvius, gave him direct

access to the latest architectural thinking. He also

became increasingly interested in the ancient art

and antiquities of Egypt and of Rome. The list

of the ruined temples, obelisks, pyramids, mon-

uments, and tombs on the Isle des Macreons

(4BK 25) reflects exactly the contemporary artis-

tic ethos. Rabelais includes painting and sculp-

ture in the school curriculum (at a time when

they were still considered to be sordid and me-

chanical arts) and advocates that pupils should

visit craftsmen’s workshops (G 24). He was also

interested in the applied arts, writing knowled-

geably and copiously about furniture (G 55), cos-

tume (G 8 and 56), jewelry and precious stones

(G 8, 56; 5BK 38, 42), silverware (4BK 13), mo-

saics (GP 5BK 38–40; OC 5BK 37–39) and tap-

estry (4BK 2, 4; GP 5BK 24, 30, 31; OC 5BK

23, 29, 30).

In his architectural descriptions Rabelais is

resolutely modern. He first links Theleme with

Bonnivet, now destroyed, and in 1542 adds the

names of Chambord and Chantilly, all still in the

process of building, with traditional elements and

much fantasy. The Temple of the Divine Bottle

with its marble staircase, automatic doors, its tes-

sellated pavement of precious stones, with cor-

responding mosaics in the emblemature over the

door, and in the vaulted ceiling, and the fantastic

fountain, is derived in part from Francesco Co-

lonna’s Dream of Polyphilus (Hypnerotomachia

Poliphili [Venice: Aldus, 1499; Paris: Kerver,

1546]). The ceiling mosaic of Bacchus’s battle

with the Indians shows Rabelais’s use of ec-

phrasis coupled with the enargeia or vivid rep-

resentation characteristic of such a visual writer,

as does his account of the Pays de Satin in

which the reader enters the marvelous world de-

picted in tapestries (GP 5BK 30–31; OC 5BK

29–30). He was concerned, too, with optical the-

ories of the effects of light and color (“Une

Lampe admirable,” GP 5BK 41; OC 5BK 40).

Rabelais often refers to commonplaces about

classical art: Polycletus’s perfect statue (GP 5BK

42; OC 5BK 41), Zeuxis’s painting of grapes

pecked at by birds (GP 5BK 38; OC 5BK 37),

Daedalus capturing movement in sculpture (4BK

50), Heliogabalus’s feast of painted and sculpted

food (GP 5BK 31; OC 5BK 30), and Apelles’s

and Aristides’s choice of impossible subjects

(“tonnerres, esclaires, fouldres, ventz, Echo, les

meurs et les espritz” [GP 5BK 40; OC 5BK 39]).

Elsewhere, in describing what Panurge and his

companions bought on Medamothi, Rabelais

refers to imaginary and impossible paintings

(4BK 2), among which were canvases of Charles

Charmois who worked at Fontainebleau, Saint-

Maur-les Fosses, and Anet, a rare allusion to a

contemporary painter. Architecture, archaeology,

sculpture, and the decorative arts were more to

Rabelais’s taste.

Readings: Jean Guillaume, “Le ‘Manoir des The-

lemites’: Reve et Realites,” Rabelais pour le XXIe sie-

cle, ed. Michel Simonin (Geneva: Droz, 1998); Mir-

eille Huchon, “Theleme et l’Art Stenographique,”

Rabelais pour le XXIe siecle, ed. Michel Simonin (Ge-

neva: Droz, 1998); Antoinette Huon, “Alexandrie et

l’Alexandrisme dans le Quart Livre: L’escale a Me-

damothi,” ER 1 (1956): 98–111; Paul J. Smith, Voyage

et ecriture. Etude sur le Quart Livre de Rabelais (Ge-

neva: Droz, 1987) (originally in Neophilologus, 70

[1986]: 1–12).

Peter Sharratt

ASCLEPIADES Ancient doctor who, in ad-

dition to extolling the therapeutic benefits of

wine and passive exercise, reformed traditional

Astrology 13

Hippocratic theoretical practice and devised a

physical theory used to explain all biological

phenomena in uniformly simple terms. Although

none of his texts survive, Rabelais gained knowl-

edge of Asclepiades by way of other Greek au-

thors including Galen and Pliny the Elder, who

give testimony to the value of his theories. Ech-

oing Galen’s belief in the need for doctors to be

in good health themselves in order to heal others,

Rabelais uses Asclepiades as a model in the pro-

logue to the Fourth Book. The passage relates

Asclepiades’s pact with Good Fortune that, as a

doctor, his reputation should stand on the ex-

ample of his own health—required to be excel-

lent from the time any physician begins practic-

ing medicine until he breathes his last breath.

This was the case for Asclepiades, who died

without ever being ill, at a ripe old age following

an unfortunate fall from a tower. Aside from this

biographical anecdote, the true value of Ascle-

piades’s theory for Rabelais lies in the manner in

which he promotes the positive virtues of wine.

Knowing this theory as he did, our Renaissance

doctor could in good conscience promote the cy-

cle of thirst, drink, and satiation—all in good

moderation—as natural, normal, and necessary

to the maintenance of human health.

Reading: J. T. Vallance, The Lost Theory of Ascle-

piades of Bithnya (New York: Oxford University Press,

1990).

Lesa Randall

ASTROLOGY A distinction between “astron-

omy” and “astrology” did exist during Rabelais’s

time, and a vigorous debate arose about the va-

lidity of “astrology.” Nonetheless, until the mid-

dle of the seventeenth century, most astronomers

accepted the validity of at least some astrological

prediction, the words “astronomy” and “astrol-

ogy” were often used interchangeably, and the

more important distinction was between “natural

astrology” and “judicial astrology.” Natural as-

trology dealt with the weather and medicine. It

was the most successful means of predicting the

weather in the sixteenth century. Rabelais was

trained as a physician and would have studied

astrology as part of his medical training because

most physicians believed that the heavenly bod-

ies influenced both individual and public health.

They believed that the birth chart, or horoscope,

gave crucial information about the physical and

emotional constitution of the patient; they studied

the heavenly bodies to know when to administer

certain treatments, to predict the course of a dis-

ease, and to predict and explain the occurrence

of epidemics. Judicial astrology involved trying

to describe specific personal characteristics and

to predict specific human events from the heav-

enly bodies. Most opponents of astrology were

motivated primarily by religious reasons: astrol-

ogy interfered with divine providence and human

free will, and it provided a secular explanation

for phenomena that some would have preferred

to attribute to divine retribution for human sin-

fulness. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Dis-

putations against Judicial Astrology (1494), the

most widely discussed work against astrology,

was motivated by the religious belief in an ab-

solute contradiction between human free will and

astrological prediction.

In Gargantua’s letter to Pantagruel, Rabelais

suggested that the humanist education should in-

clude astronomy but should leave off judicial as-

trology (P 8). Rabelais’s disapproval of divina-

tion is shown when Thaumaste, an expert in

reading signs including those of astrology, is

bested by the obscene gestures of Panurge (P

19). It is further underscored through much of

the Third Book as Panurge consults various peo-

ple about the possibility of his being cuckolded

in marriage. Her Trippa consults Panurge’s

horoscope among other forms of divination, both

real and fabricated by Rabelais; he concludes

from the horoscope that Panurge will not only be

cuckolded but also robbed and beaten by his wife

and get the pox to boot, but Her Trippa does not

know that he himself is a cuckold (3BK 25). Ra-

belais’s Pantagrueline Prognostication (1533) is

an extended satire of astrological divination in

almanacs. But in his satires Rabelais showed fa-

miliarity with the specifics of astrological predic-

tion even as he mocked it. He also published al-

manacs, possibly every year, though only four

survive, and the almanac for 1541 gives serious

advice to physicians about the best times to per-

form various medical procedures during the year.

Furthermore, his Pantagrueline Prognostication

suggests that the problem with astrological prog-

nostication is that people trust in it rather than

trusting in God. Thus, Rabelais rejected judicial

14 Astrology

astrology, at least partly for religious reasons, but

accepted natural astrology.

Readings: G. Mallary Masters, Rabelaisian Dialec-

tic and the Platonic-Hermetic Tradition (Albany: State

University of New York Press, 1969); Dene Scoggins,

“Wine and Obscenities: Astrology’s Degradation in

the Five Books of Rabelais,” Paracelsian Moments:

Science, Medicine, and Astrology in Early Modern Eu-

rope, ed. Gerhild Scholz Williams and Charles D.

Gunnoe, Jr. (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University

Press, 2002): 163–86.

Sheila J. Rabin

B

BACBUC The last fifteen chapters of the Fifth

Book depict Rabelais’s heroes, who in the Third

Book decided to visit the Oracle of the Divine

Bottle to receive the “mot” or “word” within the

temple itself, which is described at length and

from a Bacchic perspective. Their initiatress is

“the princess Bacbuc, lady in waiting of the Bot-

tle, and pontiff of all mysteries.” She has them

drink from the fantastic fountain, which trans-

forms the taste of wine according to the drinker’s

imagination. After dressing Panurge in sacra-

mental habits, making him execute a series of

ritual gestures and sing a Bacchic ode (repre-

sented in the text as verses in the form of a bot-

tle), and pronouncing conjurations in Etruscan,

she invites him to receive the “word” of the sa-

cred bottle (“garbed in pure crystal, half im-

mersed in the water of a fine alabaster fountain”)

and casts a spell that causes the water to boil.

Bacbuc then interprets the word of the bottle,

“trinch,” as an “oracular word, celebrated and

understood by all nations, which to us means

“drink” (GP 5BK 46; OC 5BK 45): for drink

rather than laughter is the “propre de l’homme”

(G ded.)—or “the characteristic of humanity”—

in this work.

The character Bacbuc, whose name is taken

from the Hebrew word for “bottle,” only appears

in Rabelais’s work in the second part of the Fifth

Book, which corresponds to the second series of

sketches for that volume, and in the Fourth Book

of 1552, where she is identified with the Bottle

itself. In the title of chapter 1 in the 1552 version

of the Fourth Book (“How Pantagruel Set Sail to

Visit the Oracle of the Divine Bacbuc”), in con-

trast to the 1548 edition, Rabelais substituted the

term “Bacbuc” for “Bottle” and added a refer-

ence to “the oracle of the Divine Bottle Bacbuc.”

The term “Bacbuc” is glossed in this way by

Rabelais in the Brief Declaration of Some of the

Most Obscure Terms Contained in the Fourth

Book, added to the 1552 edition of the Fourth

Book: “Bacbouc. Bottle. In Hebrew also used for

the sound it makes when emptied.” This defini-

tion, which assimilates Bacbuc with the Bottle,

may be compared to the Thesaurus by Sante Pag-

nino published by R. Estienne in 1548 and to the

definition given in the French-Latin Dictionary

of R. Estienne in 1539: “The Hebrews call a bot-

tle “Bacbuc,” and it seems that Bacbuc and bou-

teille (“bottle”) are nomina ficta a sono quem edit

lagena quando depletur inversa” (“the names

created from the sound a flask produces when

being emptied out when upside down”).

The Bottle and Bacbuc designate the same per-

son; however, in the Fifth Book the Bottle and

the priestess Bacbuc are very distinct. Since the

second part of the Fifth Book was drafted con-

temporaneously with the Third Book, we can sur-

mise that Rabelais was not familiar with glosses

of this word in 1548.

In fact in the Fifth Book, it would appear that

Rabelais introduces additional glosses of Bacbuc.

The idea of the bottle’s immersion in water was

probably borrowed from Reuchlin, who in his De

rudimentis hebraicis (1506) supplies the follow-

ing definition: “A hard or brick-colored (testa-

ceum) vessel that is almost throat-shaped, taking

its name from the sound heard when it is im-

mersed in water.” Further, the textual reference

to boiling water may derive from the explanation

of R. Estienne in his Dictionnaire francoislatin

(1539): “Bottle or bubble which rises up on the

water, especially when it rains.”

Marie-Luce Demonet has suggested parallels

between the end of the Fifth Book and the Sefer

ha-baqbuc ha-navi, the Book of the Prophetic

Bottle, a Jewish Provencal parody of the four-

teenth century, attributed to the philosopher Levi

ben Geron. This book, intended to be read during

16 Badebec

the period of Jewish carnival, plays upon the

words Habakuk (a book of the Bible) and ha-

baqbuc (“bottle”), and “is founded upon a

mystico-carnivalesque conception of wine.”

Readings: Michel Bastiaensen, “L’hebreu chez Ra-

belais,” Revue belge de Philologie et d’histoire, 46

(1968): 725–48; Marie-Luce Demonet, “Le nom de

Bacbuc,” RHR 34 (1992): 41–46.

Mireille Huchon

BADEBEC Wife of Gargantua, mother of

Pantagruel. Her name, derived from the Gascon,

means “wide-open mouth,” reflecting her role in

the text as a receptacle to carry Gargantua’s

child. Badebec appears in the work briefly in

Pantagruel in the two chapters (2–3) that de-

scribe her pregnancy, Pantagruel’s birth, and her

resulting death. These events seem inextricably

linked in the narrator’s mind. Badebec’s impact

on the narrative is minimized by the fact that her

death is announced in the same sentence in which

she is first mentioned. Throughout the episode,

her presence in the text is eclipsed because her

experience is exploited as a way to affirm the

importance of the male protagonists. The narrator

presents her death as an inevitable consequence

and confirmation of Pantagruel’s prodigious size.

Badebec is seen as devoid of specific character-

istics: she herself does not speak, and the details

of her death are not recorded, whereas the text

retains the words spoken by the midwives in re-

sponse to Pantagruel’s birth. Similarly, Gargan-

tua’s grief at his wife’s death is quickly replaced

by joy at his newborn son.

Readings: Francoise Charpentier, “Un Royaume qui

perdure sans femmes,” Rabelais’s Incomparable

Book: Essays on His Art, ed. Raymond La Charite

(Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986); Jefferson

Humphries, “The Rabelaisian Matrice,” RR 76.3

(1985): 251–70.

Pollie Bromilow

BAISECUL AND HUMEVESNE This epi-

sode forms one of Pantagruel’s exploits in Paris

where he completes his education and achieves

fame for a variety of reasons, in this instance by

solving a lawsuit whose complexities have de-

feated the most exalted French legal brains. Ra-

belais exploits the theme in various ways. First,

it links with his satire of scholasticism, whose

outdated methods and authorities fail to equip the

Parlement for its task. Second, it facilitates a

positive statement for humanist jurisprudence via

Pantagruel who, arraigning the conseilliers et

docteurs for their wrong approach, insists spe-

cifically that the litigants address the court in per-

son rather than have their case assessed through

documents, and generally that good legal exper-

tise is based on classical philology and philoso-

phy, not medieval ignorance. The points are sup-

ported by Du Douhet, a member of the panel of

experts, but one clearly identifiable as a human-

ist, whereupon four donkey-loads of paperwork

are burned and the parties invited to speak for

themselves. Here the textual modality changes,

since the two speeches that follow (by Baisecul

as plaintiff and Humevesne as defendant), al-

though mostly composed of comprehensible

words, are deliberately made incoherent in the

way the words are put together. As a result, the

lawyers’ perplexity becomes, at a literal level,

entirely justified. Must the reader not agree that

“We have heard indeed, but—in the name of the

devil!—we certainly haven’t understood” (P 13;

GP 174)? Pantagruel’s reaction, however, is not

to prosecute the satire, but rather to enter into

the same linguistic game as the two parties in-

asmuch as Rabelais has exploited the theme to

his satisfaction in previous chapters. Pantagruel

declares the issue to be less complex than the

assembled authorities have declared. Then he

takes a couple of turns around the room, appar-

ently deep in thought, before delivering a judg-

ment no clearer than the two previous speeches

and using a broadly similar register. The ruling

satisfies both lords, not inconceivably because it

exempts them legal costs. Meanwhile, the assem-

bled experts all swoon in ecstasy at Pantagruel’s

apparent brilliance, before being revived with

vinegar and rose water.

Rabelais’s readers have a strategic choice in

this episode. They may understand it as an alle-

gory of his theories on law, which supported

Guillaume Bude’s historical approach and at-

tacked the traditional mos italicus. In that case

the speeches become irrelevant nonsense into

which Rabelais has inserted various encoded ref-

erences (for example, to the Gallican policies of

various French kings). They may alternatively

see the satiric material as merely preluding a

Bakhtin, Mikhail 17

piece of theatrical farce consonant with the

traditions of the basoche, whereby court proce-

dures become distorted parodies of themselves,

as here a judge crowns gibberish with gobble-

dygook and is lionized for his triumph. Further

options reside in the way one assesses the main

figures. Are Baisecul and Humevesne to be con-

demned for perverting language when they

speak (and perhaps for wasting the court’s time

in mounting a preposterous case), or are they to

be celebrated as clowns proficient in the coq-a-

l’ane? Pantagruel is, to be sure, the fulcrum of

the episode, but is he playing a game with his

audience, is he mocking the two participants, is

he adversely infected by their logorrhoea, or does

he really understand the case on their level and

in their terms? After all, he does fully satisfy

them, though one does not know precisely why.

Such intentional gaps as that effacing Panta-

gruel’s thoughts (before delivering sentence, is

he actually reflecting “deeply” [“bien profunde-

ment, comme l’on povoit estimer”]?) are crucial

to Rabelais’s technique. One reads as one

chooses, provided other readings are granted ap-

propriate respect.

Readings: Gerard Defaux, Rabelais agonistes (Ge-

neva: Droz, 1997); Claude Gaignebet, A plus hault

sens, vol. 1 (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1986);

John Parkin, “Comic Modality in Rabelais: Baisecul,

Humevesne, Thaumaste,” ER 18 (1985): 57–82; Fran-

cois Rigolot, “The Highs and Lows of Structuralist

Reading: Rabelais’s Pantagruel, cc. 10–13,” Distant

Voices Still Heard, ed. John O’Brien and Malcolm

Quainton (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,

2000); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London: Duck-

worth, 1979).

John Parkin

BAKHTIN, MIKHAIL (1895–1975) Mikhail

Bakhtin’s monograph on Rabelais, translated into

English as Rabelais and His World, was first

published in the West in 1968, a mere seven

years prior to its author’s death. Yet it comprises

a reworking of a thesis presented over twenty

years previously to the Moscow Gorky Institute

and on which he had been working as far back

as the late 1930s. Bakhtin aimed to revolutionize

Rabelais studies by laying bare the popular roots

of his humor, which, though ill understood in all

periods since his own, stemmed from a centuries-

old spirit of opposition to the fixed social and

ideological hierarchies of the Middle Ages, and

which reached its apex in the communal festivi-

ties of Carnival and the literature of the Ren-

aissance, where it penetrated high culture for the

last time. As revealed in his comic verbal crea-

tions, his adaptation of popular pageants, and his

vulgarity, especially the comic exploitation of the

body’s lower organs (stomach, buttocks, and

genitals) rather than the higher (heart and brain),

Rabelais’s sense of humor was significant for

combining negative derision with positive cele-

bration in an ambivalent matrix of creativity and

destruction equally apparent in the comic coun-

terculture of the people, but lost to a modernity

whose humor was predominantly satiric. Previ-

ous analyses of Rabelais’s work had either con-

centrated on his ideas rather than his humor, or

else had reduced that humor to a mere facetious-

ness devoid of philosophical meaning. Though

never denying it, Bakhtin diminished the signif-

icance of Rabelais’s humanist awareness, seeing

the key to his work as the “culture of the market

place and of folk laughter.” His contribution to

Rabelais studies (which in fact extends beyond

Rabelais and His World) was thus deliberately

controversial and has even been interpreted as an

allegorical attack on the Stalinist repressions to

which he himself fell victim.

Admirers have praised its originality, its im-

mense range and imaginative power, together

with an infectious force of argument that suc-

ceeds even in translation: the Rabelais has been

seen as Bakhtin’s finest book. Opponents have

criticized the paucity of his detailed apparatus,

his question-begging assumptions about the pop-

ular spirit, his relegation of Rabelais’s human-

ism, including his erudite wit, to secondary im-

portance, and a bland disregard of historical

theories countering his own. In fact, these theo-

ries have disproved much of Bakhtin’s sociology.

For instance, the carnival was for him the ex-

pression of the people’s indomitable and rebel-

lious free spirit as reflected in numberless pas-

sages where Rabelais presents violent and

taboo-breaking comic scenes and converts norms

into a grotesque travesty of those norms. It tends

now to be considered not as an implicit rebellion,

but as a subtle means whereby the authorities

contained rebellion. In addition and to an extent

18 Bakhtin, Mikhail

accordingly, carnival events and performances

were created less by a general populace acting

spontaneously in riotous disorder than by specific

groups drawn particularly from the aspiring mid-

dle classes who perpetuated set traditions of an

essentially conservative nature.

The debate has deep philosophical implica-

tions concerning humor’s very nature, but, that

controversy notwithstanding, Bakhtin studies,

both within and without the Rabelaisian context,

continue to expand in range and quality. His key

errors are perhaps two. First in identifying Ra-

belais’s humor as an epitome of that of the peo-

ple at large, he insists that it is a virtually unique

blending of two comic modes: satiric attack and

comic celebration. In fact, these modes, though

different in kind, combine with varying degrees

of stability in writers of almost any period (Ra-

belais’s included)—hence, Bakhtin’s own ex-

amples which, despite his argument, spread back

from the Renaissance to ancient Greek drama

and forward into twentieth-century fiction. Sec-

ond, he appears to confuse a state of mind (the

carnival spirit, which does imply complete lib-

eration, “contrary to all existing forms of . . . or-

ganization” [Rabelais and His World 255]), with

a social reality, namely, the actual events of car-

nival, which fit far more ambiguously into the

political life of Rabelais’s times than Bakhtin can

bring himself to admit. Parodic humor such as

that invested in Panurge may thus defy respon-

sibility toward God and his church, king and

country, womanhood and the family, friendship

and the very duties of self-respect, but the actual

behavior of real clowns, jesters, and actors was

far more restrained and ritualized than his. Were

it not so, then the pre-Lenten and other holidays

enjoyed in traditional society would have in-

volved not merely a relaxation of various restric-

tions and sanctions, but the entire collapse of or-

der. License is not anarchy.

Consequently, Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais has

been judged utopian and idealistic, even atypical

of the main trend of his thinking which is ques-

tioning and dialogic rather than assertive and pre-

determined: the associated debate remains lively

among his students and followers. At the same

time, his detailed readings of various comic ep-

isodes (two examples among many are the Pi-

crocholine War in Gargantua and the Basche

sequence of the Fourth Book) achieve a richness

and complexity seldom matched elsewhere. He

identifies the positive implications of Rabelaisian

scatology (as in, say, the walls of Paris episode

in Pantagruel, or Gargantua’s invention of the

arse-wipe). He reexamines to great effect the role

and adaptation of folk rituals in Rabelaisian fic-

tion (the arrivals of the giants in Paris are but

one case in point), and the mocking of his own

status as author, which has misled so many in

their tedious reexaminations of the “sustantif-

icque mouelle” or marrow symbol and is easily

explained via Bakhtin’s notion of comic ambiv-

alence and desacralizing humor. Rabelais, here

in dialogue with himself, considered nothing too

exalted to be spared comic transformation—not

the sacred texts of the Bible, not the highest civil

or religious authorities, not his personal friends

or objects of serious study, and not the very work

he was himself producing.

Given Bakhtin’s insistence that all fruitful dis-

course be to some degree dialogic, and the fact

that he was constantly revising his own conclu-

sions and perspectives, it is more than appropri-

ate that his approach and conclusions be ques-

tioned, even radically. Although detractors still

abound, the reinsertion of dialogism and pluri-

vocity into Rabelais studies has led to interesting

advances. Among many instances, one may cite

the importance of discussion in the humanist ed-

ucation of Gargantua, the dialogic cast of mind

apparent in Rabelais’s mentor Erasmus, carni-

valesque interpretations of Theleme (which

Bakhtin actually excludes from study), Michel

Jeanneret’s notion of the noninterpretability of

scenes like the Gaster episode where the au-

thor’s imagery defies the narrator’s allegory, and

finally the importance of good company, in some

ways Rabelais’s entire message, and clearly the

means by which Panurge, that amiable devil and

rambling idiot, may be wholeheartedly re-

deemed.

Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His

World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 1968); Michael Baraz, Rabelais et la joie de la

liberte (Paris: Corti, 1983); Richard M. Berrong, Ra-

belais and Bakhtin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska

Press, 1986); Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist,

Beda, Noel 19

Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1984); Michel Jeanneret, Le Defi des signes (Or-

leans: Paradigme, 1994); Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s

Carnival (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1990); John Parkin, Interpretations of Rabelais (Lew-

iston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002).

John Parkin

BASCHE (4BK 12–15) Panurge recounts the

story of Lord Basche in the Fourth Book, chap-

ters 12–15. In this episode, the fat prior of Saint-

Louant sends the Chicanous (or Chiquanous) to

harass the nobleman. Basche subverts the system

by creating a ruse—when the Chicanous arrive,

Basche’s household is pretending to hold a wed-

ding celebration. As part of the festivities, guests

playfully hit each other. The Chicanous partici-

pate and end up being severely beaten, and each

time a new one returns, he receives an even

greater drubbing. It has been hypothesized that

the real-life Lord Basche was Rene du Puy from

Indre-et-Loire and that the prior was Jacques Le

Roy. This episode can be seen as a critique of

the contemporary harassment of the nobility by

members of the clergy, although Pantagruel and

Epistemon express reservations about Basche’s

methods (see 4BK 16). The description of Bas-

che’s actions represents the first use of the term

tragicomedy in French (4BK 12), consisting of

five acts: In Act I, preparations are made for the

farce; in Act II, the first Chicanou arrives and is

beaten; Act III is an interlude with a story about

Francois Villon’s punishment of a stingy prior;

in Act IV, a second Chicanou arrives and is

beaten; Act V concludes with a Chicanou, along

with his witnesses, being severely beaten.

Readings: Mireille Huchon, ed., Oeuvres completes

de Francois Rabelais (Paris: Gallimard, 1994); Robert

Marichal, “Rene Du Puy et les Chicanous,” BHR 11

(1949): 129–66.

E. Bruce Hayes

BEDA, NOEL (c. 1470–1537) A scholastic

theologian and leader of the Paris Faculty of The-

ology, Beda was born in Picardy (northern

France), received an M.A. at the University of

Paris circa 1492 and a doctorate in theology in

1508. A protege of the Flemish theologian Jan

Standonck, who reformed the College de Mon-

taigu in Paris for the purpose of producing dis-

ciplined clergy to reform the Church, Beda suc-

ceeded Standonck in 1504 as principal. Montaigu

flourished under his direction (pace Erasmus’s

colloquy “A Fish Diet” [1526]). After writing

three books in 1519–20 against humanist biblical

exegesis, Beda proposed reviving the office of

syndic in the Paris Faculty of Theology to im-

prove its ability to deal with controversial issues

and was elected to it. For the next fifteen years

he implemented a policy of censorship and re-

pression of reformers and humanists, arguing that

the humanists’ opposition to scholastic theology

and their philological approach to the Vulgate

Bible gave aid to heretics. Rabelais (P 7) satirizes

Beda as the author of De optimate triparum (On

the Excellence of Tripe). One author sees Rabe-

lais’s character Picrochole as, at a symbolic

level, a depiction of Noel Beda. The Parlement

of Paris allied itself with Beda and the Faculty

to form a conservative party that opposed re-

formers, humanists, and the tolerant stance of

King Francis I (who forbade the sale of Beda’s

Annotationes [1526] against Erasmus and Le-

fevre d’Etaples). Undaunted, Beda led a Faculty

censure of Erasmus and published his Adversus

clandestinos Lutheranos (1529). Beda’s opposi-

tion in 1530–31 to the French king’s support for

King Henry VIII’s annulment, his campaign in

1533 to silence the preaching of Gerard Roussel

(a protege of the king’s sister Marguerite), and

his judicial suit challenging the right of Francis’s

lecteurs royaux to use biblical texts in their

Greek and Hebrew lectures led to his exile in

1535 to Mont-Saint-Michel (Normandy), where

he died on January 8, 1537.

Readings: Walter Bense, Jr., “Noel Beda and the

Humanist Reformation at Paris, 1504–1534” (Ph.D.

diss., Harvard University 1967); Walter Bense, Jr.,

“Noel Beda’s View of the Reformation,” Occasional

Papers of the American Society for Reformation Re-

search 1 (1977): 93–107; James K. Farge, “Beda,

Noel,” Biographical Register of Paris Doctors of The-

ology (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Stud-

ies, 1980): 31–36; James K. Farge, Orthodoxy and Re-

form in Early Reformation France. The Faculty of

Theology of Paris, 1500–1543 (Leiden: L. J. Brill,

1985); Jean Larmat, “Picrochole, est-il Noel Beda?”

ER 8 (1969): 13–25; Erika Rummel, Erasmus and His

20 Body, Representations of

Catholic Critics II: 1523–36 (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf,

1989).

James K. Farge

BODY, REPRESENTATIONS OF A subject

matter that constitutes the basic framework of the

whole of Rabelais’s novels and figures in many

Renaissance works. The sixteenth century is

widely regarded as a period that engendered reas-

sessments in all fields of learning. Correspond-

ingly, humanist physicians amplified the anatom-

ical teachings bequeathed to the Renaissance

from antique sources (Aristotle, Hippocrates,

and Galen), to produce a more accurate repre-

sentation of human anatomy, one based on the

practice of dissection. The publication of such

works as A Short Introduction to Anatomy (1522)

by Jacopo Berengario da Carpi and On the Fab-

ric of the Human Body (1543) by Andreas Ve-

salius led to radical changes in the teaching of

medicine that challenged Galenism and assured

the dominance of this new anatomical science.

As a physician, known for his participation in

early anatomical dissections, Rabelais demon-

strated a medical and anatomical interest in the

body, which he readily transferred to his writ-

ings.

Representations of the body are omnipresent

in all four authentic books of Rabelais’s writings,

where they revolve around an imaginary family

of giants. Although many of these representa-

tions incline toward scatological or epistemolog-

ical musings delivered in hyperbolic form, all ex-

hibit rather remarkable forms of physicality.

Rabelais was fond of incorporating corporeal

themes such as birth, death, growth, deforma-

tion, dismemberment, castration, mutilation, out-

rageously monstrous figures, giants, and other

purely delusory bodies. In addition to exploiting

these bodily images for comic effect, Rabelais

frequently linked the passages to satire of the

scholastics, or employed them to expose contem-

porary political, philosophical, or religious dis-

putes.

In his Gargantua (G 3, 6) where the themes

of birth and the growth of giants prevail, Rabe-

lais presents physiological reflections on a pre-

posterous birth, which occurs not through the

conventional bodily orifice but instead through

the left ear. This parturition, occurring only after

eleven months, offers Rabelais the opportunity to

expose such contemporary debates as the ques-

tion of the length of a pregnancy, in order to

ascertain the legitimacy of a child. In subsequent

chapters, the alimentary, digestive, and excretory

routines of the young Gargantua’s body are ex-

amined. Self-absorbed in the physicality of child-

hood activities, the young prince is seen drink-

ing, eating, defecating, and urinating (G 11).

Elsewhere, he is observed searching, by trial and

error, for the perfect torche-cul or “arse-wipe” (G

13), in an episode linked to intellectual devel-

opment and satire of scholastic argumentation.

In the opening chapters describing Panta-

gruel’s birth (P 1–2), Rabelais continued to focus

on gigantification and on the genetic mutation

that engendered the race of giants. Clearly, Ra-

belais was inspired by the wide popular interest

in giants circulating in the early sixteenth cen-

tury, which included Annian (Giovanni Nanni,

1432?–1502), notions of the antediluvian giant

Noah, and other pseudohistories, including those

of Jean Lemaire de Belges.

Elsewhere in his Pantagruel, Rabelais devel-

ops a favorite corporeal leitmotif in a passage

focusing on bodily orifices and lower bodily

functions as he provides an example of a death

as irrational as the birth of Gargantua. In the

well-known passage, Panurge uses excrement as

a curative medicine in reattaching Epistemon’s

decapitated head (P 30). This combat injury had

allowed Epistemon to glimpse life in a postmor-

tem underworld “workhouse” and to return with

a report. In another episode noted more for its

political and philosophical implications than for

its sexual innuendos, female body parts are con-

sidered as potential building material as Panurge

discourses on his fantasy of rebuilding the walls

of Paris using women’s genitals (P 15). Gener-

ally, the female body is not physically visible in

Rabelais’s work but commonly appears as mis-

cellaneous sexual parts, as distortions of nature,

or in debates on the humanness of females.

The list of material bodily images found in

Rabelais’s work might be expanded with ease.

With its more learned discourse devoted to mar-

riage and reproduction, the Third Book exposes

a carnivalesque succession of monsters, fools,

oddities, and anomalies. In the more pessimistic

Fourth Book, the theme of death returns. By

Briconnet, Guillaume 21

means of an anatomical inquiry that elucidates

Renaissance anatomical and medical practices,

Rabelais performs a postmortem dissection of a

monstrous figure named Quaresmeprenant

(4BK 29–32).

Scholars have noted that the body Rabelais

represents in his writing, whether it be celebrated

or denigrated, is quintessentially grotesque and

open rather than classical and closed. To be sure,

Rabelais often relied on his extensive range of

bodily representations to reflect the cultural, po-

litical, and religious assumptions of his time and

to appeal to the diverse readers for whom the

books were ultimately destined.



Press, 1968); Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival;

Text, Context, Metatext (Berkeley: University of Cal-

ifornia Press, 1990); Anne Lake Prescott, Imagining

Rabelais in Renaissance England (New Haven, CT:

Yale University Press, 1998); Walter Stephens, Giants

in Those Days (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,

1989).

Karen Sorsby

BOTTLE, DIVINE OR HOLY (DIVE BOU-

TEILLE) Oracular goal of Panurge’s matri-

monial quest in the Fourth and Fifth Books.

Seeking to know whether he should marry and,

if so, whether his wife will be faithful, Panta-

gruel’s roguish companion consults a variety of

expert opinions to no avail. He does attribute

meaning, however, to the empty bottle—origi-

nally a gift of wine from Panurge to his visitor—

that the fool Triboullet hands back to him (3BK

45). While Pantagruel interprets this gesture as a

sign that Panurge’s wife will be a drunkard, the

prospective bridegroom instead sees the bottle as

a referent to the Dive Bouteille, an oracle that

promises to resolve his matrimonial quandary

with a transcendent “mot” or “word” (3BK 47).

Located in Cathay in upper India (4BK 1), the

Bottle has the same ambiguous connotations that

are present in the narrator’s previous allusions to

drink: if on one hand it seems inscribed within

the Christian tradition, recalling the wine and

word of Christ, the drinking vessel also conjures

up images of Bacchic furor and everyday drunk-

enness. Lending its form in the Fourth Book to

the insignia on Pantagruel’s ship (4BK 1), the

Bottle is finally revealed by the priestess Bacbuc

in the Fifth Book: and its long awaited “word,”

proffered in response to Panurge’s bottle-shaped

incantation, is the ambiguous directive to

“Drink!”

Readings: G. Mallary Masters, “The Hermetic and

Platonic Traditions in Rabelais’ Dive Bouteille,” SI 10

(1966): 15–29; G. Mallary Masters, Rabelaisian Dia-

lectic and the Platonic-Hermetic Tradition (Albany,

NY: State University of New York Press, 1969); Ray-

mond Mauny, “La Dive Bouteille et autres boutilles a

vin,” BAARD 3 (1973): 23–26; Flora Samuel, “Le Cor-

busier, Rabelais and the Oracle of the Holy Bottle,”

Word and Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry,

17.4 (2001): 325–38; Florence Weinberg, The Wine

and the Will (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,

1972).


BRICONNET, GUILLAUME (1470–1534)

Bishop of Meaux who was a prominent figure in

the evangelism movement in France. From a

family of top diplomats and high-placed church

officials, Guillaume Briconnet began his career

with a position at the Cour des Comptes (Court

of Auditors) of Parlement and as the bishop of

Lodeve. In 1507, he was named as abbot of Saint

Germain des Pres. The ecclesiastical vocation

seems to have called to him with more insistence,

for he put enormous energies into reforming the

abbey during his tenure there. A skillful diplo-

mat, Briconnet participated in church councils

and was sent as an envoy to the Pope. His efforts

to press the French position during the final

stages of the Concordat of Bologna gained him

the respect and trust of the powerful. He was

consequently named bishop of Meaux (1515) and

began his reforms anew.

During Briconnet’s time, few high-ranking

church officials remained in their dioceses, pre-

ferring a comfortable life at court. Thwarting

convention, the new bishop of Meaux took up

residence in Meaux. Leading by example, he en-

couraged his parish priests to do the same. He

denounced clerical depravity, promoted those

with a taste for learning, and created official

posts for preachers. Briconnet’s vision of reform

was a complete program that touched the people,

places, and things around him.

Briconnet garnered support from the French

22 Bridoye

court for his reforms. Letters to his protector

Marguerite de Navarre show a sensitive spiri-

tual guide. As he glosses Bible passages for his

royal correspondent, the sacred text springs to

life; each verse gains meaning for personal de-

velopment and the establishment of a relationship

with God through Christ. But Briconnet’s reform

did not apply only to the well heeled. The bishop

of Meaux gathered a vibrant, erudite group,

known as the “Circle of Meaux,” by inviting

Guillaume Farel, Lefevre d’Etaples, Gerard

Roussel, Francois Vatable, and Michel d’Arande

to assist him. Along with a dynamic intellectual

life, Briconnet nurtured service and spiritual ste-

wardship in his diocese. Preaching formed the

core of his program, but he also fought the Fran-

ciscans who responded with accusations of her-

esy.

Briconnet offended partisans of the status quo

and encountered resistance. The Sorbonne itself

attacked the Circle of Meaux through the censure

and inquisition of his old friend Lefevre

d’Etaples. The fragile equilibrium of the

forward-looking group could not last in a climate

of growing unrest, and a clampdown dispersed

the Circle of Meaux in 1525 (see also Religion).

Readings: Philippe Auguste Becker, “Les idees re-

ligieuses de Guillaume Briconnet, eveque de Meaux,”

Revue de theologie et des questions religieuses de

Montauban (1900): 318–58, 377–416; Guillaume Bri-

connet and Marguerite de Navarre, Correspondance

(1521–1524), 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1975–79); Lu-

cien Febvre, Le cas Briconnet: idee d’une recherche

(Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1945); Henry Heller,

“Marguerite de Navarre and the Reformers of Meaux,”

BHR 33 (1971): 271–310; Michel Veissiere, Autour de

Guillaume Briconnet (1470–1534) (Provins: Societe

d’histoire et d’archeologie, 1967); Michel Veissiere,

L’eveque Guillaume Briconnet (1470–1534): contri-

bution a la connaissance de la Reforme catholique a

la veille du Concile de Trente (Provins: Societe

d’histoire et d’archeologie, 1986).

Amy C. Graves

BRIDOYE An aging provincial judge, desig-

nated by Pantagruel as a representative of legal

learning to counsel Panurge (along with the the-

ologian Hippothadee, the doctor Rondibilis, and

the philosopher Trouillogan) on the question of

whether or not to marry (3BK 29, 36, 39–44).

What qualifies Bridoye for this role is presuma-

bly his extraordinary judicial record: of the more

than four thousand sentences he has handed

down over his long career, all have been found

equitable and none has ever been overturned on

appeal. Bridoye is unable to perform the advisory

function intended for him, however, because he

has been arraigned by the regional Parlement (the

“Parlement Myrelinguoys en Myrelingues”) on

charges that he handed down an inequitable sen-

tence against a certain Toucheronde. Questioned

by the president of the Parlement, Bridoye re-

veals that in his forty years on the bench he has

always sentenced by throwing dice, without ever

troubling to learn what is at issue in any of the

cases he has adjudicated. This astonishing reve-

lation creates a judicial dilemma for the Parle-

ment and its president, Trinquamelle: should Bri-

doye be condemned for his obvious judicial

incompetence, or should he be acquitted for his

remarkable record of equitable judgments? The

episode ends with a moving plea for pardon by

Pantagruel, and some highly contrived specula-

tions by Epistemon about the way Providence

may have intervened in Bridoye’s throws of the

dice.

Bridoye’s long, rambling testimony is one of

Rabelais’s greatest comic tours de force. Choked

with hundreds of highly technical references to

real statutes in civil and canon law and veering

constantly into irrelevant digressions, anecdotes,

and banalities, Bridoye’s speech brilliantly rep-

resents the self-satisfaction of a falsely learned

fool. Over the course of four dense and difficult

chapters (39–42) Bridoye flaunts an immense le-

gal learning while revealing that he understands

nothing at all of the law, citing at every turn laws

and legal tags that he consistently misinterprets

and misapplies. Bridoye’s most obvious and

comical failing is his naive literalism. For ex-

ample, he understands the common legal expres-

sion “alia judiciorum” (the risks and hazards of

litigation) literally to mean the “dice” with which

judges are required to arrive at their “judgments,”

and the principle that “semper in obscuris quod

minimum est sequimur” (obscure laws must al-

ways be interpreted and applied conservatively)

to mean that cases involving lots of paperwork

should be decided by small dice rather than large

dice. Such gross misinterpretations are comical

Brief Declaration 23

instances of an excessive respect for the letter of

the law at the expense of the spirit of the law.

Modern scholars have interpreted Bridoye in

very different ways. For some, Bridoye is merely

an incompetent fool. For others he is a “fool in

Christ” whose recourse to dice is a pious means

of deferring to God’s providential judgment. In

this disagreement much hangs on the legitimacy

of resorting to dice in judging and on Episte-

mon’s favorable view of Bridoye’s manner of

doing so. There is in fact solid legal authority for

casting dice in undecidable cases where convic-

tion and acquittal would be equally justified. Bri-

doye himself cites (without understanding) many

authentic laws on this subject, but the cases he

decides do not meet any of their criteria for re-

course to dice. Nor does his method correspond

to the one supposed by Epistemon. His use of

dice cannot therefore be viewed as legitimate in

itself.

And yet because Bridoye’s method of judging

has inexplicably resulted in a perfect record of

good sentences, it is impossible to say that he is

guilty of malfeasance. It would seem that the

problem of interpreting Bridoye is precisely the

point of the episode and that Bridoye’s impor-

tance lies less in his methods of judging than in

the dilemma he poses as an object of judgment.

This dilemma is highlighted by Trinquamelle’s

perplexity at the end of the hearing, and even by

Bridoye’s own name. “Oison bride” (“bridled

gosling”) was a common sixteenth-century ex-

pression for a “silly goose” or a fool. A “bride-

oie” (“goose bridler”) would therefore be a

maker of fools, a confounder of the wise who

defies the judgment even of Trinquamelle and the

areopagites of Myrelingues. Pantagruel’s solu-

tion to the aporia of Bridoye is to transcend it.

In recommending pardon rather than acquittal,

the hero refuses to judge altogether, preferring to

forgive rather than condemn the failings of a

fool, on the grounds that love alone fulfills the

law.

Readings: J. Duncan M. Derrett, “Rabelais’ Legal

Learning and the Trial of Bridoye,” BHR 25 (1963):

111–71; Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s

Tiers Livre de Pantagruel, ER 34 (Geneva: Droz,

1997): 33–53; Charles Perrat, “Autour du juge Bri-

doye: Rabelais et le De Nobilitate de Tiraqueau,” BHR

16 (1954): 41–57; Michael A. Screech, “The Legal

Comedy of Rabelais in the Trial of Bridoye in the

‘Tiers Livre de Pantagruel’,” ER 5 (1964): 175–95.

Edwin M. Duval

BRIEF DECLARATION (BRIEFVE DE-

CLARATION) “Brief Declaration (� Clarifi-

cation) of Some of the More Obscure Terms

Contained in the Fourth Book of the Heroic

Deeds and Sayings of Pantagruel.” This is the

complete title in English translation of an anon-

ymous list attached to some copies of the 1552

edition of the Fourth Book. It contains 178 en-

tries, of which the majority (79) explain Greek

words and expressions, while the remaining part

explains, translates, or comments upon words

and expressions from other languages (Latin,

Italian, German, Hebrew, Arabic) as well as

French dialectic idioms. In comparison with the

text of the Fourth Book itself, this list often ap-

pears to be very useful, even necessary for a

good understanding of the work. But there are

also redundancies (for instance, lasanon has two

entries, both referring to the explanation given in

the text [“Lasanon: this term is explained

there”]), as well as explanations that are contra-

dictory to the significance the words have in the

text, the most problematic ones being parallele,

canibales, periode, and Venus. There are also

many terms in the Fourth Book which urgently

need some explanation but are not mentioned in

the Brief Declaration. Therefore, it is no surprise

that critics disagree about the authenticity of this

list. Raymond Arveiller and Andre Tournon con-

tend that it is inauthentic, whereas for Mireille

Huchon its author is Rabelais. Marie-Luce De-

monet considers the list to be a satirical pastiche

by Rabelais on contemporary glossators and lex-

icographers. If the Brief Declaration is indeed

authentic and serious, it gives some interesting

autobiographical information on, for instance, the

lessons in Arabic Rabelais may have taken dur-

ing his stays in Rome (see the entry on Catad-

upes du Nil).

Readings: Raymond Arveiller, “La Briefve Decla-

ration est-elle de Rabelais?” ER 5 (1964): 9–10;

Marie-Luce Demonet, “Rabelais metalinguiste,” ER 37

(1999): 115–28; Mireille Huchon, Rabelais grammair-

ien (Geneva: Droz, 1981): 406–11, 491–95; Andre

24 Bringuenarilles

Tournon, “La Briefve Declaration n’est pas de Rabe-

lais,” ER 13 (1976): 133–38.

Paul J. Smith

BRINGUENARILLES (4BK 17) One in a se-

ries of swallowing mouths and Fourth Book

monsters, Bringuenarilles is a superficially be-

nign and farcical enemy of the wind eaters who

consumes windmills and other detritus before

falling ill of a stomach ailment and dying. Iron-

ically, his death results not from the hardware he

has consumed, but rather from the cure pre-

scribed by doctors: a pat of butter, probably in-

tended to lubricate the pots and pans he has swal-

lowed, suffocates the giant. Linked by Alice

Berry to the “archetypal myth of the male made

pregnant by what he eats” (149–51), Bringuen-

arilles is a figure borrowed from the Disciple of

Pantagruel whose demise foreshadows the death

of Pan later in the narrative. As Michael Heath

points out, moreover, there is a potentially dark

side to this farcical episode: for windmills are

used in the production of flour, without which

the people will starve (101). Underneath the ve-

neer of fantasy, then, Rabelais links the theme of

unbridled consumption, which served in 1532 as

a positive figure of humanistic curiosity, to in-

equities of class and power.

Readings: Alice Fiola Berry, The Charm of Catas-

trophe: A Study of Rabelais’s Quart Livre (Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Mi-

chael J. Heath, Rabelais (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and

Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1996); Elizabeth Ches-

ney Zegura and Marcel Tetel, Rabelais Revisited (New

York: Macmillan/Twayne, 1993).


BUDE, GUILLAUME (c. 1467–1540) Bude

is the greatest French humanist of the sixteenth

century. Geofroy Tory called him “the jewel of

the noble and studious Pharisees” (“diamant des

nobles & studieux Pharrisiens)” and set him

alongside Erasmus (with whom he frequently

corresponded), but he is hardly read today be-

cause he wrote almost exclusively in Latin. He

studied law, was secretary to the king from 1497

to 1515, and published translations as well as

original works. Of these, the three most impor-

tant are the “Annotations on the Pandects” (Di-

gest), the essential book of Roman Law (1508),

the De asse, a treatise on the Roman coin called

an as (c. 1515), and the “Passage from Hellenism

to Christianity” (1535), an impassioned plea for

“true” Christianity.

Bude is mentioned only once in the works of

Rabelais: in chapter 18 of the Fifth Book (OC

767), in a list of contemporary humanists dispar-

aged by the warriors of Quinte Essence. A Latin

letter from Rabelais to Bude has survived (OC

993–97, 1744–46); probably written in 1521, it

is Rabelais’s first known work, so we need not

be surprised by its obsequious tone. The two hu-

manists have more in common than we might

suspect; both were devout Christians of the kind

we now call “evangelical,” both were thoroughly

grounded in law as well as in ancient literature,

both were political conservatives and ardent sup-

porters of the monarchy.

Rabelais owes most to Bude’s De asse, whose

numerous editions in the sixteenth century attest

to its popularity. The first edition had 172 folios,

while the 1542 edition (quoted here) has 819

pages. Ostensibly a numismatic treatise in five

books, it is in fact a rambling discourse on money

and many other subjects, most notably religion,

good government, civilization, language and lit-

erature, and the glory of France. Bude’s special-

ized knowledge is staggering: he speaks of ancient

monetary systems, gems, ostentatious banquets,

and extravagance in general; of Roman history

and politics; of drinking measures, utensils and

habits; of astronomy, Egyptian hieroglyphics, an-

cient funerals, gardens, ships, and much, much

more. We may learn in passing about such dispa-

rate subjects as the price Marc Antony paid for the

severed head of Cicero, the boundaries of the Ro-

man Empire, the measurement of the earth,

French bread, and the lack of owls in Crete.

Bude is fond of underlining the lack of struc-

ture in his book (“Verum ut ad rem redeamus”

[302]). Like a Montaigne essay, his work deals

simultaneously with a number of subjects, so that

the attempt of some modern critics to find order

in it seems to me misguided. Bude quotes some

ancient jokes (facetiae) and would like to be

thought a “Democritus gelasinus” (792), but Ra-

belais’s debt to him is more obvious than that

and has yet to be thoroughly explored. Bude sup-

plied him with some important names: Panurgus

(239–40), Thalamegos (654), islands of the blest

called Macaron (750), as well as several terms

used in passing (Coraxian sheep, Pastophores,

Bude, Guillaume 25

Ucalegon, Arimaspien, Otacuste, celeusma, and

the Trojan Pig). And high on the list of both

authors’ aims is publicity for the intellectual su-

periority of France.

Readings: Guillaume Bude, Gulielmi Budaei Pari-

siensis, Consiliarii Regii, De asse et partibus eius libri

V (Lyon: Sebastien Gryphe, 1542); M.-M. de La Gar-

anderie, Christianisme et lettres profanes (1515–

1535): essai sur l’humanisme francais (1515–1535) et

sur la pensee de Guillaume Bude, 2nd ed. (Paris:

Champion, 1995); David O. McNeil, Guillaume Bude

and Humanism in the Reign of Francis I (Geneva:

Droz, 1975).

Barbara C. Bowen

C

CALUMNY Calumny can be considered in re-

lation to Rabelais in two ways: first, with refer-

ence to the attacks that his books received during

his lifetime, which he described as “calumnious”;

and second, with reference to how calumny can

be represented in these works. In both the pro-

logue to the first version of the Fourth Book

(1548) and in the dedicatory letter of the 1552

version, Rabelais attacked his critics whose ac-

cusations of heresy had almost stopped his writ-

ing. In chapter 32 of the 1552 Fourth Book, Pan-

tagruel explicitly condemns the “Demoniacles

Calvins imposteurs de Geneve,” “les enraigez

Putherbes” and “Maniacles Pistoletz”—three real

and virulent critics, John Calvin, the monk Ga-

briel de Puy-Herbault, and possibly Guillaume

Postel, figure in a list of fantastical monsters.

Rabelais’s most dangerous enemies, however,

and those for whom he reserved the most biting

satire, remained the theologians of the Sorbonne.

After the publication of the Third Book in 1546,

the Faculty of Theology reiterated its condem-

nation of Rabelais’s books, although all three re-

tained the royal privilege and were indeed re-

printed, with adjustments and revisions, after this

censure. An accusation of heresy was, of course,

a serious one; and Rabelais’s remark in the 1552

dedicatory letter that if he were guilty of heresy

as accused he would gather the wood for his own

pyre was by no means careless.

Rabelais possessed a number of strategies to

combat these “calumnious” accusations of

heresy. He had already modified his first two

books for the authorized editions of 1546, cutting

direct references to the Sorbonne and to any

“theologiens.” Francis I enjoyed and supported

the publication of the first books; Henry II sub-

sequently allowed the Third Book to be sold in

Paris despite the Sorbonne’s censure and the

Paris Parlement’s suspension of its sale. Rabe-

lais’s patrons, the du Bellay family, had by 1552

strengthened their influence; and the dedicatory

letter of the Fourth Book was addressed to the

cardinal de Chatillon, a powerful protector of

Christian humanists. In this letter, Rabelais

claimed that his books were simply “folastries

joyeuses” (joyful sport) that had been misinter-

preted and that any detection of heretical material

could only come from a perverse misreading and

willful misinterpretation, as, in the words of

Luke 11.11–12, “comme qui pain, interpretroit

pierre: poisson, serpent: oeuf, scorpion” (“as if

you interpreted bread to mean stone, fish to mean

serpent, or egg to mean scorpion” [4BK ded.]).

At the heart of the anxiety over calumny is, then,

an anxiety about interpretation and reading, a

return to the problem of interpretation famously

elaborated in the prologue to Gargantua. Cal-

umny represents another term in the reader’s in-

terpretation of a text, effectively separating

reader and text. Indeed, as Rabelais pointed out,

“l’esprit Calumniateur” is the spirit of discord

and the devil: in Greek, diabolos was originally

a calumniator, etymologically that which sepa-

rates and divides (4BK ded.). If it was in the

Fourth Book that Rabelais most explicitly de-

nounced those who attacked and calumniated his

work, the link between calumniators and the di-

abolical was already made in Pantagruel: the

censors at the Sorbonne criticized “diabliculant,

c’est a dire callumniant” (P 34).

Calumny thus runs counter to the Pantagrue-

line principle of interpreting all things in the best

and most charitable spirit: Pantagruel “toutes

choses prenoit en bonne partie, toute acte inter-

pretoit a bien” (“took all things in good part, in-

terpreted all actions favorably” [3BK 2]). Cal-

umny, false accusation, equally raises the

question of intention. Laughter at Rabelais’s

equivocations was never straightforward: Rabe-

Calvin, Jean or John 27

lais was himself accused of calumny against the

monastic orders by Puy-Herbault, who clearly

read the “folastries joyeuses” as more biting sat-

ire. The continuing polemic over the Gargantua

prologue demonstrates that the question of inten-

tion and interpretation is still far from resolved.

Readings: Michel Charles, Introduction a l’etude

des textes (Paris: Seuil, 1995); Natalie Zemon Davis,

“Rabelais among the Censors (1940s, 1540s),” Rep-

resentations 32 (1990): 1–32; Diane Desrosiers-Bonin,

Rabelais et l’humanisme civil, ER 27 (Geneva: Droz,

1992); Lucien Febvre, Le probleme de l’incroyance au

seizieme siecle: la religion de Rabelais (Paris: Albin

Michel, 1947); Francois Rigolot, L’erreur de la Ren-

aissance (Paris: Champion, 2002).

Emily Butterworth

CALVIN, JEAN OR JOHN (1509–64)

French-born reformer who was a prolific theo-

logian, preacher, and polemicist. His major work,

the oft-revised and expanded Institutio chris-

tianœ religionis or Institutes of the Christian Re-

ligion (first Latin edition, 1536; first French edi-

tion, 1541), lay the foundation for the French

Protestant or Reformed Church. Geneva, where

he settled permanently in 1541, was to become,

after considerable struggle, the Church’s epicen-

ter for the conversion of neighboring France. The

efforts of the French Calvinists or Huguenots

throughout the 1550s would culminate in several

decades of openly violent religious and civil con-

flict, starting in 1562. As Calvin was fifteen years

Rabelais’s junior, his considerable influence be-

gan too late to be reflected in Rabelais’s first two

major vernacular works, Pantagruel (1532) and

Gargantua (1534), in which current evangelical

and, to a lesser extent, Lutheran thought figure

prominently. In the later, “definitive” Francois

Juste edition of these works (Lyon, 1542), how-

ever, Rabelais does include derisive topical ref-

erences to “predestinators” and “imposters” (G

prol.), which critics have taken as evidence of

Rabelais’s negative reaction to the dissemination

of Calvinist doctrine.

The primary recorded connection (or confron-

tation) between Rabelais and Calvin came in

1550 with the publication of the Traite des scan-

dales, Calvin’s own vernacular translation of his

De scandalis (On Scandals), a virulent attack, as

its full title indicates, on those “who today pre-

vent many people from coming to the pure doc-

trine of the Gospels and lead others astray from

it.” Although by no means taking him as his prin-

cipal target, Calvin does group Rabelais with

other influential humanist scholars, including

Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim

(1486–1535) and Etienne Dolet (1509–46),

whom he reviles for “proudly scorning the Gos-

pels” and “vomiting up their execrable blasphe-

mies against Jesus Christ and his teachings,” be-

fore singling him out: “the others, like Rabelais”

who “after having tasted of the Gospels, were

struck with a similar blindness,” occasioned by

their “diabolical pride.” Rabelais’s middle road

was essentially that of many other evangelical

humanists whom Calvin would label “moyen-

neurs” (moderates or moderators). However crit-

ical they were of contemporary Catholic institu-

tions, doctrine, and conduct, their relative

moderation was as unacceptable to Calvin as

Catholicism itself. Rabelais’s works were, in ad-

dition, all the more dangerous for their apparent

mocking tone, easily (mis)taken for rejection of

the sacred truths and of those who communicated

or interpreted them.

Rabelais had perhaps indirectly provoked Cal-

vin’s attack and even set its terms in the 1546

Third Book, with his definition of Pantagruel-

ism, arguably the overarching and unifying

moral philosophy of the chronicles, the tenets of

which include the injunction never to “se scan-

dalizer” (3BK 2). This can be understood in both

Rabelais’s and Calvin’s writings as “to turn away

(or to allow oneself to be turned away) from the

path of righteousness.” It is based on the Gospel

notion of the ska¬ ndalon (skandalon), a “trap” or

“stumbling block,” that is, an impediment to

faith, an etymology that is developed at length in

Calvin’s treatise. In this very specific sense, Ra-

belais and Calvin each viewed the other and the

other’s understanding of and efforts toward re-

form as “scandalous.” Rabelais responded di-

rectly and in kind to Calvin’s treatise in the 1552

Fourth Book, classing the “Demoniacal Calvins,

imposters of Geneva” among “deformed and

misshapen monsters against Nature” (4BK 32).

Similarly, Calvin himself, as editor Olivier Fatio

notes in the most recent critical edition of the

Traite des scandales, continued the quarrel, at

least from the pulpit, even after Rabelais’s death

28 Carnival

in 1553 (see also Evangelism; Reformation;

Religion).

Readings: Jean Calvin, Des scandales, ed. Olivier

Fatio (Geneva: Droz, 1984); Lucien Febvre, Le prob-

leme de l’incroyance au XVIe siecle. La Religion de

Rabelais (Paris: Albin Michel, 1942); Alban J.

Krailsheimer, Rabelais (Les ecrivains devant Dieu)

(Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1967); Michael Screech,

Rabelais and the Challenge of the Gospel: Evangel-

ism, Reformation, Dissent (Baden-Baden/Bouxwiller:

Valentin Koerner, 1992).

Jeff Persels

CARNIVAL In the pre-Reformation liturgical

calendar, Shrove Tuesday (the day when the

faithful were shriven, that is, confessed their sins

and had them forgiven) and Ash Wednesday

marked the beginning of the penitential season of

Lent, forty days of prayer and fasting in prepa-

ration for Easter. But in the observances of lay-

people and junior clerics, a period of days or

even weeks culminating in Shrove Tuesday (also

called Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday) was given the

name of Carnival (derived by some from the

Low Latin Carne vale, goodbye to meat) and de-

voted to celebrations and physical indulgence of

various kinds. In many places, similar celebra-

tions marked the twelve days between Christmas

and the Feast of Kings (January 6), and a good

number of the rituals discussed in modern writ-

ing as examples of Carnival in fact belonged to

the winter celebration. Carnival food ideally con-

sisted of meat, particularly fat meat, sausages,

eggs, butter, and cheese—all the foods forbidden

in Lent, when the faithful were supposed to sub-

sist on fish, cereals, and vegetables. Carnival ob-

servances were often of an apparently subversive

kind: at feasts, someone might be designated by

lot as king for a day and allowed to give orders

to his social superiors. Some towns or courts

even chose a “Lord of Misrule,” while in some

cathedrals a Boy Bishop was chosen from among

the choristers to go up into the pulpit and preach

a facetious sermon while other junior clerics per-

formed a parody of the usual rites. The text for

the Boy Bishop’s sermon was usually “Stultorum

numerus infinitus” (“the number of fools is infi-

nite” [Ecclesiastes 1.15]), and the pre-Lenten

Carnival season was often marked by the meet-

ings of fool-societies and the acting of plays in

fools’ costume.

Another type of play for which several scripts

survive is a battle between Carnival, personified

as a fat, jolly Father-Christmas-type figure, and

Lent, a thin, kill-joy female figure, and their re-

spective followers, armed on the one hand with

chickens and sausages and on the other with

leeks and salt herrings. Lent has to win, but she

is reminded that her reign will last only six

weeks, after which plenty and jollity will return.

All these observances seem to flout received wis-

dom (for a few days, children and madmen will

be allowed to teach adults and the sane), and nor-

mal decorum and common sense (men may dress

as women or animals, women as men, “indecent”

acts are permitted, food is consumed in unaccus-

tomed quantity or wasted entirely by being

thrown at the other side in the “battle” plays).

Such observances as these might seem to express

popular resentment against rulers and the Church

which closely ordered people’s lives. Recent his-

torians, however, have questioned how subver-

sive these rituals actually were, and some have

argued that by confining reversals of power to a

limited season and to these well-established tra-

ditional forms, Carnival in fact acted as a safety

valve which helped ensure the survival of tradi-

tional authority.

In the Fourth Book, chapters 29–42, Rabelais

gives a lengthy description first of Quaresme-

prenant (Lent, or more accurately, “Lent-

coming-on,” the beginning of Lent) represented

as a bizarre, forbidding hybrid monster, and then

of his traditional enemies, the Andouilles (tripe-

sausages). The personified sausages have as their

god a flying pig, and their war-cry is “Mardi

gras!” A strange misunderstanding means that

Pantagruel and his men, despite their initial

friendly approaches (“Vostres, vostres, vostres

sommes-nous trestous,” they cry; “we are at your

service one and all” [4BK 41]), find themselves

fighting against the Andouilles rather than

against Quaresmeprenant, but after the interven-

tion of the flying pig the conflict is resolved and

a new friendship established.

These chapters are plainly based upon tradi-

tional Carnival rituals, but some critics, most no-

tably Mikhail Bakhtin, have argued that many

more elements in the book are inspired by a car-

Cartier, Jacques 29

nival, or “carnivalesque” spirit: that is, one of

irreverence, privileging of the physical, and even

intellectual or political subversion.

It was in his study of Dostoevsky, published

in 1929, that Bakhtin introduced the notion of

“carnivalesque” writing and the idea that subjects

could be “carnivalized.” He developed these

ideas at length in his study of Rabelais (Tvor-

chestvo Fransua Rable, written between 1935

and 1940 but not published until 1965 in Rus-

sian, and then translated into both English and

French in the opportune year of 1968). Despite

questioning by historians of Bakhtin’s historical

account of Carnival as an institution, his critical

notion of the carnivalesque has had a consider-

able influence in recent critical writing in Eng-

lish.



Press, 1968); “Carnivalization/carnivalesque,” A Dic-

tionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 4th ed.

(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998); Carol Clark, The

Vulgar Rabelais (Glasgow: Pressgang, 1983); Samuel

Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

Carol Clark

CARTIER, JACQUES Although travel be-

comes a major theme of his work only in the

Fourth Book, Rabelais displays considerable in-

terest in voyages of exploration as early as the

Pantagruel (1532) where, at least until its final

stage, Pantagruel’s return journey to Utopia rep-

licates the route taken by the Portuguese to reach

the Indies (24), and where in chapter 32 Panurge

discovers in Pantagruel’s mouth a “new world.”

Since the structure of the Third Book (1546)

does not allow for any sort of sea voyage, it is

only with the appearance of the Fourth Book that

we are once again in the domain of travel. In-

deed, throughout this and the Fifth Book, Pan-

tagruel and his companions sail from island to

island in search of the Oracle of the Dive Bou-

teille or Divine Bottle. It becomes obvious at the

beginning of the Fourth Book that Rabelais has

at least heard about and possibly read some of

the accounts of Cartier’s three journeys to Can-

ada (1534, 1535, 1541), since the ships of Pan-

tagruel’s fleet sail from Saint-Malo in search of

a shortcut to Cathay. This was precisely the goal

of Cartier’s expeditions, since he wanted to give

the French an advantage over the Portuguese and

Spanish who were deriving considerable eco-

nomic gain from their trade routes to the East via

the Cape of Good Hope. It is interesting to note

that the account of Cartier’s first journey in 1534

was first published in Italian (Venice, 1556) and

was published in France (Rouen, 1598) only after

being retranslated into French. The account of

the second expedition was published much ear-

lier (Paris, 1545), although a manuscript version

of this text also exists and was perhaps given to

Francis I before this date. Cartier’s second voy-

age also departed from Saint-Malo and, like that

of Pantagruel, was preceded by a service of wor-

ship.

In his analysis of the relationship between Ra-

belais and Cartier, Abel Lefranc suggests that

Cartier’s influence on Rabelais was direct and

far-reaching. Following the lead of Margry’s

French Navigations of the Maritime Revolution

from the Fourteenth to Sixteenth Century (Les

navigations francaises de la Revolution maritime

du XIVe au XVIe siecle [Paris, 1867]), he identifies

Jamet Brayer, the captain of Pantagruel’s fleet,

as Jacques Cartier, on the rather slim evidence

that “Jamet” is a familiar form of Jacques. (Other

scholars have found a Jamet Brayer among Ra-

belais’s relatives.) However, Lefranc goes even

further than Margry, suggesting that Rabelais

could well have consulted Cartier in person.

Lefranc bases this hypothesis on the work of a

local historian, Jacques Dorement of Saint-Malo,

who claims that Rabelais came to Saint-Malo not

only to learn the details of Cartier’s voyages, but

also to familiarize himself with the technical sail-

ing and navigational terms that would subse-

quently appear in the Fourth Book (Lefranc

1984: 59–60). This would certainly help to

explain the extensive nautical knowledge Rabe-

lais displays in this work, although Rabelais

could also have acquired this knowledge from

treatises on navigation and seamanship, as well

as accounts of sea voyages. However, what is

certain is that Rabelais intends the Fourth Book

to pay homage to the exploits of Jacques Cartier,

perhaps out of admiration and personal contact

with the navigator, but undoubtedly because he

wished to endorse the political dimension of Car-

30 Castiglione, Baldassare

tier’s expeditions, undertaken to further the

king’s political aspirations in New France.

Readings: Marius Barbeau, Pantagruel in Canada

(Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1984); Jean-

Philippe Beaulieu, “La Description de la nouveaute

dans les recits de voyage de Cartier et de Rabelais,”

RAR 9.2 (1985):104–110; Kim Campbell, “Of Horse,

Fish, and Frozen Words,” RAR 14.3 (1990): 183–92;

Jacques Cartier, Brief Recit . . . (Rouen, 1545);

Jacques Cartier, Discours du voyage fait par le capi-

taine Jaques Cartier . . . (Rouen, 1598); Jacques Do-

remont, De l’antiquite de la ville et cite d’Aleth . . .

(1628); Abel Lefranc, Les navigations de Pantagruel

(Geneva: Slatkine, 1967); Guy Sylvestre, “Jacques

Cartier et les lettres,” Etudes canadiennes/Canadian

Studies: Revue interdisciplinaire des etudes canadien-

nes en France 10.17 (1984): 221–23.

Lance Donaldson-Evans

CASTIGLIONE, BALDASSARE (1478–1529)

Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano first appeared in print

in 1528, well in time for Rabelais to have dis-

covered it when visiting Italy. The classical

scholar Jacques Collin penned the first surviving

French translation (1537), and Mellin de Saint-

Gelais and Etienne Dolet collaborated on the re-

vised Lyonnais edition of 1538. The work gen-

erated intense interest, both favorable and hostile.

While Rabelais quotes it at least once (3BK 29),

Pauline Smith opines correctly that his work con-

tains little anticourtier satire such as the Corte-

giano stimulated and may indeed have sought to

nullify via the ideal figure it portrays. Neverthe-

less, the Third Book passage is significant both

as prefacing the erudite symposium to follow and

as cueing yet another hostile judgement on Pan-

urge. Paraphrasing the words of Castiglione’s

character Giuliano, Panurge questions the value

of asking advice (a) from theologians, most of

whom are heretics, (b) from doctors, who uni-

versally abhor medication, and (c) from lawyers,

who never sue one another. Such words are those

of a courtisan, says Pantagruel, who (going be-

yond Castiglione) combines seriousness and in-

genuity in answering the charges. Good theolo-

gians extirpate heresy by inciting faith; good

doctors rely on prophylaxis, thereby preempting

any need for cures; meanwhile, good lawyers are

too busy pleading for others to take up their own

affairs. Panurge makes no answer and acquiesces

in Pantagruel’s ultimately fruitless dinner-party

plan.

The charge of courtisanie may be significant,

however. Is Rabelais associating Panurge’s re-

duced status as Pantagruel’s sycophant with at-

titudes that Castiglione presents with approval?

Some editors imply this strongly. M. A. Screech,

for instance, observes that “evidently R[abelais]

feels very little sympathy for the ideals of the

Courtisan.” However, in pulling the joke back

into a serious context, Pantagruel is merely add-

ing a moralistic gloss to a Renaissance topos that

Castiglione (and Panurge) had chosen to treat

comically. It is for the reader to say, here as else-

where in the text, which perspective appeals

more: Panurge’s irreverence or Pantagruel’s

conscientiousness. Undeniably, however, the di-

alogues orchestrating the Cortegiano and Rabe-

lais’s work, especially the Third Book, are both

similar and different. They share a spirit of free

debate, an avowed debt to classical precedent,

and an atmosphere of enlightenment and relaxa-

tion. Rabelais differs from Castiglione in all but

excluding female voices, in dramatizing his

themes via Panurge’s behavior, and in spending

far less time theorizing humor than practicing it.

Readings: Sydney Anglo, “The Courtier. The Ren-

aissance and Changing Ideals,” The Courts of Europe,

ed. Arthur G. Dickens (London: Thames and Hudson,

1977); Richard Cooper, “Les lectures italiennes de Ra-

belais: une mise au point,” ER 37 (1999): 25–49; Mi-

chael A. Screech, ed., Le tiers livre (Geneva: Droz,

1964); Pauline M. Smith, The Anti-Courtier Trend in

Sixteenth Century French Literature (Geneva: Droz,

1966).

John Parkin

CENSORS AND CENSORSHIP The Age of

Print increased the volume and speed of the cir-

culation of ideas, and that in turn necessitated

new mechanisms for the control of those ideas.

The earliest measures in that direction were taken

by the popes Innocent VIII and Alexander VI at

the beginning of the sixteenth century, consoli-

dated by the Fifth Lateran Council in 1515. The

concern was with religious control, not (as later)

with the control of pornography.

In France, the mechanism of censorship was

installed only slowly. In March 1521, King

Francis I, in response to a request from the rec-

Censors and Censorship 31

tor of the University of Paris, instructed the Par-

lement to forbid the printing of books on relig-

ious questions without inspection by the Faculty

of Theology of the University of Paris (the “Sor-

bonne” to those who did not like it); the Parle-

ment duly complied, in an edict dated March 21,

1521. This already shows the main parties in the

censorship process: the theologians could pass

doctrinal judgments on suspect texts, but they

had no power to enforce a condemnation. For

that they needed the civil magistrates of the Par-

lement who could order the confiscation of books

and the banishment, or burning, of persons. But

the magistrates always needed to avoid offending

the monarch, who could transfer a case to his

Privy Council (which normally delivered verdicts

pleasing to His Majesty). As long as Faculty,

Parlement, and king were in agreement, censor-

ship could work; but when Francis I favored hu-

manists like Erasmus, Louis de Berquin, or Le-

fevre d’Etaples, representatives of a movement

that the Sorbonne detested, conflict could arise;

this happened notably in 1523, 1526, and 1533.

The gravity and the exact nature of these con-

flicts is a subject of debate: James Farge argues

that the Faculty was always the respected guard-

ian of religious orthodoxy, that the Parlement

systematically supported the Faculty, and that the

problem was the inconsistent attitude of the king

and his protection of “humanists.” Francis Hig-

man disagrees on all three points.

The 1521 edict was designed to control book

production at its source: permission had to be

obtained before a manuscript text was printed.

This was inadequate, since books were fre-

quently printed without the necessary permission,

and foreign printings could not be controlled in

this way. Already by 1526 edicts were issued de-

manding that copies of vernacular translations of

Scripture and certain other texts be handed in to

the authorities. A new step in 1531 was the prac-

tice of searches in suspect bookshops. The Af-

faire des Placards in October 1534 provoked an

outburst of book-burning and executions, as well

as the famous edict of January 13, 1535 banning

all printing in the French kingdom.

Until 1540, censorship involved examination

of a text, quotation of heretical propositions, and

explanation of the condemnation (often just

“plainly Lutheran”). But after 1540 the size of

the problem changed dramatically, and the proc-

ess of censorship evolved accordingly. The the-

ologians took to drawing up lists of titles, with-

out detailed explanations. A first list, made “at

the request of the Parlement” between Christmas

1542 and March 2, 1543, involved forty-three ti-

tles in French and twenty-two in Latin. This list

remained in manuscript form; however, its exis-

tence was known, and several authorities in the

French provinces requested copies of it. This was

one of the reasons given by the theologians in

1544 for the decision to publish a Catalog of the

Books Censored by the Paris Faculty of Theol-

ogy (Catalogue des livres censurez par la faculte

de Theologie de Paris [Paris, Benoist Prevost for

Jean Andre, 1544]). The list includes 230 titles—

109 in Latin and 121 in French. This world pre-

miere of a printed Index of forbidden books was

backed by the spiritual authority of the Faculty;

but there was no means of enforcing that au-

thority. In 1545 the Inquisitor Matthieu Ory pro-

posed that the list be republished with the back-

ing of an edict from the Parlement; the edict

appeared on June 23, 1545, and the related edi-

tion of the Catalogue on July 20, 1545 (with con-

tents identical to the 1544 edition except for the

addition of four mixed items at the end). It is this

version of the Catalogue, backed by its edict,

which represents the first authoritative list of

condemned works.

Further editions of the Parisian Catalogue ap-

peared in 1547, with eighty-four new condem-

nations (thirty-six in Latin, forty-eight in

French); 1549 (thirty-one new titles in Latin and

four in French); 1551 (thirty-one new titles in

Latin, eighteen in French); and 1556 (seventy-

two new titles in Latin, sixty in French). No new

lists were published in France after this date,

though the Faculty decided individual condem-

nations; the Catalogues were replaced by the Ro-

man Index from 1557 on.

In France, the Edict of Chateaubriant (1551)

comprehensively summarized censorship dispo-

sitions to that date. All printed books, it stated,

should carry the name of the author and of the

printer, the printer’s address and mark, and the

date of printing. Regular inspections of book-

shops were to be held, in which the Catalogue

should be available alongside the list of books on

sale. The import of foreign books was to be

32 Cervantes, Miguel de

closely controlled, and new works would require

a certificate from the Theology Faculty before

permission to print was granted. And so on.

The development of this censorship system co-

incides with the period of Rabelais’s intellectual

activity. There are three points of contact. First,

in 1524 Rabelais, then a Franciscan friar, had

certain books in Greek confiscated by his relig-

ious superiors. This was an internal matter to the

Franciscan order, not based on an official eccle-

siastical decree. Second, despite many statements

to the contrary, it seems that Pantagruel was not

condemned by the Sorbonne in 1533. Our only

source on the subject, a letter from John Calvin

to Francois Daniel of Orleans (October 1533),

reports on the row within the University con-

cerning Marguerite de Navarre’s Miroir de

l’ame pecheresse; Nicolas Le Clerc, representa-

tive of the theologians, protests that Marguerite’s

work was not condemned by the Faculty depu-

ties, but certain other works should have been—

like Pantagruel, the Sylva cunnorum and similar

works. It would seem that Le Clerc wanted to

denounce Rabelais’s novel not for heresy but for

obscenity (a criterion not otherwise evident in the

period); Calvin adds a comment concerning Le

Clerc’s evident ignorance—implying perhaps

that the significant message in Pantagruel con-

cerns the Saint-Victor library rather than Pan-

urge’s pranks. In any case, no censure of Ra-

belais’s work dates from this period.

Third, the first certain evidence of a condem-

nation of Rabelais’s works is in the list of 1542/

3, where the final item (apart from a later addi-

tion) is: “Grandes Annales tres-veritables des

gestes merveilleux du grand Gargantua et Pan-

tagruel Roy des Dipsodes.” This must refer not

to the original editions of 1532 and 1534, but to

the combined edition by [Pierre de Tours],

[Lyon], 1542– in which the attacks on the “Sor-

bonagres” and so on have been watered down.

In 1544, the same title is transcribed; in addition,

there is the condemnation of “Pantagruel et Gar-

gantua” (which is transcribed into the Anvers

Index of 1570 and sqq., and thence to the Spanish

and Roman lists). In the 1547 Catalogue, the

Third Book of Pantagruel is added. The Fourth

Book, which caused so much difficulty for Ra-

belais, does not appear on any of the lists of cen-

sured books.

Readings: Jesus Martinez de Bujanda et al., Index

des livres interdits. Vol. 1: Index de l’Universite de

Paris, 1544, 1545, 1547, 1549, 1551, 1556 (Sher-

brooke: Centre d’Etudes de la Renaissance, 1985);

James K. Farge, Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Ref-

ormation France: The Faculty of Theology of Paris,

1500–1543 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985); Francis Hig-

man, Censorship and the Sorbonne. A Bibliographical

Study of Books in French Censured by the Faculty of

Theology of the University of Paris, 1520–1551 (Ge-

neva: Droz, 1979).

Francis Higman

CERVANTES, MIGUEL DE (1547–1616)

Spanish novelist whose masterpiece Don Quijote

displays many affinities of narrative technique

and verbal exuberance with Rabelais’s work. Al-

though Cervantes is unlikely to have had any di-

rect knowledge of Rabelais, both authors shared

an enthusiasm for Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso,

and both made crucial contributions to the de-

velopment of Renaissance comic narrative. Crit-

icism has acknowledged the prominent role of

proverbial speech in both authors as well as their

predilection for lexical experimentation and lin-

guistic parody. Each author conceives his work

in part as a parody of chivalric romance, and

each resorts to linguistic means to reveal the

anachronism of the chivalric tradition.

One technique that the two authors share is a

burlesque form of verisimilitude that they may

have borrowed from Ariosto. Like Rabelais’s

narrator Alcofrybas Nasier, Cervantes’s narrator

Cide Hamete Benengeli recounts the most im-

plausible and fantastic events with rigorous pre-

cision and an indignant pretension to the strictest

veracity. This parodic technique, known in Ari-

osto studies as the Turpin method, allows Ra-

belais and Cervantes to assert the autonomy of

fiction from historical criteria of truth and false-

hood.

Readings: Helmut Hatzfeld, El “Quijote” como

obra de arte del lenguaje (Madrid, 1966); Eric

MacPhail, “The Ethic of Timing and the Origin of the

Novel: Speaking Too Soon in Rabelais and Cervan-

tes,” Symposium 52 (1998): 155–64; Eleanor O’Kane,

“The Proverb: Rabelais and Cervantes,” CL 2 (1950):

360–69; Sergio Zatti, Il “Furioso” fra epos e romanzo

(Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi, 1990).

Eric MacPhail

Charity 33

CHANEPH (4BK 63–64) Chaneph (meaning

“hypocrisy” in Hebrew) is the name of the pe-

nultimate island encountered in the Fourth

Book. The episode begins by relating a moment

of deathly calm (the lack of wind causing a stag-

nation of the joyful quest, Pantagruel and his

companions dozing in lethargy). Frere Jean

breaks “that obstinate silence” by asking:

“What’s a way to raise a breeze during a calm?”

In this untranslatable wordplay, the expression

“haulser le temps” also means “drink hard until

the weather is clearing up.” To this and similar

questions asked by his companions, Pantagruel

promises to give one single answer, not by

words, but by “signs, deeds, and results” (4BK

63). Epistemon informs the Pantagruelists on the

Island of Chaneph and its sinister habitants. Dur-

ing a copious banquet-lunch, the initial lethargy

quickly disappears; the habitual joy and linguistic

virtuosity are returning as is clear from the in-

sertion of other discourses: anecdotes, rhymes,

and a long, alphabetic list of venomous animals

(4BK 64). Finally, Pantagruel answers the ques-

tion asked by Frere Jean, by pointing the atten-

tion of the others to what is happening during the

banquet: with the raising of the spirits, the wind

has risen “by occult sympathy.” Pantagruel

promises to tell more about it “elsewhere and at

another time.” The episode ends with Panta-

gruel’s cheerful reflexion on Bacchic furor (4BK

65).

For Edwin Duval, this episode belongs to the

threefold sequence of increasingly dangerous an-

ticaritas (Gaster, Chaneph, Ganabin) which con-

cludes the Fourth Book. The episode itself is

based on the opposition of the banqueting com-

panions and the dreadful habitants of Chaneph.

Modern critics of the episode are largely in-

debted to V.-L. Saulnier’s seminal interpretation

of this opposition: Chaneph represents an “anti-

Thelema” opposed to the merry company of the

Pantagruelians whose feasting echoes the depar-

ture’s banquet, related in the opening chapter of

the Fourth Book. Saulnier also stresses the allu-

sion to the Last Supper and the christological im-

pact of Pantagruel, who seems to repeat Christ’s

eschatological words during the Last Supper

(John 16.12–25).

Other critics underscore the allusions to the

practice and significance of the Holy Mass (E.

Duval) with Pentecostal undertones: the (twelve)

companions assembled sadly together, their glad-

ness caused by the raising of the wind (spiritus),

their apparent drunkenness and their linguistic in-

spiration (glossolaly) remind readers of the story

of Pentecost, Acts 2.1–47 (P. J. Smith). Other

thematic impacts and intertextual allusions are

visible in this hybrid episode: its place in the

overall theme of the wind (the death calm being

opposed to the Fourth Book’s tempest scene),

the insertion of dialogue (allusions to Erasmus’s

Convivium religiosum), natural history (borrow-

ings from medical manuals on poisonous ani-

mals), and classical mythology (the myth of the

Winged Bacchus).

Readings: Paul Delaunay, “Les animaux venimeux

dans Rabelais,” Melanges Abel Lefranc (Paris: Droz,

1936); Edwin M. Duval, “La messe, la cene, et le voy-

age sans fin du Quart Livre,” ER 21 (1988): 131–40;

Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Li-

vre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1998); Verdun-L.

Saulnier, Rabelais II: Rabelais dans son enquete.

Etude sur le Quart et le Cinquieme livre (Paris:

SEDES, 1982); Michael A. Screech, “The Winged

Bacchus (Pausanias, Rabelais and Later Emblema-

tists),” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Insti-

tutes 43 (1980): 259–62; Paul J. Smith, Voyage et ecri-

ture. Etude sur le Quart livre de Rabelais (Geneva:

Droz, 1987).

Paul J. Smith

CHARITY Caritas, the Latin equivalent of

agape or love, the highest of the three Christian

virtues (faith, hope, charity) according to a tra-

dition originating in Saint Paul (1 Cor. 13.13).

“Charity” in the biblical sense of “brotherly

love” is the moral foundation of the Christian

religion and the single commandment of the New

Testament: “You shall love your neighbor as

yourself” (Matt. 22.39). As such, it fulfills and

supersedes the entire Law of the Old Testament:

“He who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law.

. . . Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore

love is the fulfilling of the law” (Rom. 13.8–10;

cf. Gal. 5.14). The “golden rule” (Matt. 7.12) and

Christ’s various injunctions not to judge (Matt.

7.1–5) but to forgive (Matt. 6.12) and to love

even one’s enemies (Matt. 5.43–48) are all ex-

pressions of the single law of charity.

Much in Rabelais’s books is predicated on the

34 Charles V

ideal of Christian charity, including Panta-

gruel’s role in restoring friendship to the feud-

ing litigants Baisecul and Humevesne and in re-

placing the fratricidal reign of Anarche with a

utopian reign of brotherly love in Dipsodie (Pan-

tagruel), Grandgousier’s attempts to buy peace

from his aggressive neighbor Picrochole and

Gargantua’s institution of the Abbey of The-

leme in which everyone defers to the wishes of

all (Gargantua), Pantagruel’s abiding love for

the wastrel Panurge and his forgiveness of the

incompetent judge Bridoye (Third Book), and

Pantagruel’s repeated attempts to befriend ene-

mies and to broker peace between antagonistic

forces (Fourth Book). Although all of Rabelais’s

books promote the ideal of a tolerant, all-

inclusive brotherhood based on charity, they

show an increasing tendency to favor love over

knowledge as the remedy for all the ills of a

post-lapsarian world, and to encourage in the

reader a particular form of charity called Pan-

tagruelism.

Readings: Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s

Pantagruel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,

1991); Ulrich Langer, “Charity and the Singular: The

Object of Love in Rabelais,” Nominalism and Literary

Discourse: New Perspectives, ed. Christoph Bode,

Hugo Keiper, and Richard J. Utz, Critical Studies 10

(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997); Francois Rigolot, “Ra-

belais, Misogyny, and Christian Charity: Biblical In-

tertextuality and the Renaissance Crisis of Exemplar-

ity,” PMLA 109.2 (1994): 225–37.

Edwin M. Duval

CHARLES V (1500–58) Considered the

greatest of the Hapsburg emperors, Charles V de-

veloped an empire on which “the sun never set.”

Spain, South America, the Low Countries, Na-

ples, Sicily, and parts of Austria made up his

kingdom. Rival and adversary to the French

kings Francis I and Henry II, Charles is best

known for his simultaneous promotion of Cath-

olic reform and his fight against Protestantism.

The conquest of Mexico and Peru became ar-

guably his most lasting legacy. Having aban-

doned his titles, Charles V retired in 1556 to a

monastery in Yuste, Spain.

The choleric Picrochole found in Gargantua

(1534) is Rabelais’s caricature of Charles V.

Gargantua appeared within a decade of a series

of defeats for the French at the hands of Charles

V: Francis I’s loss in the election to Holy Roman

emperor, his decisive defeat in the Battle of Pa-

via, his subsequent imprisonment, and finally the

taking of his two oldest sons as hostages. Picro-

chole (the very name meaning “bitter bile”)

serves as a foil to Rabelais’s wise giant-kings,

Grandgousier and his son Gargantua. Rabelais

features the enlightened humanistic and Christian

upbringing received by Gargantua in the first half

of the book. It is a dramatization of Erasmus’s

1516 The Education of a Christian Prince (In-

stitutio principis christiani), which had been

written with Prince Charles, the future Charles

V, in mind. In contrast, Picrochole’s irrational

behavior presented in the latter half of Gargan-

tua offers a primer of how a king should not

behave. The absurd war begun over a dispute

between bakers and shepherds also serves to

highlight Gargantua’s rise to leadership and

hence manhood. Picrochole is both a cautionary

example of an unwise king and a richly devel-

oped comical character. Picrochole’s dominant

role as a ridiculous adversary but one that the

giants must take seriously may well reveal the

anxiety the French felt over Charles V’s power

and foreshadows the resumption of hostilities be-

tween Francis I and Charles in 1536.

Readings: Margaret Harp, “Charles V as Picrochole

in Rabelais’s Gargantua,” Young Charles V 1500–

1531 (New Orleans: University Press of the South,

2000); Royall Tyler, The Emperor Charles the Fifth

(London: Allen & Unwin, 1956).

Margaret Harp

CHELI (4BK 10) An island encountered by

Pantagruel and his companions in the Fourth

Book, chapter 10. The island’s name is borrowed

from Hebrew and is in direct correlation with

the content of the chapter. Cheli (pronunciation,

kli) is the biblical word for “pots and pans.” In-

deed, the seemingly culinary chapter recounts

Frere Jean’s enthusiastic visit to King Panigon’s

kitchens. Under the guise of setting up an argu-

ment on the merit of “cooking matters” versus

that of kissing ladies, the chapter introduces one

of the various kabbalistic keys to be found in the

Fourth Book. Because of the proximity of the

word Cheli to other hermetically opaque terms

such as Ruach, Tohu, Bohu, and Belimah, one

Cicero, Marcus Tullius 35

can envision that beyond the immediate transla-

tion of Cheli as “pots and pans,” Rabelais hides

a motif pertaining to speculative kabbala. While

Belimah is a term attached to the Sephiroth, or

“numbers,” Cheli is linked to esoteric elabora-

tions about Creation. It is associated with the var-

ious steps of the creation of beings and forms in

the Divine plan and their ideal hierarchy. Ac-

cording to the Shevirath HaKelim, or “breaking

of the Vases,” during the creation of the material

world, divine light sprang forth in various stages.

In one of these stages, light beamed from the first

being, Adam Kadmon. This light was captured

and kept in special vases (kelim or cheli), some

of which broke when hit by sudden light. Laden

with hermetic value, the metaphor of the Cheli,

or cups or vases, through which God acts, is

present at the beginning and at the end of the

companions’ journey—at the end, since the ul-

timate goal of the Fourth Book is to reach Bac-

buc, the Divine Bottle, the divine recipient; at

the onset, because an emblem akin to a vase is

symbolically reproduced on eleven out of the

twelve ships (bouteille, hanat, potet, brocq,

bourrabaquin, entonnoir, guoubelet, brinde,

breusse, portouoire, barrault).

Readings: Moshe Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah

(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988);

Gershom G. Scholem, Les grands courants de la mys-

tique juive (Paris: Payot, 1983); Francois Secret, Les

Kabbalistes chretiens de la Renaissance (Paris:

Dunod, 1964).

Katia Campbell

CHICANOUS (CHIQUANOUS) (4BK 12–16)

Pantagruel and his fellow travelers arrive at the

country of Procuration (4BK 12) where they first

meet the Chicanous, who are described as hairy

men (“gens a tout le poil”). Their name is derived

from the root word chicane, or chicanery. They

are in fact process-servers, often collecting dam-

ages for the beatings they receive while harassing

nobles. This curious encounter leads Panurge to

tell the story of Lord Basche’s ruse to punish the

Chicanous (4BK 12–15). The Chicanous in this

episode are sent by the fat prior of Saint-Louant

to harass Basche so that he will beat them and

then be charged with having assaulted officers of

the crown. Basche circumvents the system by

holding a mock wedding party when the Chican-

ous arrive. As part of the festivities, guests play-

fully hit each other. This tradition is taken to ex-

tremes, and on three different occasions, the

“wedding guests” gruesomely beat the Chican-

ous. While Pantagruel and Epistemon condemn

Basche’s excessive actions, Frere Jean decides

to test it himself and pays a Chicanou and then

beats him (4BK 16). The Chicanous’ harassment

of Lord Basche can be read as a critique of the

practice of summons against the nobility by

members of the clergy and the third estate.

Readings: Mireille Huchon, ed., Oeuvres completes

de Francois Rabelais (Paris: Gallimard, 1994); Robert

Marichal, “Rene Du Puy et les Chicanous,” BHR 11

(1949): 129–66.

E. Bruce Hayes

CHITTERLINGS See Andouilles (Chitterlings,

Sausages)

CHRONIQUES GARGANTUINES See Gar-

gantuan Chronicles

CICERO, MARCUS TULLIUS (106–43 B.C.)

Noted Roman statesman, lawyer, philosopher,

and orator who was revered by humanists and

heralded as a master of eloquence. Ciceronian

rhetoric, characterized by florid language, peri-

odic sentences, extensive amplification, and

overstatements used for persuasive purposes, was

a mainstay of learned discourse throughout the

Renaissance. The Gallic doctor’s own use of

lofty, erudite rhetoric, described by Donald

Frame as “more or less Ciceronian” (142), is par-

ticularly evident in his neo-Latin correspon-

dence and in speeches (G 29, 50) and letters (P

8, G 29) in the chronicles, which differ markedly

in style and tonality from the exuberant prose,

outrageous scatology, and carnivalesque banter

popularly associated with Rabelais. As a result,

Rabelais’s Ciceronian passages, viewed by some

readers as models of sincerity and earnestness,

strike others as ponderous and heavy-handed—

diametrically at odds with the “natural” speech

that Pantagruel advocates in P 6. This interpre-

tive quarrel yields radically different readings of

key texts: taken seriously, Gargantua’s letter on

learning (P 8) represents a manifesto of human-

istic pedagogy; but its inflated style, similar in

many ways to Rabelais’s “mock serious” dis-

36 Clothes

course, leaves open the possibility that he is ei-

ther parodying or interrogating the aging giant’s

ambitions for his son.

Textual allusions to Ciceronian rhetoric do lit-

tle to resolve this ambiguity. When the author

compares Eudemon to Cicero (G 15), our first

impression is positive. Yet the youth is painfully

effete, and his ornate language and eloquent

voice, unnatural in a child of twelve, make Gar-

gantua “cry like a cow.” The veiled satire of this

episode sets the stage for overt mockery in chap-

ter 39 of Gargantua where Frere Jean, accused

of taking God’s name in vain, defends his moral

lapse on rhetorical grounds, claiming the swear

words are “Ciceronian” embellishments (G 39).

Rhetoric is just one dimension of Cicero’s legacy

to French humanists, however. Like many of his

contemporaries, Rabelais alludes frequently to

the Roman orator’s historical, philosophical, and

political writings on topics ranging from military

history to debt and divination. If on one hand

these learned references serve a rhetorical func-

tion, they also enrich the ideological content of

Rabelais’s chronicles with principles of social

justice, reciprocity, and tolerance.

Readings: Richard L. Enos, The Literate Mode of

Cicero’s Legal Rhetoric (Carbondale: Southern Illinois

University Press, 1988); Donald Frame, Francois Ra-

belais. A Study (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanov-

ich, 1977); Ann Vasaly, Representations: Images of

the World in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley: Univer-

sity of California Press, 1993); Neal Wood, Cicero’s

Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1988).


CLOTHES From Panurge’s initial appear-

ance in rags (P 9) to his hooded initiatory smock

(GP 5BK 44; OC 5BK 43) and the Lantern

Queen’s embroidered and bejeweled gown in the

Fifth Book (GP 5BK 33; OC 5BK 32), clothes

permeate the Rabelaisian text. As Lance

Donaldson-Evans points out, “no author of the

early Renaissance in France evinces a greater

interest in clothes than Francois Rabelais” (2),

who devotes three chapters to Gargantua’s lav-

ish livery and its symbolism (G 8-10), focuses at

length on Panurge’s decorative codpiece, and re-

gales us with myriad details about the luxurious

fabrics (satin, brocade, linen, taffeta, damask,

velvet), rich colors (gold, silver, purple, orange,

green, yellow), ornate accessories (collar pieces

with fine gems, lace veils, hats garnished with

berries and buttons, feathers in the hair, taffeta

petticoats), and fashion-conscious design (form-

fitting stockings and breeches for the men,

topped with luxurious jackets and decorative

weaponery; and for the women short or long

gowns, embroidered with rich silk thread and

studded in pearls) of clothing at Theleme.

In the prologue to Gargantua, of course, Ra-

belais focuses on the frequent discontinuity be-

tween outward appearance and inner worth,

which seems on one level to suggest that “l’habit

ne fait pas le moine,” or, as we say in English,

that one cannot judge a book by its cover. In

Pantagruel this adage may apply to the clergy

and to haughty ladies, who find their impressive

garments torn to shreds or pulled up above their

waists by Panurge’s sly stitchery (P 16). How-

ever, Rabelais more frequently seems to revel in

the symbolic and aesthetic possibilities of cloth-

ing, which serve as indicators of taste, wealth,

power, masculinity, and—hypothetically—inner

nobility of character that is externalized through

the language of clothes. As Count Ludovico da

Canossa points out in Castiglione’s Book of the

Courtier, after all, outward appearances are at

times our only clues to a person’s character. And

while Pantagruel admits that sartorial eccentrici-

ties, such as Panurge’s decision in 3BK 7 to tie

spectacles to his cap, take off his breeches, and

wear a flea-studded earring, are in themselves

neither good nor evil, he nonetheless chastises

his friend gently for flouting “current usage.”

Readings: Lance Donaldson-Evans, “Fashioning

Gargantua: Rabelais and the History of Costume,”

Mots pluriels 10 (1999); Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter

Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials

of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2000); Daniel Russell, “Panurge and His New

Clothes,” ER 14 (1977): 89–104; Florence Weinberg,

“Platonic and Pauline Ideals in Comic Dress: ‘Com-

ment on vestit Gargantua,’ ” Illinois Classical Studies

9 (1984): 183–95.


Colonna, Francesco 37

CODPIECE (BRAGUETTE) Taking their or-

igin from plated suits of armor, Renaissance

braguettes or codpieces exaggerated the size of

the male member underneath and were often dec-

orated. Very much in style among the nobility in

the first half of the sixteenth century in France,

the braguette is a very prominent aspect of male

costume in Rabelais, referred to in all four au-

thenticated books and representing aspects of

masculinity such as sexual and military virility.

Implying the noble giant’s future virility, Gar-

gantua’s famous braguette is described in great

comic detail (G 8) not only as enormous, made

up of 24 1⁄4 yards of material, but also as mag-

nificently decorated. The narrator states that

it could be compared “to one of those grand

Horns of Plenty” because of its fertility and full-

ness (see Cornucopia). Inside is a male member

that matches the size of the braguette, “having

no resemblance to the fraudulent braguettes of

so many young gentlemen which contain nothing

but wind.” Since Terence Cave’s influential in-

terpretation, this abundant braguette is generally

taken to represent a textual copia (or abundance),

a rhetorical and humanist commonplace requir-

ing a brand of linguistic versatility and richness

discussed in Erasmus’s well-known De Copia

(1512). In this case, male sexual potency repre-

sented by the braguette corresponds to textual

copia, a link confirmed by the narrator’s refer-

ence near the end of the passage to a book of his

entitled On the Dignity of Braguettes. But even

as the braguette represents a fullness, it is unable

to maintain the quality and in the end is deflated.

The reference to the braguettes “which contain

nothing but wind” implies a sexual as well as a

textual emptiness, as rhetoric can turn out to be

devoid of meaning under its aesthetic exterior.

Although not noble, Panurge is also closely

associated with the braguette in Pantagruel and

the Third Book. As Pantagruel has him dressed

according to the fashion of the day (P 15), Pan-

urge asserts what he sees as his masculinized in-

dividuality by insisting on a braguette “cut three

foot long and square, not round.” Later, as his

academic and rhetorical virility grows and as he

prepares to seduce the object of his affection, he

decorates his braguette “with embroidery in the

Romanesque style” (P 21). As Panurge moves

toward victory in his debate by signs with Thau-

maste (P 19), he draws out, extends, and shakes

his braguette. In this debate, Panurge’s braguette

represents virilized humanism in opposition to

the nonvirile, outdated school of scholasticism

espoused by the feminized Thaumaste (see Per-

sels, 1997).

In the Third Book (3BK 7), Panurge’s quan-

dary as to whether he should marry is symbolized

by what he does with his braguette. Having de-

cided to give up a life of war, he disguises him-

self, removing his “fine and magnificent bra-

guette on which [he] had once relied, as on a

holy anchor.” The following chapter (3BK 8) de-

tails how the braguette is “the principal piece in

a warrior’s armour,” suggesting that Panurge is

contemplating giving up a life of arms in favor

of a more sedate lifestyle based around the fam-

ily (see Russell, 1977). He also describes remov-

ing the braguette as a kind of religious vow

(3BK 24), or a move toward the contemplative

life in which he can make a well-thought-out de-

cision about whether to marry. In the Fourth

Book (5), Dindenault or Dingdong notices that

Panurge is without his braguette and mocks him

as a cuckold, thereby linking being cheated on

by one’s wife with demasculinization. The im-

portance accorded to Panurge’s missing bra-

guette in the Third Book could also refer to an

emptiness of narrative copia in the absurd and

highly repetitious book that leads to no definite

conclusions (see Cave, 1979). Without his tex-

tual/sexual “anchor,” Panurge is devoid of any

kind of textual fertility and of any stable, non-

superficial meaning.

Readings: Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text:

Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Ox-

ford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Jeffery C. Persels, “Bra-

gueta Humanıstica, or Humanism’s Codpiece,” SCJ

28.1 (1997): 79–99; Daniel Russell, “Panurge and his

New Clothes,” ER 14 (1977): 89–104; James Sacre,

“Les metamorphoses d’une braguette,” Litterature 26

(May 1977): 72–93.

Todd Reeser

COLONNA, FRANCESCO (1433–1527)

Fifteenth-century Venetian friar whose allegori-

cal dream vision Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

38 Colors

(Dream of Polyphilus) was published by Aldus

Manutius in 1499. The first vernacular work ever

printed by Aldus, the Hypnerotomachia enjoyed

a great deal of celebrity during the Renaissance

primarily because of its beautiful woodcut illus-

trations. The work was translated into French in

1546 by Jean Martin, under the title Discours du

songe de Poliphile, with original engravings by

Jean Goujon. Rabelais mentions the Hypneroto-

machia twice, both times in relation to hiero-

glyphs, and it has been suggested, plausibly, that

he learned of Colonna’s work from Geoffroy

Tory, whose Champfleury refers to “Polyphile”

as a source of pseudohieroglyphs or imaginary

letters in the manner of the Egyptians. It is cer-

tain that Colonna, Tory, and Rabelais all share

what might be called a typographic aesthetic or

an appreciation of the graphic appeal of words

on the printed page.

Beginning with the eighteenth-century com-

mentator Leduchat, criticism has gradually ac-

knowledged Rabelais’s debt to Colonna. Those

who have studied the presence of Colonna in Ra-

belais usually focus on the episode of the Abbey

of Theleme in Gargantua, the Island of the Ma-

creons in the Fourth Book, and two lengthy bor-

rowings in the Fifth Book: the chess ballet at the

court of Queen Quintessence and the Temple of

Bacbuc, priestess of the Holy Bottle. The as-

sessment of Colonna’s importance for the Fifth

Book has also been used to confirm or deny the

authenticity of the work as well as to distinguish

its various stages of composition.

Most of these episodes exemplify the ekphras-

tic impulse that Rabelais shares with Colonna,

whose lengthy descriptions of art and architec-

ture, of mosaics, obelisks, fountains, and funeral

monuments, occupy the bulk of what is largely

a static, descriptive work. The same tendency

manifests itself at times in Rabelais and begins

to predominate in the conclusion of the Fifth

Book, where the description of the temple of the

Holy Bottle imitates numerous details from Co-

lonna’s temple of Venus Physizoe in which Po-

lifilo and Polia are initiated into the mysteries of

love. The ekphrastic passages found in both au-

thors may even possess some occult significance,

since critics or enthusiasts have discerned al-

chemical symbolism in the architecture and ac-

cessories of the temple which each author de-

scribes. Others suggest that Rabelais himself

initiated the alchemical reading of Colonna by

importing esoteric motifs into forms previously

devoid of any such references (see Alchemy).

One aspect of Rabelais’s reception of Colonna

that deserves much more attention than it has re-

ceived so far is the impact of Colonna’s very

distinctive and unusual diction on Rabelais’s ver-

bal creativity. Colonna inserts Latin words with

Italian declensions into pompous periodic

phrases so as to create an unnatural, hybrid style

of speech. On a much smaller scale, Rabelais ex-

periments with this same procedure in the epi-

sode of the Ecolier Limousin (P 6), who con-

structs his phrases from Latin words with French

endings arranged in vernacular word order. Ra-

belais returns to this hybrid style in his portrayal

of Queen Quintessence (5BK 18–24), whose es-

oteric diction and contorted syntax seem to point

directly to Colonna. Therefore, among the vari-

ous inspirations that Rabelais drew from Co-

lonna’s work, we may include the stylistic ex-

ercise of relatinizing the vernacular to the limit

of its capacity.

Readings: Leon Dorez, “Des origines et de la dif-

fusion du Songe de Poliphile,” Revue des biblio-

theques 6 (1896): 239–61; Gilles Polizzi, “Theleme ou

l’eloge du don: le texte Rabelaisien a la lumiere de

l’Hypernotomachia Poliphili,” RHR 25 (1988): 39–59;

Gilles Polizzi, “Le voyage vers l’oracle ou la derive

des intertextes dans le Cinquieme livre,” Le cin-

quiesme livre. Actes du colloque international de

Rome (Geneva: Droz, 2001): 577–596; Louis Thuasne,

Etudes sur Rabelais (Paris: Champion, 1969).

Eric MacPhail

COLORS Together with gestures, emblems,

hieroglyphs, devices, and precious stones, colors

are among the many “signs” endowed with sym-

bolic meaning that feature so prominently in Ra-

belais’s books. A subject that aroused much in-

terest and discussion during the Renaissance,

both in courtly and scholarly circles, colors and

their symbolism are chiefly dealt with in a set of

chapters in Gargantua (8–10). The choice of

white and blue for Gargantua’s livery occasions

a declamation on the true meaning of these col-

ors. Gargantua’s father’s equation of white with

joy and delight, and of blue with heavenly things,

runs counter to the common belief that white sig-

Community, Portrayal of 39

nifies faith and blue firmness. The narrator at-

tributes this view to the anonymous (as he has

it) Blazon of Colors (Blason des couleurs). Be-

hind this apparent target of Alcofrybas’s criti-

cism lie all similar treatises, guilty of arbitrarily

conferring meanings on colors and devices. Un-

like words (3BK 19), colors have natural rather

than imposed meanings. Alcofrybas promises to

devote a long treatise to colors and their real sig-

nificance (G 8). He gives us a sample of it in the

following chapter, an erudite exposition of the

reasons white must be associated with joy and

delight, whose legal, theological, and philosoph-

ical overtones are discussed in a detailed study

by M. A. Screech. These chapters shed light on

color symbolism throughout Rabelais’s work.

Rabelais uses color sparely and with great ef-

fect, usually in descriptions of clothing, liveries,

architecture, food, and wonders. Clusters of color

appear in a relatively small number of episodes,

and their presence is highly symbolic. Rabelais’s

interest in heraldry manifests itself in his precise

descriptions of the colors of noblemen’s liveries

in the Sciomachie (1549), and in the Frozen

Words or parolles gelees episode of the Fourth

Book, where the words take on the guise of he-

raldic colors (4BK 56). Similarly, the brightly

colored feathers of the birds inhabiting Ringing

Island or L’Isle sonante (5BK 5) are emblematic

of different knightly orders. In the utopian Ab-

bey of Theleme, nuns and monks sport fashion-

able outfits in a wealth of colors (G 56), in strik-

ing contrast to their real-life counterparts clad in

grey, dark and dull tones, the colors which stand

for the mendicant friars in the account of the poet

Raminagrobis (3BK 21). Religious symbolism

also dictates the grey and cold colors of King

Lent or Quaresmeprenant’s clothing (4BK 29).

While color is rare in Pantagruel, its use in-

creases markedly in the final books which, as

travel narratives, contain lavish descriptions of

places, curiosities and wonders such as the color-

changing chameleon (4BK 2). The quest for the

Divine Bottle or Dive Bouteille is itself placed

under the auspicious ensigns of white and red

(4BK 1). Color is also present in set expressions,

puns, and curses.

Readings: Gerard Defaux, “Rabelais et son masque

comique: Sophista loquitur,” ER 11 (1974): 113–127;

Francois Rigolot, “Cratylisme et Pantagruelisme: Ra-

belais et le statut du signe,” ER 13 (1976): 115–32;

Michael A. Screech, “Emblems and Colours. The Con-

troversy over Gargantua’s Colors and Devices,” Me-

langes d’histoire du XVIe siecle offerts a Henri Mey-

lan (Geneva: Droz, 1970).


COMMUNITY, PORTRAYAL OF A strong

unifying theme embodied in the concept of Pan-

tagruelists, the motif of community is found

throughout Rabelais’s writings. Community, the

sharing of common goals and values by a group,

occurs in many forms in the text, reflecting the

numerous communal examples in Rabelais’s own

society from which he could draw inspiration.

The monastery was likely an influential standard

of community for Rabelais. As is seen in his four

chronicles, Rabelais could be critical of monas-

teries, characterizing monks as timorous gluttons

seeking refuge from worldly hazards and respon-

sibilities rather than isolation for devout prayer

and meditation. Like many humanists, Rabelais

believed that the Apostles and other early Chris-

tians constituted the ideal community, with the

monastical system having distanced itself over

time from their model. It is apparent that Rabe-

lais was not entirely comfortable with his own

role as a monk: first a Franciscan, then a Bene-

dictine, he and the other members of his Bene-

dictine abbey at Saint-Maur-les-Fosses eventu-

ally became secularized. Rabelais’s utopian

Abbey of Theleme, described at the end of Gar-

gantua, offers, perhaps, a counterpoint to the tra-

ditional monastery. Founded by Gargantua and

led by the vigorous Frere Jean, it is a commu-

nity restricted to the young, beautiful, and noble.

Another highly organized community of which

Rabelais was critical was the Sorbonne. As an

adjunct of the Church, the institution of theolo-

gians invoked its royally sanctioned powers to

censor humanist books and to exile their authors.

Rabelais saw his own works criticized and cen-

sored as well as those of Francis I’s sister, Mar-

guerite de Navarre (see Censors and Censor-

ship). Even more damaging was the Sorbonne’s

influence in spearheading campaigns of perse-

cution and oppression, often leading to the autos-

da-fes of prominent scholars. Humanists such as

Rabelais not only found the Sorbonne’s actions

40 Coq-a-l’ane

reprehensible but deemed its very practice of

learning and language to be retrograde and per-

nicious. In Gargantua, Rabelais ridicules at

length the pompous manner and corrupt Latin of

the ubiquitous Sorbonnicoles with his presenta-

tion of Gargantua’s bumbling and ineffective tu-

tor, Thubal Holoferne.

Humanists in general offered Rabelais a rich

and positive communal example. The noun hu-

manista itself, used in late fifteenth-century Italy

to designate members of a professional group of

teachers, is based on the notion of a community

of scholars. The humanist attitude deemed learn-

ing and the practice of virtue as distinctive to

man. The late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-

century humanists Desiderius Erasmus, Tho-

mas More, Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples, and

Guillaume Bude concentrated their intellectual

efforts on the study of classical works which em-

phasized the dignity of man. Not only did these

scholars’ writings exert a great influence on Ra-

belais’s intellectual development, but their close

friendships and regular correspondence gave

Rabelais a standard for communal excellence.

Small but influential groups in Rabelais’s so-

ciety are represented throughout the Third Book

as Panurge visits those whom he believes can

best predict whether he should marry. Rabelais

satirizes communities of lawyers, judges, doc-

tors, charlatans, and seers as their representatives

such as Raminagrobis, Bridoye, Triboullet,

and Rondibilis offer their opinions to Panurge.

The portrayal of community is most promi-

nently demonstrated in the Fourth Book. The

text’s narrative consists of successive encounters

of various communal island groups by Panta-

gruel’s own community on his ship, the Thala-

mege. The chronicle provides the modern reader

with a view of the microcosm of cultural issues

and conflicts predominant in mid-sixteenth-

century France. For instance, the widespread de-

velopment and increasing importance of inter-

national commerce is emphasized on the trade

island of Medamothi (4BK 2), as well as on

Dindenault’s merchant ship (6). The period’s

rapid technical advances are reflected in Gaster’s

litany of inventions (57). Not least, the religious

strife between Protestant groups and Catholics

occurring at the time of the book’s composition

is highlighted with the inclusion of Quaresme-

prenant (Lentkeeper) (29), the Andouilles (Chit-

terlings) (35), the Papefigues (45), and the Pap-

imanes (48) episodes.

Rabelais’s reading and his knowledge of di-

verse literary communities would have further

helped him in imagining the insular communities

eventually depicted in the Fourth Book. Well

versed in classical literature, Rabelais would

have been familiar with utopian communities

such as Atlantis in Plato’s Timaeus. Lucian’s

tongue-in-cheek presentation of fantastic imagi-

nary communities in his True History, along with

Plutarch’s tales in The Moralia, inspired Rabe-

lais’s own chronicles. The myth of Paradise or

the Golden Age permeate Rabelais’s readings. It

appears in classical works such as Hesiod’s

Works and Days with its most familiar version,

the Garden of Eden, introduced in the biblical

book of Genesis. Closer to Rabelais’s own time,

Thomas More’s Utopia and Sebastian Brant’s

Ship of Fools’ depictions of imaginary commu-

nities were known to Rabelais. With this variety

of sources in mind, Rabelais in his Fourth Book

established Pantagruel’s ship as a paradigmatic

community to which all others may be compared,

as it accommodates both wisdom and nonsense.

The resultant comparisons sometimes become sa-

tirical and even caricatural, a trait shared by all

of Rabelais’s works.

Readings: Barbara C. Bowen, Enter Rabelais,

Laughing (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press,

1998): 68–101; Margaret Harp, The Portrayal of Com-

munity in Rabelais’s Quart Livre (New York: Peter

Lang, 1997).

Margaret Harp

COQ-A-L’ANE Originally a form of poetry

that commented critically on current events be-

hind the protective veil of an allusive style that

jumped from topic to topic without any apparent

coherence—hence the alternative designation of

non sequitur. Thomas Sebillet defines the coq-a-

l’ane as a truly French form of the satire, in-

vented by Clement Marot, in his Art poetique

francoys (1548), an assessment that Joachim du

Bellay confirms in his Deffense et Illustration de

la langue francoyse (1549). Marot’s first Epıtre

du coq a l’ane dates from 1530, shortly before

the publication of Pantagruel. We find similar

incoherent structures in medieval farce and

Correspondence 41

sottie-plays as well as in the lesser known genres

of the fatras and the fatrasie, the fatrasie provid-

ing a prose model for the non sequitur. Techni-

cally, the coq-a-l’ane therefore falls in the cate-

gory that Nothrop Frye calls “low-norm satire”

(Anatomy of Criticism). In Rabelais the form is

particularly prominent in the first two books, the

process of Baisecul and Humevesne (P 10–13)

or the “Fanfreluches antidotees” (G 2) consti-

tuting its most obvious examples. It virtually

vanishes in the later books, being replaced by

more erudite and classical forms of satire. This

change could serve as an indicator of Rabelais’s

development as a writer, who, in his early phase,

was feeding off of medieval literary traditions,

while at the same time attempting, through satire,

to move beyond them.

Readings: Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism:

Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1957); Claude-Albert Mayer, “Coq-a-l’ane: Defini-

tion—Invention—Attribution,” FS 16 (1962): 1–13;

Bernd Renner, “Du coq-a-l’ane a la menippeenne: la

satire comme forme d’expression litteraire chez Ra-

belais” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2000); Fran-

cois Rigolot, “Dichotomie linguistique. Le mot et la

syntaxe,” Les langages de Rabelais, ER 10 (Geneva:

Droz, 1972): 41–48; Thomas Sebillet, Art poetique

francois, ed. Felix Gaffe and Francis Goyet, Societe

des textes francais modernes 6 (Paris: Nizet, 1988).

Bernd Renner

CORNUCOPIA Cornucopian imagery in Ra-

belais frequently functions as a vehicle for self-

conscious reflection on the workings of language

and the potential disjunction between rhetorical

surface and the thing represented. This theme is

particularly prominent in Gargantua 8, the de-

scription of the child Gargantua’s codpiece,

where Alcofrybas uses the simile of a horn of

plenty in asserting that the bejeweled exterior ac-

curately represents the value of the contents. The

passage ends with a negative counterexample of

codpieces “full only of wind,” however, and par-

allel passages in Pantagruel (8) and the Third

Book (7) likewise evoke the threat of mere rep-

etition or emptiness in what initially appears to

be potency. A similar anxiety is visible in the

prologue to the Third Book, where references to

the book as “an inexhaustible barrel . . . a real

Cornucopia” are systematically undercut by im-

ages of unattainability and lack. The motif of

empty proliferation plays out on a structural level

as well. The repetitiveness of Panurge’s consul-

tations makes the Third Book appear as a dram-

atization of the impossibility of moving beyond

ambiguous signs to interpretive certitude, and the

quest theme of the Fourth Book can be read as

a spatial enactment of the search for a locus of

abundance.

Terence Cave’s The Cornucopian Text exam-

ines the notion of copia as a rhetorical ideal

whereby northern Renaissance writers sought to

imitate the stylistic plenitude and inexhaustible

meanings of the great pagan texts and Scripture.

A prominent theme in the works of Erasmus,

especially De duplici copia verborum ac rerum

(1512), copia also figures in Rabelais, Ronsard,

Montaigne, and other canonical Renaissance

writers. Cave highlights the tension between the

humanist preference for protean texts (which

yield potentially limitless interpretations rather

than being reducible to a single stable reading)

and the persistent fear that displays of rhetorical

virtuosity might mask the absence of an altior

sensus or higher meaning.

Reading: Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).

Jennifer Monahan

CORRESPONDENCE Very little of Rabe-

lais’s correspondence survives, and such as does

exist is rather due to the distinction of the re-

ceiver than to that of the sender. The young

monk at Fontenay-le-Comte sought to make con-

tact with major humanist scholars, as witness his

earliest surviving letter of March 4, 1521 (BnF,

ms. Rothschild, arm. 1510), the surviving frag-

ment of his correspondence with Guillaume

Bude, which earned him two replies from Bude,

of which one was in Greek. Rabelais tries to im-

press by imitating Bude’s style and ideas, in-

cluding the mixture of Greek and Latin, images

of darkness and madness, and elaborate legal

jokes. Another surviving autograph humanist let-

ter was sent ten years later to Erasmus on No-

vember 30, 1532 (formerly in Leipzig, ms.

0331m, now lost). The humanist script is similar,

as is the profession of devotion, but the style is

now more elegant and less showy. Fragments of

poems suggest he was also in correspondence

42 Correspondence

with Tiraqueau and others, but the next firm ev-

idence of his public humanist letters consists in

the dedicatory epistles which he included in

1532–34 with his first scholarly publications in

Lyon: to Andre Tiraqueau (June 3, 1532); to

Geoffroy d’Estissac (July 15, 1532); to Amaury

Bouchard (September 4, 1532) and to Jean du

Bellay (August 31, 1534). In these letters he con-

tinues the art of panegyric and remains faithful

to the hellenizing Latin of Bude, full of unusual

vocabulary, of numerous quotations from or al-

lusions to classical texts, and of striking images.

The letter to Tiraqueau is a good example of his

kaleidoscopic use of metaphors; the opening of

the letter to du Bellay exemplifies Rabelais’s

Latin rhetoric, with carefully constructed trico-

lon, parallelism, wordplay, and climax. Gone is

the humility of the letters to Bude and Erasmus,

replaced by the confident advocacy by a pub-

lished author of the new humanist philology and

fierce denunciation of its opponents.

A verse epistle to Jean Bouchet dated Septem-

ber 6, [1527?], and its reply, suggest that Rabe-

lais participated in the exchange of letters in

verse common under Francis I. Rabelais’s sur-

viving neo-Latin poetry suggests that he partook

in similar, often joking, exchanges in Latin with

poets like Etienne Dolet, Salmon Macrin, and

Jean de Boyssonne. A few fragments exist of his

personal correspondence in French with friends

and protectors. The three letters sent from Rome

to d’Estissac in 1535–36 are part of a larger lost

correspondence with his spiritual superior (at

least ten lost letters). One of them (January 28,

1536, BnF, ms. Rothschild A.xvi.162) is auto-

graph and shows Rabelais writing in a French

bastard hand, except for foreign quotations which

are in italic. These letters send political news

from Rome and the Mediterranean, drawn in part

from printed newsletters, which do not show him

to be particularly well informed. He reveals his

patriotism in the judgments he offers on the

news, and his style at times reflects that of his

comic works, with lists, Italianate vocabulary,

and picturesque images. Other indiscreet letters

he wrote were intercepted and provoked the fa-

mous quart d’heure de Rabelais, or short brush

with the law, during which he was reportedly ar-

rested and interrogated by Cardinal Francois de

Tournon. During his stay in Turin (1540–42) he

also exchanged letters with the ambassador in

Venice, Guillaume Pellicier, of which three re-

plies survive: apart from snippets of news, the

topics were law, medicine and the copying of

ancient manuscripts. During one vacation from

Turin Rabelais wrote to a friend in Orleans, An-

toine Hullot (March 1, [1542]), which survives

only in copies: Rabelais’s letter inviting his

friend to a Lenten banquet, at which lists of wine

and fish would be served, is reminiscent of his

comic writing, with its dense, allusive burlesque

patter. No greater contrast could be imagined

than with Rabelais’s only other surviving auto-

graph letter, sent from Metz on February 6,

[1547?] to Jean du Bellay (formerly in the Barrett

collection in Chicago): reduced to exile, indi-

gence, and despair, he pleads with his wealthy

patron for support, apparently with success, since

within a few months he was with the cardinal in

Rome.

Rabelais’s books contain models of epistolary

writing that reveal the author’s interest in rhet-

oric (P 8; G 29; 4BK 3–4), as well as an admi-

rable example of Rabelais’s own formal letter-

writing in the epıtre to Odet de Chastillon

(January 28, 1552), thanking him for his support

and stoutly defending himself, presented in a

long image of the doctor, against his calumni-

ateurs or detractors. As was common with con-

temporary newsletters, Rabelais’s occasional

piece, La Sciomachie of 1549, is presented as

“excerpted from a copy of the letters” (“extraict

d’une copie des lettres”) sent from Rome to the

cardinal de Guise, and contains a number of epis-

tolary devices. The style chosen exemplifies the

elegant vernacular that Rabelais was pioneering,

but without the comic elements and the overlay

of erudition present in his five books.

Readings: Jacques Boulenger, “Etude critique sur

les lettres ecrites d’Italie par Francois Rabelais,” RER

1 (1903): 97–121; Victor-Louis Bourrilly, ed., Rabe-

lais, lettres ecrites d’Italie, (Paris: Champion, 1910);

Henri Clouzot, “Les amities de Rabelais en orleanais

et la lettre au bailli du bailli des baillis,” RER 3 (1905):

156–75; Richard A. Cooper, “Rabelais’ neo-Latin

writings,” Neo-Latin and the Vernacular in Renais-

sance France, ed. Grahame Castor and Terence Cave

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); R. A. Coo-

per, Rabelais et l’Italie (Geneva: Droz, 1991); R. A.

Cooper, “Rabelais ‘architriclin dudict Pantagruel,’ ”

Critical Theory 43

Rabelais-Dionysos: Vin, carnaval, ivresse, ed. Michel

Bideaux (Montpellier: J. Laffitte, 1997); Arthur Heul-

hard, Rabelais, ses voyages en Italie, son exil a Metz

(Paris: 1891); Librairie de l’art, Fritz Neubert, “Fran-

cois Rabelais’ Briefe,” Zeitschrift fur franzosische

Sprache und Literatur 71 (1961): 154–85.

Richard Cooper

COUILLATRIS (4BK prol.) Poor woodcutter

from the village of Gravot (Bourgueil) whose

name literally translates as the “ballsy guy,”

Couillatris appears in the prologue to the Fourth

Book as the central character and model of mod-

eration and sexual temperance in Rabelais’s fan-

tastic version of an Old Testament miracle story

(2 Kings 6.1–7). Though the biblical story in-

volves divine intervention in the retrieval of a

lost axe blade, Rabelais centers his interpretation

of its significance around a claim that the biblical

miracle took place only because the prayer re-

quest for restoring the axe blade; that is, the

woodcutter’s source of livelihood, was reasona-

ble and moderate. From this claim Rabelais de-

velops a parable whose message is expanded to

encourage moderation and temperance specifi-

cally with regard to sexual conduct, insofar as

such moderation would permit maintenance of

man’s prize possession: good health.

Replete with sexual metaphors beyond his

name, the Couillatris story relates that after los-

ing his axe blade the woodsman is soon visited

by Death, upon which he vigorously summons

Jupiter to intervene and either return or replace

his only source of livelihood. The axe blade here

becomes a metaphor for health, following the pri-

mary theme of the prologue. As Jupiter considers

the request, enters Priapus, a god of fertility and

viticulture typically represented with a large vir-

ile member, to link the condition of prolonged

and painful erections to the increasingly explicit

theme of (im)moderation in sexual activity. The

lustful god reports on various definitions of the

term used here to designate an axe blade (coig-

nee), citing popular poetry and song to authen-

ticate the word’s multiple sexual connotations.

Rabelais pushes his health metaphor further by

clarifying that the loss of Couillatris’s “blade” is

akin to the loss of sexual health, most likely due

to syphilis, and thus related to diminishing health

in general. Mercury, here messenger for the gods,

but for Doctor Rabelais the main ingredient of

deadly charlatan treatments for syphilis, is sent

to offer a choice of three axe blades: Couillatris’s

blade along with one of gold and another of sil-

ver. Should the woodsman choose a blade other

than his, he is to be executed with his own axe.

However, if he chooses his own in an act of wise

moderation and honesty, he is to be rewarded

with the two others. Fortunately, the simple

Couillatris opts for his own blade.

Reveling in his newfound fortune, the wood-

cutter goes on to acquire land and animals in

such quantity that he is soon the wealthiest man

around. When others learn of the manner in

which he obtained his fortune, they attempt to

repeat the scene. Not having learned, however,

that the key to riches is moderation (i.e., refusal

of the gold and silver axe heads), the eager

fortune-seekers try to claim the precious blades

and are instantly executed by terrible Mercury

with their own blades. The Couillatris “parable”

succeeds in showing the potentially deadly re-

sults of excess desire and immoderate behavior,

while praising themes dear to Doctor Rabelais:

moderation, abstinence, and valuing one’s health

above all else, even at the expense of sexual

pleasure.

Reading: Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London:

Duckworth, 1979).

Lesa Randall

CRITICAL THEORY Although the most

dramatic impact of critical theory on Rabelais

studies coincides with the appearance of struc-

turalism and poststructuralism on the intellectual

scene in the 1960s and beyond, in a sense the

critical attitude of professional readers of Rabe-

lais has always been grounded in the literary the-

ories of the day. The hostility manifested toward

Rabelais’s work in the seventeenth and eight-

eenth centuries has sometimes been explained in

political terms, as an effect of the progressive

embourgeoisement of French society. But it can

also be ascribed, with at least equal justification,

to the dominance of classical norms at the time

of Boileau and La Bruyere, and to their persist-

ence in neoclassical guise in the age of Voltaire.

Conversely, the enthusiasm of the Romantic gen-

eration had obviously much to do with their con-

viction that a hallmark of great literary works

44 Critical Theory

was their ability to present a complete picture of

reality, encompassing in a bold juxtaposition—

as Rabelais’s book so strikingly did—both the

sublime and the grotesque elements of human ex-

perience. The correlation between critical ap-

proach and dominant theory is even clearer at the

turn of the century, when the prevailing positiv-

istic mentality and more specifically the deter-

ministic literary theories of Hippolyte Taine,

with their stress on social milieu and historic mo-

ment, led Abel Lefranc and his academic follow-

ers to appreciate Rabelais’s fiction above all for

its alleged realism and its documentary value.

Modern critical theories begin to affect the

course of Rabelais criticism some sixty years

later, with Leo Spitzer’s ahistorical approach to

textual analysis. When the German philologist,

in a memorably scathing article entitled “Rabe-

lais et les ‘rabelaisants’ ” (1960), seeks to impose

his conception of Rabelais’s work as an original

verbal creation rather than a mere recreation of

preexisting metalinguistic reality, he does so in

the name of a theory which, in its insistence on

aesthetic appreciation of form and structure in-

dependent of any contextual considerations, sit-

uates itself at the crossroads of Russian Formal-

ism, New Criticism, and the peculiarly French

tradition of the explication de texte.

To the extent that Spitzer’s attack was aimed

specifically at the kind of interpretative studies

that persisted in the wake of Abel Lefranc into

the 1950s, it also represented one of the first at-

tempts to challenge the traditional interpretation

of Rabelais’s fictional work as a document pro-

moting the religious and cultural values of Ren-

aissance humanism. Another more specifically

ideological challenge to traditional humanistic

interpretations came at more or less the same

time from the Marxist wing of Rabelais critics,

first in 1955 with a study by Henri Lefebvre,

then, some thirteen years later, with Mikhail

Bakhtin’s monumental Rabelais and His World.

Le probleme de l’incoyance au XVIe siecle, Lu-

cien Febvre’s historical, psychological, and so-

ciological study of what Lucien Goldmann was

to call the “mental structures” at the time of Ra-

belais, had previously sought to replace the con-

cept of rationalistic humanism, which Rabelais’s

work was alleged to embody, by a new concept

of the Renaissance as an age of sensibility and

instinct rather than science and knowledge. This

time it is humanism itself, however defined,

which finds itself rejected as the dominant ide-

ology underlying Rabelais’s fictional text. Mini-

mizing in the extreme the role of official high

culture as its source of inspiration, the Marxist

readings present Rabelais’s work as reflecting ei-

ther the totality of human experience at a partic-

ular moment in the inexorable progress of history

toward a better world, or, in the case of Bakhtin,

its popular origins and the carnivalesque spirit

of subversion allegedly permeating every aspect

of the Gargantua-Pantagruel. Bakhtin’s dog-

matic contention that Rabelais can only be un-

derstood in the context of popular culture and

folk humor, his emphasis on Rabelais’s use of

the language of the marketplace, and his valori-

zation of the lower body (at the expense of the

mind) as the productive center of transformation

and renewal, have been seen by some as political

propaganda masquerading as scholarship. Others

have viewed it as a welcome antidote to the hith-

erto excessive stress on the intellectual content

of Rabelais’s fiction. But all would no doubt ac-

knowledge that in its new semiotic orientation,

and in its emphasis on the text as a polyphony

of alternative voices free from any authorial in-

terference, Rabelais and His World played a de-

termining role in ushering in the momentous

changes that were to characterize the structuralist

and poststructuralist phase of Rabelais criticism

in the next decades of its evolution.

Rabelais’s awareness of the problems inherent

in the use of language, and the often ambiguous,

paradoxical, and sometimes ambivalent nature of

his text had been noted by traditional scholars

and critics well before the advent of linguistic

structuralism. Recently, critics of poststructural

persuasion such as Jean Paris and, more recently

still, Michel Jeanneret, have sought to draw from

these early insights their fullest consequences.

They have also sought to prove, through a new

reading of such texts as the prologue to Gargan-

tua and the episode of the Frozen Words in

Book 4, that Rabelais had anticipated the theories

of structural linguistics about the essential am-

biguity and polyvalence of all verbal statements;

that his ambiguous, paradoxical, discontinuous

text was a direct result of his discovery of the

contingency of language; and that the prologue,

Critical Theory 45

far from sanctioning the search for a specific

meaning embedded in the fictional fabric of the

book, proposes a new conception of the act of

reading, in which the reader is responsible for

the interpretation he chooses to impose upon a

text whose intended meaning will never be

known.

Behind such pronouncements, it is not difficult

to detect some of the main tenets of structuralist

and poststructuralist theories as they relate to lit-

erary texts: Ferdinand de Saussure’s notion of the

arbitrariness of verbal signs and their frequent

inability to signify; Roland Barthes’s proclama-

tion of the Death of the Author, and his conten-

tion that a text is not to be read as the expression

of a writer’s thought but as a rearrangement of

what had already been written into a new config-

uration offered for the pleasure of the reader;

Michel Foucault’s reflection on the relationship

between words and things; Lacan’s rejection of

the idea that a text can reveal the author’s in-

tended meaning, in view of the role of the un-

conscious in literary expression; and Derrida’s

similar contention, grounded in his deconstruc-

tionism, that authors always say something dif-

ferent from what they mean to say, because the

unfolding of their text owes more to the laws of

textuality than to authorial intention.

In an early structuralist “Note sur Rabelais et

le langage” published in Tel Quel in 1963, Jean

Starobinski pointed out how often an absurd ep-

isode in Rabelais’s novels is “rectified” in the

one that follows, and saw in this alternation the

main principle of their secret structure. Noting

the same alternation between opposing view-

points within any given episode, but rejecting the

notion of “rectification” as implying an unwar-

ranted belief in authorial intervention, later Rab-

elaisian structuralists postulated such binary op-

positions as forming the very essence of

Rabelais’s dialectical text. They then endowed it

with a plurality of alternative meanings whose

function was to enrich its thematic complexity

while invalidating by their coexistence any at-

tempt at coherent interpretation. The extremism

of this position, and the contention that it was

authorized by Rabelais’s own reflection on lan-

guage and interpretation, were bound to engen-

der, as indeed they did in the 1980s, one of the

most heated controversies in the turbulent history

of Rabelais criticism. Viewing poststructuralist

criticism of Rabelais as fundamentally wrong-

headed in its adoption of an antihumanistic ap-

proach to an essentially humanistic work, rela-

tively traditionalist scholars like Gerard Defaux,

Francois Rigolot, and Edwin Duval saw the mod-

ern critics’ insistence upon the polyvalence of

Rabelais’s text as stemming from their adherence

to the fashionable tenets of poststructuralist the-

ory rather than from a careful reading of Rabe-

lais’s text. The modern critics’ equally spirited

defense of their position can be followed in the

scholarly publications of the time. Only recently

has the polemic lost some of its vehemence, as

poststructuralism itself casts an increasingly

amused and skeptical glance at its earlier preten-

sions.

Whatever controversy still surrounds Rabelais

studies can be found above all in the application

of feminist theories to Rabelais criticism. On the

question of Rabelais’s attitude toward women,

traditional criticism has been particularly inde-

cisive. For those who believe that Rabelais did

not mean to withdraw from the debate but chose

to express himself through his fictional charac-

ters, it has been relatively easy to point to any

number of episodes and statements in which

women are treated either contemptuously or with

respect, and to conclude accordingly, with un-

warranted assurance, that Rabelais was either a

misogynist, a feminist, neither, or both. The most

recent attempt to find a way out of the resulting

impasse has been to reconsider the problem in

the light of modern feminism. Although fifteen

years have passed since Wayne Booth hailed its

emergence as the most transformative develop-

ment in Rabelais studies, feminist criticism does

not seem to have left entirely behind its initial

polemical phase, and periodically threatens to

lose sight of Rabelais—in favor of itself—as its

legitimate object. Nonetheless, it has already pro-

posed some intriguingly new interpretations,

such as Elizabeth Chesney Zegura’s attempt to

reconcile Rabelais’s frequently unflattering por-

trayal of women with their egalitarian treatment

at the Abbey of Theleme. She proposes an an-

aphrastic reading of the seemingly misogynous

texts and suggests that they may have been in-

46 Cuckoldry, Fear of

tended as an indirect, inverted satire of men’s

phallocentric antifeminism (and more generally

of our intolerance of the Other) rather than the

merciless indictment of women they are com-

monly taken to be. Other scholars have enlarged

the scope of the investigation by subjecting to

a feminist reading a number of aspects not pri-

marily related to women. (Francoise Charpen-

tier’s psychoanalytic approach in her study of

the near-exclusion of women from the anthro-

pological structure of the giants’ kingdoms, and

Carla Freccero’s similarly oriented study of the

theme of paternity in her Father Figures: Ge-

nealogy and Narrative Structure [1991] come

to mind.) Now that the controversies surrounding

poststructural approaches have somewhat died

down, it is this feminist criticism, with its inher-

ently interdisciplinary bent, that promises to

provide the most innovative perspective on the

complexities of Rabelais’s text in the years to

come.

Readings: Richard Berrong, “Finding Antifeminism

in Rabelais; or, A Response to Wayne Booth’s Call

for an Ethical Criticism,” CI 11.4 (1985): 687–96; Ter-

ence Cave, Michel Jeanneret, and Francois Rigolot,

“Sur la pretendue transparence de Rabelais,” RHLF

(July–August 1986): 709–16; Gerard Defaux, “D’un

probleme l’autre:Hermeneutique de l’ ‘altior sensus’

et ‘captatio lectoris’ dans le prologue de Gargantua,”

RHLF (March–April 1985): 195–216; Edwin M. Du-

val, “Interpretation and the ‘Doctrine Absconce’ of

Rabelais’s Prologue to Gargantua,” ER 18 (1985): 1–

17; Michel Jeanneret, “Signs Gone Wild: The Dis-

mantling of Allegory,” Francois Rabelais: Critical As-

sessments, ed. Jean-Claude Carron (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1995); Elizabeth Chesney

Zegura, “Toward a Feminist Reading of Rabelais,”

JMRS 15.1 (1985): 125–34.

Bruno Braunrot

CUCKOLDRY, FEAR OF Along with the

question of marriage, fear of cuckoldry forms

the main framework of the Third Book, as Pan-

urge is unable to decide whether or not he should

marry, and if he does, whether he will be cuck-

olded, beaten, and robbed by his wife. His fear,

combined with his acute narcissism, keeps him

in a perpetual state of indecision, and after a long

series of consultations with soothsayers, a nec-

romancer, a poet, a philosopher, a doctor, a the-

ologian, and a couple of fools, Panurge remains

in the same state in which he began. Fear of

cuckoldry is a familiar theme in misogynistic lit-

erature, from the Romance of the Rose (Roman

de la rose [1225–78]) to The Fifteen Joys of

Marriage (Les XV joies de marriage [early fif-

teenth century]), from fabliaux to farce, where

antifeminist sentiment is brought to the fore

through traditional sexist beliefs that in marriage,

a man ran a threefold risk: the likelihood of cuck-

oldry, the dangers of being browbeaten, and the

impossibility of satisfying the insatiable lust of

his wife. Such sentiments contributed to what be-

came known as La querelle des femmes, and it

has been suggested that Panurge’s concerns in

the Third Book represent Rabelais’s contribution

to this ongoing debate on the nature of women.

Readings: Catharine Randall, “Le cocuage hypoth-

etique de Panurge: Le monde a l’envers dans Le tiers

livre,” Constructions (1986): 77–86; M. A. Screech,

The Rabelaisian Marriage (London: Edward Arnold,

1958).

E. Bruce Hayes

D

DEATH, TREATMENT OF Rabelais’s treat-

ment of death unites a range of influences both

classical and contemporary, scientific and artistic.

Also informing his approach is the traditional

Christian association of death with sin and folly.

Although it is not possible to present an exhaus-

tive list of allusions to death in these chronicles,

we can easily isolate four episodes to illustrate

the major points of Rabelais’s treatment of this

subject.

The death of Badebec at the birth of Panta-

gruel (P 2–3) immediately presents the reader

with many of the themes to be associated with

death throughout the mock epic. On a very literal

level, we see the medical reality of the hazards

of childbirth in sixteenth-century France. The di-

lemma faced by Gargantua, torn between joy at

the birth of his son and grief at the loss of his

wife, highlights two others. The debate the newly

widowed father holds with himself echoes other

Renaissance works (Marguerite de Navarre’s

“Dialogue in the Form of a Nocturnal Vision”

[“Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne,” c.

1520]) for example) that present the Christian

survivor wrestling with the desire to grieve at the

loss of a loved one and the recognition that the

dead in Paradise are better off than they were on

earth. This view of death is parodied by Panurge

in his sermon to the drowning shepherds in the

Dindenault episode of the Fourth Book (4BK

8). Pantagruel’s birth at the cost of his mother’s

death also introduces the view of the life cycle

as an economy: life in exchange for death in

exchange for life. This view of death is strongly

influenced by the Christian message of salvation

that the death of Christ bought eternal life for

humankind. The economic exchange of life for

death is also reflected in the letter from Gargan-

tua (P 8), where the ability to produce children

is presented as part of a cycle of generations et

corruptions that will end only with the Last

Judgment.

The physical aspects of death are explored in

Rabelais’s scenes of battle, and we can consider

Gymnaste’s combat against Tripet (G 35) as an

example. Doctor Rabelais describes the mutilated

human body using vocabulary that evokes a phy-

sician at an autopsy. These graphic descriptions

echo the artwork of the period, especially por-

trayals of the danse macabre, the “triumph of

death,” and Last Judgment illustrations of the

punishment of the damned. Rabelais seems to

share this fascination with morbid imagery while

simultaneously revealing a scientific interest in

death and dying. With precise description of

limbs severed and organs destroyed by the pass-

ing weapon, the text attempts to pinpoint the

physical location of death, the precise moment

when the mortal body can no longer serve as a

viable host for the immortal soul.

The influence of classical thought on death is

best seen in the death of Raminagrobis (3BK

21–23) and on the Island of the Macreons. The

dying poet shows the detachment from this world

of those clearly aware they are about to leave it

and presents the art of dying well. The conflict

between humanists and the proponents of tradi-

tional piety is highlighted by Raminagrobis’s

characterization of the clergy as vultures swarm-

ing around the dying and Panurge’s shocked re-

action to this characterization. The Island of the

Macreons (4BK 25–28), populated by elderly hu-

mans and dying heroes and demons with ruined

monuments filling its center, illustrates the mor-

tality of all created things. In a carefully crafted

conversation between Pantagruel and the Ma-

crobe, Rabelais’s treatment of death and dying

unifies classical thought and Christian orthodoxy.

Ancient beliefs regarding natural phenomena sig-

naling the departure of great souls is supported

48 Debts or Debtors, Praise of

by the testimony of those who witnessed the

death of Guillaume du Bellay in 1543. The sug-

gestion that some souls come to a finite end, a

view posited by Plutarch’s De defectu oraculo-

rum, is corrected by Pantagruel’s assertion of

Christian teaching regarding the soul’s immor-

tality. His reinterpretation of the tale of the death

of Pan as a revelation of the death of Christ

crowns this Christianization of classical thought

and inquiry. The episode on the island of the Ma-

creons is the most direct treatment of the subject

of death in the four books. Because of its central

placement within the Fourth Book some critics

interpret the entire book as a voyage in the realm

of the dead.

Readings: Claude Blum, La representation de la

mort dans la litterature francaise de la Renaissance,

2 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1989); Douglas L.

Boudreau-Tiegezh, “Death in the Quart Livre,” RN

37.2 (Winter 1997): 183–91.

Douglas L. Boudreau

DEBTS OR DEBTORS, PRAISE OF (3BK 2–

5) Panurge’s Praise of Debts is the focus of

chapters 2–5 of Rabelais’s Third Book. Rabelais

takes Erasmus for a source in his Praise of

Debts, which like the Praise of Folly is mock

serious. M. A. Screech sees the passage as Pan-

urge’s misapplication of Ficino’s Commentary

on Plato’s Symposium in which love is said to

hold the world together (Screech 1970: 225–26).

In his self-justification, Panurge appears as a

comic rhetorician presenting debt as the moving

force of the universe. By declaring those who

disagree with him to be heretics, Panurge’s spe-

cious arguments in favor of outlandish spending

pointedly recall the rhetoric of the priests of the

Sorbonne and appear to convey Rabelais’s crit-

icism of Church practices (Screech 227).

In chapter 2 of the Third Book, Pantagruel

gives the wardenship of Salmagundia or Sal-

migondin to Panurge after the war with the Dip-

sodians. Jean Paris (1970) surmises that, since

Pantagruel had earlier given the manor to Alco-

frybas Nasier, anagram for Francois Rabelais, in

chapter 32 of Pantagruel, Rabelais seems to be

indicating to the reader that in some ways Pan-

urge is to be his mouthpiece in this section (177–

78). Paradoxically, we learn that Panurge had

mismanaged the property and exhausted the rev-

enues from the property for the next three years.

Rather than spending funds on the erection of

buildings, Panurge had wasted his resources on

feasts for his good companions and performed

proverbially condemned financial practices such

as buying dear, selling cheap, and eating his

wheat in the blade (3BK 2). Using Marx’s terms,

Paris explains that Panurge considers his assets

for their use value and intends to consume them,

while Pantagruel’s more bourgeois advice is to

conserve the resources and property in order to

retain their future exchange value and accumu-

late worth (183–84).

As is typical of a mock encomium, Panurge

uses and misuses arguments from various sources

in his defense, acting in a way that is contradic-

tory to the maxims of the oracle of Delphi and

yet claiming he is following the four cardinal vir-

tues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temper-

ance and the three theological virtues of faith,

hope, and charity (Screech 1979: 226–28). Still,

Pantagruel condemns Panurge for not following

Roman sumptuary laws, which forbade the

spending of more than one’s annual income in

one year and accuses him of having sacrificed all

of his goods as in a Roman feast (3BK 2). In

response, Panurge heretically presents himself as

a Creator and praises himself for his creation of

debts out of nothing, which is metaphysically im-

possible according to philosophers (3BK 3). Sig-

nificantly, in this regard, Rabelais and Panurge

are similar, with each effecting a creation ex nih-

ilo.

By definition, Panurge’s spending beyond his

means implies the possibility of credit. This pro-

ductive use of signs had been condemned in the

previous (medieval) era. Scholastic economists,

following Aristotle, had believed that the gen-

eration of interest through credit (the fruition of

money) was immoral or unnatural since money

was thought to be fungible or sterile (Lavatori

1996: 66). Nevertheless, letters of credit were a

reality in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for

funding merchant voyages and the French mon-

archy used ultimately worthless banknotes to fi-

nance wars. This borrowing, combined with the

influx of precious metals from the Americas, pro-

duced an inflationary economy that wreaked

havoc on the finances of ordinary citizens. In

placing the praise of debt in the mouth of the

Decretals 49

apparent fool, Panurge, Rabelais appears to be

obliquely critiquing royal and Church policies

and at least bringing some humor to a phenom-

enon that most likely troubled his readers (Ze-

gura and Tetel 1993: 94–95). However, follow-

ing Aristotle’s comparison of the composition of

the state with the parts of the human body in

Politics V, Panurge naturalizes debt and com-

pares the exchange of money within the state

with the circulation of blood within the body.

In his vision of a world without debts, Panurge

uses the concept of the macrocosm and micro-

cosm which was so important to the Renaissance

mind, affirming that without debts the cosmos

would devolve into chaos and the organs of the

human body would refuse to interact because

nothing would be owed between them (3BK 3).

In contrast, Panurge invokes Ficinian Platonism

in his vision of a world of debtors and borrowers

exchanging in perfect harmony (3BK 4). In point

of fact, the circulation of blood among the organs

of the body is not an accurate representation of

credit, which implies an abstraction of the proc-

ess of exchange and includes the concept of risk.

However, Marx has indicated that the primitive

basis of credit is a delay of the process of buying

and selling because when the process of buying

is separated in time from the process of selling,

relations of debtor and creditor are created, his-

torically before the credit system is established

(qtd. in Lavatori 1996: 73). Thus, through Pan-

urge, Rabelais can present credit as a naturally

occurring phenomenon.

Nevertheless, identifying debts with lies, Pan-

tagruel condemns Panurge as a sophist who is

defending an immoral cause and literally making

money out of his abuse of sophisticated rhetoric

(3BK 5). Pantagruel sees borrowing as a last re-

sort for desperate situations and not as a means

of increasing spending opportunities without

working for them and producing true wealth as

a byproduct (3BK 5). Siding with Plato in his

Laws and the conservative bourgeoisie in its

practices, Pantagruel condemns loans that are not

productive and only permit consuming beyond

resources (Paris 1970: 180). Pantagruel ulti-

mately pays Panurge’s debts and authoritatively

ends the debate, simply telling Panurge to drop

the issue (3BK 5). Jean-Christophe Deberre

(1983) shows that this generosity reflects the

French monarchy’s obliging and yoking of the

country’s middle class in order to control the

country and its productivity. According to De-

berre’s logic, in order to deserve his gift and re-

pay his debt to the monarch, Panurge must marry

and produce descendants, which is confirmed by

the discussion of Panurge’s potential marriage,

which follows the praise of debt (19–20).

Although Panurge is in effect persuaded to

give up debt, pledging to become the perfect

householder and sporting the spectacles of the

archetypal Jan Bourgeoys in chapter 7, his de-

fense of debts is a depiction of the new oppor-

tunities offered by the creative economic practice

of credit, just as the book itself is a representation

of the productivity of verbal signs from its iden-

tification with Diogenes rolling his tub in the

prologue. In Panurge’s tirade, the borrowing and

lending of the parts of the body result in its per-

petuation through the eventual creation of off-

spring. Similarly, Zegura (1993) indicates that

debt itself can be seen as a metaphor for the lit-

erary borrowing characteristic of the Renais-

sance, which allowed sixteenth-century writers to

interact profitably with ancient texts in the re-

newal of antiquity and the generation of new

meanings (95–96).

Readings: Jean-Christophe Deberre, “La genealogie

du pouvoir dans les trois premiers livres de Rabelais,”

Litterature 50 (May 1983): 15–35; Gerard Lavatori,

Language and Money in Rabelais (New York: Peter

Lang, 1996); Michael Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, 1979); Jean Paris, Rabelais

au futur (Paris: Seuil, 1970); Elizabeth Chesney Ze-

gura and Marcel Tetel, Rabelais Revisited (New York:

Twayne, 1993).

Gerard Lavatori

DECRETALS (LES DECRETALES) (4BK 48–

54) The power of canon law and its application

to the practice of everyday life in France pro-

vides the material for Rabelais’s satire of the

supporters of the Church who put Rome above

both Christian charity and the smooth running

of public order in France. In the twelfth century,

Gratian sought to organize canon law into the

document that became known as the Decretum,

which Pope Gregory IV later organized into

five books. Subsequent books were added: Liber

Sixtus, by Boniface VIII, Clementinae, under

50 Decretals

Clement V, and finally Extravagantes by John

XXII.

Arriving at the Island of the Papimaniacs

(L’Isle des Papimanes), Pantagruel and his

band discover that the same Decretals have be-

come the object of adoration, along with the

Pope himself, by the Papimaniacs and their

bishop, Homenaz. Through his satire, Rabelais

attacks the power of the Decretals to protect the

clergy against civil and royal authority in France.

As Pantagruel touches the gold volume covered

with “fine and precious stones” that holds the text

of the Decretals, he confesses to having an urge

to hit the local civil officers, as long as they are

not clerics (“provided that they are not tonsured”

[4BK 49]). French humanists resented both the

revenues flooding toward Rome and the ability

of the Church to exempt its clergy from civil law.

The chapters devoted to the Papimaniacs de-

velop an elaborate satirical eulogy of the Decre-

tals, using the same rhetorical devices that we

find in the Praise of Debtors (3BK 3–4) and in

the Praise of the Pantagruelion (3BK 49–52):

enumeration, interrogation, exclamation. Hom-

enaz posits a world held in harmony by the De-

cretals. However, it is not the vision of Christian

harmony set forth by Erasmus and the evangel-

ists who would reform the Church from within,

but, as Edwin Duval has shown, an anticaritas,

based on the witch hunt against heresy. Hyper-

bolic rhetoric (“O seraphique Sixiesme,” “O

cherubicques Clementines” “O Extravaguantes

angelicques”) combining the names of the later

books of the Decretals with the bands of angels

used as descriptors underscores the author’s pa-

rodic intention (Duval 1998: 74). The vision

seems to illustrate the image of Christian char-

ity, except that heretics will be excluded. Indeed,

Homenaz predicts that those who read the texts

will be inflamed “with charity toward [their]

neighbor, as long as he is not a heretic” (4BK

51).

Unconvinced by the inflated rhetoric of the

bishop of Papimanie, Pantagruel and his friends

engage in debasing the sacred object, the Decre-

tals, by putting them to unseemly use: toilet pa-

per, wrapping for medicine, patterns for dress-

making, and face masks. But the Decretals end

up spoiling everything with which they come in

contact. For each misapplication of the “holy”

book and subsequent bungled task, Homenaz

cries “Miracle! Miracle!”

With a final flourish, Homenaz recommends a

Decretalist for all positions of responsibility: em-

peror, captain, general, governor, crusader, and

so on. Without the Decretals, all the universities

of the world would perish. Worn out by the

sound of his own rhetoric, Homenaz dissolves

into tears, beats his chest, and piously and pre-

tentiously kisses his thumbs, arranged in the form

of a cross.

The substantive authority in the Papimanie ep-

isode lies not with the empty rhetoric of its

bishop, but with Pantagruel and his friends.

Homenaz’s inflated prose bursts and deflates

when attacked by the vivid language evoking the

lower stratum used by Pantagruel and his band.

Repulsed by Homenaz’s reverence for the inap-

propriate substitute (the Decretals) for the true

word of God as reflected in the Holy Scriptures,

Epistemon runs straight to the toilet (“selle per-

see”), complaining that the “farce has loosened

[his] bowels” (“ceste farce me a desbonde le

boyau cullier” [4BK 51]). Contemplation of the

Decretals has the opposite effect on Panurge:

“Upon reading [them] I was so constipated that

for more than four or five days I shat only a tiny

ball of dung” (“a la lecture d’icelluy je ne feuz

tant constipe du ventre que par plus de quatre,

voyre cinq jours je ne fiantay qu’une petite

crotte” [52]). In order to vilify an official object

that has profited the Church at the expense of the

faithful, Rabelais contrasts the empty praise of

the unworthy, yet official object with the tough

and practical language of the “place publique”

(Bakhtin 1970: 167). True evangelism seeks not

to idolize or worship commentary and texts de-

veloped by the popes, whom the Papimaniacs

falsely adore as “this good God on earth” (“ce

bon Dieu en terre”), but to understand the word

of God, as transmitted in the Bible, and to prac-

tice true caritas, to be accorded even to sinners

and heretics.

Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, L’oeuvre de Francois

Rabelais et la culture populaire au moyen age et sous

la renaissance, trans. Andree Robel (Paris: Gallimard,

1970); Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Quart

Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1998); Deborah

Devils and Demonology 51

Losse, Rhetoric at Play, Rabelais and Satirical Eulogy

(Bern: Peter Lang, 1980).

Deborah Nichols Losse

DES PERIERS, BONAVENTURE (c. 1510–c.

1544) Bonaventure would be known only as a

talented but minor poet and as the equally tal-

ented writer of amusing short stories were it not

for the affair of the Cymbalum Mundi, a little

book first published pseudonymously in 1537

and again less than a year later. It was quickly

denounced to the religious authorities, judged to

be pernicious, and ruthlessly suppressed. Its first

publisher was imprisoned, and only one copy of

the first edition and two of the second survive.

In 1538 Andre Zebedee, a Protestant cleric, de-

nounced the Cymbalum as the work of an Epi-

curean who had been a collaborator on Pierre

Olivetan’s Protestant translation of the Bible:

only Des Periers can possibly fit the bill. How-

ever, this letter was only discovered in the twen-

tieth century. In 1543 Guillaume Postel dis-

missed the Cymbalum as the subversive work of

a former Protestant sympathizer, and in 1550

John Calvin excoriated it in his De Scandalis.

Further denunciations of Des Periers followed

thick and fast, but all of them were much later

than the date of Des Periers’s death: no conclu-

sions could therefore be drawn about the author-

ship of the Cymbalum until the discovery of Ze-

bedee’s letter. The book itself remained

notorious, legendary even, until the surviving

editions were discovered and copies were clan-

destinely circulated. An edition eventually fol-

lowed in 1711, quickly followed by three others.

There have been no fewer than three modern crit-

ical editions, whose interpretations vary sharply.

The critical debate still rages, and the question

is, and always was, is the book a satire of Chris-

tianity? On balance, it is difficult to deny the ac-

cusation. The Cymbalum is a work of savage yet

delicate irony denouncing the cruelties and idi-

ocies of society, for which religion appears

mainly responsible. Its dialogues wrap their

sense in allusion and ambiguity, full of clues that

always leave an escape route for their author in

that there is always another possible interpreta-

tion. Born of the absolute necessity for its author

to veil his meaning in order to avoid horrible

punishment, it is truly a unique masterpiece.

Readings: Le Cymbalum Mundi, ed. Franco Gia-

cone (Geneva: Droz, 2003); Max Gauna, “Pour une

nouvelle interpretation du Cymbalum Mundi,” Lettre

Clandestine 6 (1997): 157–72; Max Gauna, Upwell-

ings: First Expressions of Unbelief in the Printed Lit-

erature of the French Renaissance (Rutherford, NJ:

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992).

Max Gauna

DEVILS AND DEMONOLOGY Rabelais’s

novels contain numerous references to devils and

demonology, the medieval and early modern

“science” describing evil suprahuman beings.

Most of Rabelais’s references are facetious or

comical; several are satirical. Traditionally, Ra-

belais’s demonological references have been

traced to medieval folklore and theater: Panta-

gruel borrows his name from a diminutive the-

atrical demon who tormented drunkards by fill-

ing their throats with salt. Panurge claims

familiarity with devils, and the language of Ra-

belais’s characters, particularly Panurge and

Frere Jean, is filled with references to devils. At

the end of Pantagruel, the narrator promises to

recount in a later book how Pantagruel and his

companions traveled to Hell, set fire to five of

its rooms, sacked another, threw Proserpina in

the fire, and maimed Lucifer by breaking four of

his teeth and a horn on his backside (P 34). Sim-

ilar exploits are in Teofilo Folengo’s Baldus

(which, however, leaves its heroes stranded in

Hell). The Fourth Book narrates peasant en-

counters with devils (45–47) and ends when Pan-

urge battles the cat Rodilardus, whom he mis-

takes for a devil (67).

Like giants, demons were figures of grotesque

corporeality. Whereas giants were characterized

by exaggerated stature, devils’ bodies were sys-

tematically incongruous. Art of circa 1460 to

1520 depicts the bodies of demons as riotously

hybrid: not only inappropriately placed horns,

but also faces on buttocks, knees, and bellies and

mixed mammalian, insect, reptilian, and crusta-

cean forms. (Incongruity afflicted the other races

that Rabelais says [P 1] originated at the same

time as giants, but these more clearly recall the

Plinian “monstrous” races, since their otherwise

52 Dindenault

normal physique exaggerated only one feature:

ears, noses, penises, etc.)

“Scientific” demonology between about 1400

and 1700 increasingly emphasized the corpore-

ality of demons. Public officials actively inves-

tigated demons as the instigators of “witchcraft,”

defined as the transfer of maleficent power from

demons to witches through a pact or contractual

relationship. Ecclesiastical and lay officials

sought evidence of this relationship even when

no maleficia (specific acts of harmful magic)

were alleged against defendants. The most spec-

tacular and fantastic features of witchcraft—fly-

ing, sexual relations between women and de-

mons, and attendance at the sabbat (a transfer of

Satan’s court from Hell to earth)—were ex-

tracted from defendants as “confessions” and

prosecuted as evidence of verifiable, corporeal

contact between humans and demons. Treatises

on witchcraft, written by learned theologians and

magistrates, invoked this “evidence” to refute

skepticism about the reality of angels and de-

mons, which they feared was becoming wide-

spread. When Pantagruel advises Panurge to con-

sult the Sibyl of Panzoust, it cannot be accidental

that Epistemon, the most learned of the giant’s

companions, cites classical precedents for fearing

she is a witch (3BK 16). Panurge, reacting more

viscerally, experiences the same fear when he

sees her divinatory rituals (17).

Evidence of demonic corporeality was needed

to offset the theological definition of angels and

devils as pure or incorporeal spirits. Paradoxi-

cally, since demons had no bodies of their own,

they could confect bodies, which, being artificial,

were not constrained by the normal physiology

of human and animal species.

Rabelais’s delight in describing demons im-

plicates both his insight that exaggeration is fun-

damentally comic and his ambivalent delight in

mocking superstition and religious intolerance.

Panurge’s cowardice and illogic animate his fear

of devils, while the little demon of Book Four

informs a peasant that his land is forfeit to devils

because the Pope has excommunicated the dis-

respectful “Popefigs.” Conversely, Rabelais’s rel-

ative neglect of the theme of witchcraft may be

a historical accident: between the 1520s and the

1570s, witchcraft persecutions and the produc-

tion of witchcraft treatises declined as Western

Christians struggled through the Reformation

and Counter-Reformation, but resumed fero-

ciously from about 1580 to 1630, before gradu-

ally disappearing from scholarly attention.

Rabelais’s early phrase “jusqu’au feu exclusive-

ment” (only as far as the stake [P prol]) reflects

the reality of campaigns against all heresy, not

just witchcraft.

Readings: Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The

Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1997); Brian Levack, The

Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (Lon-

don: Longman, 1995); Walter Stephens, Demon Lov-

ers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2002).

Walter Stephens

DINDENAULT (4BK 5–6) In the Fourth

Book, a sheep merchant from Taillebourg in

Saintonge whom Pantagruel and his companions

encountered while at sea. Dindenault calls Pan-

urge a cuckold, provoking a conflict that esca-

lates until a peace is imposed between them. Pan-

urge, true to form, neither forgives nor forgets

and plots to undo the sheep merchant. He ne-

gotiates the purchase of a sheep from him, and

Dindenault responds by outlandishly exaggerat-

ing the value of his animals. Panurge accepts the

merchant’s price, selects the largest ram of the

herd, and throws it overboard. The rest of the

sheep follow, with Dindenault and the other

shepherds jumping in after them in a desperate

effort to prevent the loss of the flock. Panurge,

using an oar, makes sure that none return on

board ship, preaching to them as they drown

about the misery of this life and the pleasure of

the next.

The Dindenault episode, whose theme was

borrowed from the Maccheronee of Merlin Coc-

caie (pseudonym of Teofilo Folengo), is super-

ficially similar to that of the Haughty Parisian

Lady: an offended Panurge exacts a dispropor-

tionate revenge on an unwitting victim and con-

siders the whole to be great sport. The episode

restores Panurge’s reputation as a trickster,

which was clearly established in Pantagruel but

seemingly abandoned along with his codpiece in

the Third Book. Reading further into the episode,

it also serves as a stark reminder of the degree

Diogenes the Cynic 53

to which Panurge is truly a fallen creature, high-

lighting his cowardice and vengeful nature.

The incident is rich in meaning. The punish-

ment the sheep merchant receives for his gro-

tesque exaggerations reminds the reader of the

lesson of moderation detailed in the tale of

Couillatris in the prologue to the Fourth Book.

In addition, by calling Panurge a cuckold, Din-

denault recalls the transformation Panurge un-

derwent at the beginning of the Third Book and

reminds us that the purpose of the voyage to con-

sult the Divine Bottle is to settle the question of

Panurge’s marriage. Of equal interest, by refer-

ring to Panurge as a “belle medaille de coqu,”

Dindenault allies himself with the Sibyl of Pan-

zoust, Nazdecabre the mute, Triboullet the fool,

and the other oracles of the Third Book who in-

dicated that after marriage Panurge would be

cuckolded, beaten, and robbed. Panurge’s refusal

to accept this prediction is the reason Pantagruel

and company undertake this voyage to consult

yet another oracle. His forced reinterpretation of

their common message illustrates the kind of de-

liberate misreading of text that Rabelais feared

and denounced, notably in the Letter to Odet de

Chastillon and throughout the Fourth Book.

Other readings of this incident note that by de-

stroying sheep and shepherds, Panurge symboli-

cally commits violence against Christ and his fol-

lowers. Defying the biblical injunction against

revenge (“Vengeance is mine. It’s in the prayer

book,” as Frere Jan says in the last line of chap-

ter 8), Panurge brings upon himself and his fel-

low travelers the trials that will follow.


trophe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Press, 2000); Elizabeth Zegura and Marcel Tetel, Ra-

belais Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1993).

Douglas L. Boudreau

DIOGENES THE CYNIC (413 B.C.–327 B.C.)

A moral philosopher who advocated a life led

according to nature and despised social conven-

tions. As a character in Rabelais, Diogenes

makes five more or less satirical appearances. On

visiting the underworld (P 30), Epistemon finds

Diogenes living in luxury and thrashing Alex-

ander the Great, who has become a cobbler. His

imaginary treatment of Alexander reflects the

historical Diogenes’s contempt for wealth and

rank. But insofar as he had been notoriously

poor, this is a case of role reversal, akin to others

that Epistemon witnesses.

Two references concern Diogenes’s pro-

nouncements on appetites. He is reported to have

called lust “an occupation for people with noth-

ing else to do” (3BK 31). And in a discussion

about the times of day when one should eat, Pan-

tagruel quotes him as saying, “A rich man, when

hungry; a poor man, when he has the means”

(4BK 64); the first half of the maxim conveys

scorn for social conventions, while the second

adds harsh realism.

Diogenes is also the hero of two anecdotes.

One is told when Pantagruel visits Papimanie, a

land of fanatics who worship the Pope and ven-

erate everything associated with him, including

the Decretals (published papal rulings on issues

of doctrine and canon law). Homenaz, bishop of

Papimanie, extols at length the allegedly mirac-

ulous effects of these texts (4BK 51). Unimpres-

sed by his list of fanciful miracles, Pantagruel

and his companions mock it with a list of equally

fanciful mishaps, which they ascribe equally to

the Decretals. When Gymnaste describes an

archery contest in Guyenne which was vitiated

because the arrows would not hit a target made

from an old volume of Decretals, the tale re-

minds Pantagruel of Diogenes: having watched a

bad archer shoot so wide of the mark that the

spectators retreated in fear, he stood next to the

target, asserting that it was the only safe place

(52). The story shows Diogenes’s independence

of mind and his aptitude for the telling gesture

which, here, highlights both the archer’s inepti-

tude and the crowd’s timidity and illogicality.

But why does Diogenes feature here? The point

of his presence may lie, partly at least, in the

nature of the Papimanes, who are a servile mob.

On hearing that Pantagruel and company have

seen the Pope, they kneel and spend the next

quarter of an hour exclaiming, “Oh blessed ones”

(49). But their servility is not merely comical,

since it can be used for sinister purposes. Thus,

they are led to butcher and humiliate their neigh-

bors the Papefigues for one insulting gesture. In

such a context, the reader can easily see the value

of independence from the crowd, as exemplified

by Diogenes.

The other story concerns Diogenes in Corinth,

54 Dipsodes

when Philip of Macedonia threatened to attack

the city (3BK prol.). The Corinthians made fran-

tic warlike preparations. After watching for some

days, Diogenes took the tub in which he lived,

knocked it about, pushed it up a hill, let it roll

down, pushed it back up, and so on. The nar-

rator underlines the inherent futility of this ac-

tivity, likening it to Sisyphus with his rock.

When asked, Diogenes explained that he was try-

ing “not to appear the only idle person amid all

this busy population.” The explanation clearly

focuses on appearances. It may imply that the

Corinthians were too stupid to distinguish be-

tween substantial military preparations, such as

building defensive works, and Diogenes’s

equally energetic but wholly futile tub-rolling. In

addition, the answer may be taken to mean that

defense-building and tub-rolling really are equiv-

alent—both are equally pointless. Whichever

one’s interpretation, Diogenes’s activity and his

ostensible explanation of it imply a scathing crit-

icism of the Corinthians. Highlighted in the pro-

logue, this episode foreshadows a theme of fu-

tility which runs through much of the Third

Book. The book is largely devoted to Panurge

and his inchoate wish to marry. Because he is

growing old and fears that his still hypothetical

wife will cuckold him, Panurge repeatedly seeks

advice and, above all, reassurance. But Panta-

gruel advises him (10) that he must simply make

up his own mind and, thereafter, accept his lot.

This implies, obviously, that pursuing advice is

futile and that Panurge’s many consultations are

no more useful than Diogenes’s tub-rolling or the

Corinthians’ military preparations.

Readings: Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabe-

lais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1997);

Jerome Schwartz, Irony and Ideology in Rabelais

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Ian R. Morrison

DIPSODES Dipsodes, or the thirsty, were the

subjects of Anarche (without authority), the king

who invaded Utopia in Pantagruel. V.-L. Saul-

nier identified them in his TLF edition as inhab-

itants of Pantagruel’s domain, but the confusion

is understandable, since Rabelais confused his

fictional domains as well: Pantagruel awarded

Salmagundi to the author himself at the end of

Pantagruel (TLF 22; P 32)—then to Panurge at

the beginning of the Third Book (2). In spite of

several references to Utopia in Pantagruel, Tho-

mas More’s ideas (in particular his scorn for the

body [Utopia 2.176.10–11]) had little influence

on those of Rabelais. The encomium of skill over

force in Pantagruel’s heroic verses (TLF 17; P

27) was paralleled by More (2.202), but it was a

commonplace of humanist writing on warfare.

Although the Abbey of Theleme was the most

utopian passage in Rabelais’s novels, there were

no explicit evocations of More in Gargantua.

Utopia did reappear in the first chapter of the

Third Book, only immediately to disappear again,

this time for good. Rabelais disagreed explicitly

with More: Pantagruel colonized Dipsodia not

because of the excess population in his own lands

(TLF 10–22; P 20–32; cf. Utopia 2.136.4–21),

but rather in order to persuade his new subjects

to revere him as did those he transported there.

Guillaume du Bellay adopted a similar tactic

when he was appointed royal governor in Turin;

Guillaume and his brother Jean, the bishop of

Paris, were Rabelais’s mentors and patrons, and

they advocated a political course opposed to

More’s. They pursued greater independence for

European monarchs like their king, Francis I—

or his, Henry VIII—and were suspicious of any

such pan-European authority as the Holy Roman

emperor, or the Pope.

Readings: Edward Benson, “ ‘Jamais votre femme

ne sera ribaulde, si la prenez issue de gens de bien’:

Love and War in the Tiers livre,” ER 15 (1980): 55–

64; Thomas More, Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz and J. H.

Hexter, bk. 2 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,

1965); V.-L. Saulnier, ed., Pantagruel, Textes litter-

aires francais (Geneva: Droz, 1965).

Edward Benson

DISCIPLE OF PANTAGRUEL (LE DISCI-

PLE DE PANTAGRUEL) An anonymous

work of comic geography which recounts the

voyage of Panurge and his companions around

a series of marvelous islands. The work uses ma-

terial and characters from Pantagruel and was,

in turn, used by Rabelais in the composition of

the Fourth Book, and by the author(s) or com-

piler(s) of the Fifth Book. The first dated edition

of the Disciple was produced at Lyon in 1538,

though an undated version exists which may

have been printed as early as 1533. It enjoyed a

Dogs 55

vogue as a separate text until 1547, when it

ceased to be published on its own and was

thereafter included in various editions of Rabe-

lais’s collected Oeuvres, thereby blurring the dis-

tinctions between authentic and para-Rabelaisian

works, particularly for readers in the latter half

of the century who may have been unfamiliar

with the earlier publishing history. Twenty-two

editions in all of the Disciple de Pantagruel are

known to have been printed under various titles:

Panurge is the hero of the first five editions, but

from 1544 onward the eponymous hero becomes

“Bringuenarilles, cousin germain de Fesse-

pinte.” In the first five editions, Bringuenarilles

was an evil giant encountered by Panurge and

companions. The initial use of a Rabelaisian

character as hero of a comic work testifies to the

early success of Rabelais’s own creation, a suc-

cess upon which the author(s) or compiler(s) of

the Disciple attempted to capitalize, or at least to

keep interest in this character alive. Editions pro-

duced after 1545 include two chapters lifted ver-

batim from the 1542 edition of Pantagruel and

material from Les croniques admirables (a late

non-Rabelaisian Chronique gargantuine), with-

out regard for textual cohesion. Taking advan-

tage of the evident popularity of the Disciple de

Pantagruel, Rabelais himself used elements of

the episodes of the Disciple in the composition

of both versions of the Fourth Book: for exam-

ple, the general structure of a voyage to various

marvelous islands, the description of the “pays

des Lanternes,” the account of the windmill-

swallowing giant Bringuenarilles, the description

of the “Isle Farouche” and the “Isle des An-

douilles” (which Rabelais runs together and can

be seen to have been taken from the 1547 edition

of La navigation du compaignon a la Bouteille).

Similar use is made by the author(s) or com-

piler(s) of the Fifth Book (for example, the de-

scription of the “Isle des Ferrements” [Toolmak-

ing Island]), and in particular the list of “basses

dances” which, from its orthography and dispo-

sition on the page, can be seen to have been

taken from Etienne Dolet’s 1542 edition of the

Merveilleuses navigations du disciple de Panta-

gruel, dict Panurge, bound with his important

pirated editions of Pantagruel and Gargantua.

Readings: Geoffrey Atkinson, La litterature geo-

graphique francaise de la Renaissance: repertoire bib-

liographique (Paris, 1927 rpt. New York: B. Franklin,

1968); Le Disciple de Pantagruel, ed. Guy Demerson

and Christiane Lauvergnat-Gagniere (Paris: Nizet,

1982); Abel Lefranc, Les Navigations de Pantagruel

(Paris, 1905; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967); John

Lewis, “Rabelais and the Disciple de Pantagruel,” ER

22 (1989): 101–22; J. Schober, Rabelais’ Verhaltnis

zum Disciple de Pantagruel (Munich: Buchdruckerai

von F. Stein, 1904).

John Lewis

DIVINATION See Prophecy and Divination

DOGS Rabelais seems to have had an interest

in dogs. They appear here and there in the first

three books and seem to be symbolic or emblem-

atic of points he is trying to make in the texts

themselves.

The first anecdote involving dogs is, of course,

the famous episode of the Haughty Parisian

Lady (P 22). As revenge for his rejection by this

lady, Panurge cuts up the sexual organs of a

bitch in heat and sprinkles them over the lady,

who is then pursued and urinated on by more

than 600,000 dogs (as Panurge had himself been

pursued by dogs in chapter 14). Intepretations of

this episode range from Rabelais’s turning the

lady herself into a bitch in heat (Freccero 61); to

an exercise in rhetoric (Bowen 110); to an evan-

gelical parallel with the humiliation of Christ by

Roman soldiers, in the Book of Matthew (Rigo-

lot 1994: 230). Most seem to agree, however,

that Rabelais is reminding the haughty dame that

humans have a physical side, which links them

with animals.

The second well-known reference to a dog is

in the “Prologe” to Gargantua, where the reader

is invited to imitate the “philosophical dog” from

Plato’s Republic (2.71–173). He should break

open the bone and suck out the marrow inside.

Most readers have assumed that this analogy sug-

gests that the book contains more meaning on the

inside than appears on the outside—it is one of

the more “reader-centered” discussions of inter-

pretation in the book. The dog provides a pow-

erful visual image that shows humans and ani-

mals to be alike, even when performing the

cerebral activity of reading.

A third reference to a dog is found in the

Third Book (35). There, Pantagruel sees Gar-

56 Dolet, Etienne

gantua’s dog, Kyne, entering the room and de-

duces that his master is not far away. Here schol-

ars have seen a reference to the biblical Book of

Tobit and an endorsement of the conception of

marriage contained there (Ceard 332; Screech

243). The dog also provides an interesting link

to Marguerite de Navarre, who makes a similar

reference in the Suyte des Margverites of 1547,

thus leading some to believe that Marguerite her-

self had read the Third Book and that she was

commenting obliquely on it, as well as on the

Book of Tobit (Bauschatz 396; Frank 248). The

dog appears as a symbol of fidelity in marriage

and as an emblem of the need to combine the

spiritual and the physical within that relationship.

Whether or not Rabelais was a dog lover, the

dog becomes an important symbol in his work.

This symbol is sometimes used to deflate human

presumption and at other times to suggest posi-

tive values such as tenacity and fidelity, which

humans share with animals.

Readings: Cathleen M. Bauschatz, “Rabelais and

Marguerite de Navarre on Sixteenth-Century Views of

Clandestine Marriage,” SCJ 34.2 (2003): 395–408;

Barbara C. Bowen, Enter Rabelais, Laughing (Nash-

ville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998); Jean

Ceard, La nature et les prodiges. L’insolite au XVII

siecle en France (Geneva: Droz, 1977); Carla Frec-

cero, “Damning Haughty Dames: Panurge and the

Haulte Dame de Paris (Pantagruel, 14),” JMRS 15

(1985): 57–67; Marguerite de Navarre, Les Margue-

rites de la Marguerite des Princesses, ed. Felix Frank

(Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1873); Plato, “The

Republic,” Great Dialogues of Plato, trans. W.H.D.

Rouse (New York: Penguin Books, 1984); Francois

Rigolot, “Rabelais, Misogyny, and Christian Charity:

Biblical Intertextuality and the Renaissance Crisis of

Exemplarity,” PMLA 109.2 (1994): 225–37.

Cathleen M. Bauschatz

DOLET, ETIENNE (1509–46) Dolet was

born in Orleans, educated there until age twelve,

studied in Paris with Nicholas Berauld until

1526, and from 1526 to 1529 in Padua with

Simon Villanovanus. Briefly secretary to the

bishop of Limoges, he studied law at Toulouse

until 1534. During two fiery orations, Dolet al-

ienated members of Parlement and conservative

religious factions by attacking Toulouse for its

attitude toward his fraternity. He was briefly im-

prisoned and expelled from the city in 1534, af-

terward moving to Lyon, working as proofreader

for Sebastian Gryphius and Claude Nourry.

He counted Guillaume and Maurice Sceve and

Francois Rabelais among his friends. Dolet pub-

lished his Orations in 1534, dialogues against

Erasmus in 1535, and volume 1 of his monu-

mental Commentaries on the Latin Language in

1536 (volume 2 in 1538). The Commentaries at-

tacked both the Gallican Church and the Calvin-

ists, earning Dolet the hatred of both extremes.

In 1536 Dolet was attacked in a street in Lyon,

killing his adversary in self-defense. He traveled

on foot to Paris and received pardon from King

Francis I. Among the guests at the celebratory

banquet were Guillaume Bude, Salmon Macrin,

Nicolas Bourbon, Clement Marot, and Francois

Rabelais. Dolet married in 1538; his son Claude

was born a year later. Now an independent

printer, Dolet published the Genethliacum, ad-

vice to his son. He earned the enmity of many

Lyonnese printers as their rival and as an advo-

cate of workers’ rights. Perhaps at their instiga-

tion, he was imprisoned in 1542 for printing “he-

retical” books. He was tried in Lyon, transferred

to Paris, and received another royal pardon in

1543, thanks to the intercession of Pierre Ducha-

tel, bishop of Tulle. Rearrested in 1544 on a

trumped-up charge, he escaped briefly to Pied-

mont, but was caught and condemned to the

stake. He was executed on his birthday, August

3, 1546, at the Place Maubert.

Readings: Jacques Alary, L’imprimerie au XVIe sie-

cle: Estienne Dolet et ses luttes avec la Sorbonne (Ge-

neva: Slatkine, 1970); Richard C. Christie, Etienne

Dolet: The Martyr of the Renaissance (London:

Macmillan, 1880); Etudes sur Etienne Dolet; le Thea-

tre au XVIe siecle, publiees a la memoire de Claude

Longeon (Geneva: Droz, 1993).


DORIBUS (D’ORIBUS, DORISIUS) The

1542 Pantagruel (22) appended a passage about

“nostre maistre d’Oribus” who preached that the

Bievre River flowing through the Parisian suburb

of Saint-Victor had as its source the urine of

Paris street dogs. Since the title “nostre maistre”

was reserved exclusively for Parisian doctors of

theology, the preacher lampooned here has been

thought to be either Matthieu Ory or Pierre Dore.

Dream of Pantagruel 57

Matthieu Ory, a Dominican friar born in about

1492 near Saint-Malo (Brittany), took the doc-

torate in theology in 1528. In 1536 King Francis

I named him as an inquisitor and, in 1539, as

inquisitor general in France. Ory actively sup-

ported censorship of heretical books, helped to

convict and execute Etienne Dolet for heresy,

and has been seen as one of the instigators of the

Parlement of Paris’s “Chambre ardente” in the

early 1550s. In 1554, at the request of Duke Er-

cole II d’Este of Ferrara, King Henry II sent Ory

to Italy to convert the duke’s wife Renee de

France away from the Reformation. John Cal-

vin wrote a tract against Ory’s defense of images

in religion; but Calvin and Ory collaborated in

the arrest of the anti-Trinitarian heretic Michael

Servetus. Ory died in 1557.

Pierre Dore, also a Dominican friar and Pari-

sian doctor of theology (1532), was born in Or-

leans circa 1497. He was a popular preacher in

Paris during the 1530s and 1540s, and authored

thirty-five books, most of them collections of his

sermons printed in French and many of them re-

printed several times. His sermons drew heavily

on Sacred Scripture, and he became a principal

voice of Catholic orthodoxy for the people of

Paris. In 1554 he became chaplain and spiritual

director to Claude de Guise, duke of Lorraine,

and to several other prominent persons in the

court of the Guise. He died in 1569.

Readings: James K. Farge, “Dore, Pierre,” Bio-

graphical Register of Paris Doctors of Theology,

1500–1536 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval

Studies, 1980), no. 151: 137–42; James K. Farge, “Ory

Matthieu,” Biographical Register, no. 372: 353–56;

Francis Higman, “Premieres reponses catholiques aux

ecrits de la Reforme en France, 1525–c. 1540,” Le

livre dans l’Europe de la Renaissance (N.p.: Promo-

dis, 1988); John A. Langlois, A Catholic Response in

Sixteenth-Century France to Reformation Theology:

The Works of Pierre Dore (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mel-

len Press, 2003); Nathanael Weiss, La chambre ar-

dente: etude sur la liberte de conscience en France

sous Francois Ier et Henri II, 1540–1550 (Paris:

Fischbacher, 1889).

James K. Farge

DREAM OF PANTAGRUEL (LE SONGE DE

PANTAGRUEL) A para-Rabelaisian work

composed by Francois Habert and printed by

Adam Saulnier at Paris in 1542. No other edi-

tions are known. Up until that date Habert was

known as a competent poet of allegorical verse,

but the Songe stands out from his other works in

both its didactic intent and in its use of Rabelai-

sian characters to promote views that are never

explicitly expressed in authentic Rabelaisian

chronicles. In the Songe, published during Ra-

belais’s absence in Italy, Habert appears to sup-

port the facultative marriage of the clergy. The

issue was an important one to all major figures

of the Reformation; many were married men

themselves who could find no scriptural evidence

that prohibited such marriage. Even Erasmus ad-

mits in some early letters that he can find no such

evidence, though he prefers priests and ministers

to be free from the cares of marriage and able to

devote themselves to the love and service of

God. Rabelais himself never discusses the issue;

the closest he comes to it in his fiction is to de-

scribe marriage as an honorable institution. In his

“contr’abbaye,” the Thelemites are not obliged to

marry, but if they choose to do so, then they must

leave the Abbey (G 50).

Habert constructs his text around three

dreams; in the first (ll. 18–472) the dead Gar-

gantua appears to his son to advise him that the

way to wisdom lies in following the Gospels. Pan

the Great Shepherd left a book that tells Man

how to find true happiness by becoming a shep-

herd after the manner of Tityre (Saint Peter) and

by shunning the contemporary abusive practices

of high ecclesiastics. In the second, more light-

hearted, dream (ll. 477–590), Panurge describes

his imprisonment at the hands of the Turks and

his escape with the help of Melusine, daughter

of the Sultan; his adventures are loosely based

on those described in Pantagruel 10. In the third

dream (ll. 595–676), Gargantua reappears to his

son to reinforce his advice that the son should

become a berger or shepherd after the manner of

those priests of the Primitive Church; just as

those priests were allowed to marry if they chose

to do so, so contemporary priests should have the

same option, choosing a virtuous and pious

woman as companion. The Songe has also been

interpreted as having suggested to Rabelais some

of the episodes familiar from his later chroni-

cles—for example, the whole debate about the

advantages and disadvantages of marriage and

58 Dreams

the qualities to be sought in a good wife, Pan-

urge’s discussion of debts and debtors (Songe,

ll. 556–586), even the equation of the Shepherd

God Pan with Christ familiar from the moving

syncretism of the finished Fourth Book.

Readings: Alice Hulubei, L’Eglogue en France au

XVIe siecle (1515–1589) (Paris: Droz 1938); Henry

Lea, A History of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian

Church, 2 vols. (London: Watts & Co. 1907); John

Lewis, “Francois Habert, Le Songe de Pantagruel,”

ER 18 (1985):103–62.

John Lewis

DREAMS Rabelais’s writing shows little in-

terest in dreams before 1546. He sometimes uses

the words resveur (dreamer) or songe-creux as

terms of abuse; and in an Epistre to Jean Bouchet

of c. 1527 he explores the hallucinations brought

on by melancholy (OC 1022–1023); but he does

not involve dreams in the fabric of his fiction

until chapters 13–14 of the Third Book. Besides

the professional interest in dreams shown by any

Renaissance doctor, Rabelais’s particular fic-

tional use of this theme owes something to one

of his own imitators, Francois Habert, who in

1542 had published his Songe de Pantagruel, a

verse continuation of Rabelais’s earlier book.

Habert imagines Pantagruel dreaming of future

adventures concerning his own forthcoming

marriage, including a dream of a banquet in

which sages offer him advice, a dream of Pan-

urge returning from Babylon, and a dream of his

father Gargantua coming back from the dead.

This “songe tresprospere” (“very favorable

dream”) clearly helped to shape the future Third

Book. Although poets had long made use of the

device of the dreamlike vision of divine, pro-

phetic inspiration, this has no role in Rabelais’s

fiction.

In the Renaissance the most widely practiced

and most widely accepted form of natural magic

was oniromancy, the interpretation of dreams.

Humanists were familiar with the classical trea-

tises on the subject by Hippocrates, Aristotle,

Artemidorus, the Neoplatonic work by Synesius,

and especially the famous commentary of Ma-

crobius on the Dream of Scipio, which was a

best-seller in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

They might also have some knowledge of Arabic

scholarship on dreams, especially the writing of

Albumazar.

Divination by dreams is one of the dozen or

more methods Panurge used to ascertain the fu-

ture of his marriage (3BK 13–14). Some critics

have thought that Rabelais was mocking the in-

terpretation of dreams in these chapters and that

he was broadly skeptical of divination. Both

views have little foundation. Pantagruel specifi-

cally commends this method, and he cites all the

above classical authorities, and several others, in

order to prove that this form of divination is

“good, ancient, and authentic” (“bonne . . . , an-

tique, et authenticque” [OC 388]). Biblical prec-

edents added further prestige to this method, no-

tably the examples of Daniel, who had

interpreted the dreams of Nebuchadnezzar (Dan-

iel 2, 4), and of Joseph, who had explained those

of Pharoah (Genesis 40–41). Thus Pantagruel

concludes: “Sacred texts bear witness [to the

power of dreams], profane histories confirm it”

(“Les sacres letres le tesmoignent, les histoires

prophanes l’asceurent” [OC 389]). This method

gives an answer to Panurge consistent with the

other methods he attempts.

The name of Daniel in particular was associ-

ated with a medieval dreambook, which circu-

lated in manuscript throughout Europe, and of

which French editions exist: The Dreams of Dan-

iel the Prophet, translated from Latin into

French (Les Songes Daniel prophete, translatez

de latin en Francoys [c. 1510]). Although this

manual provided interpretations for a popular

readership, its material was reworked by contem-

porary physicians, who were commonly involved

in oniromancy. One of these, a physician to

Francis I, was Jean Thibault, who in the 1530s

published a work on dreams, The Physiognomy

of Dreams and Fantastic Visions (La Phision-

omie des songes et visions fantastiques des per-

sonnes), based on the Daniel dreambook. In this

work he makes a specific link between dreams

and astrology, giving guidance on dreams that

might occur on each day of the lunar month and

their medical significance. He also supplies an

alphabetical list of 277 objects that might appear

in dreams, giving their significance. Some prefig-

ure Panurge’s concerns about marriage: thus

“Marrying a woman means trouble” (“Espouser

une femme signifie dommage”); “Engag-

Du Bellay, Guillaume 59

ing in conjugal acts with one’s wife spells dan-

ger” (“Faire l’œuvre de mariage avec sa femme

signifie peril et danger de sa personne”); advice

is also given on the unfavorable significance of

dreaming about horns or birds or musical instru-

ments.

Treatises and manuals on dreams appeared

throughout the sixteenth century, and Rabelais

had read studies by Ficino, Vives, Agrippa and

Scaliger, who provide him with some of the er-

udition of these chapters. His ideas are close to

those of another medical contemporary and royal

doctor, Auger Ferrier, whose treatise appeared in

1549. The underlying principle is drawn from

Neoplatonic sources, namely, that during sleep

the soul or spirits of the body, no longer required

to sustain bodily functions, were free to leave

and to rejoin the spirit world: “Nostre ame . . .

s’esbat et reveoit sa patrie, qui est le ciel” (3BK

13). Dreams were revered because they were

thought to contain vague, half-remembered im-

pressions from this night journey of the soul, in-

cluding material about the future.

Some of the debate in these chapters turns on

commonplace medical advice on how to prevent

the body, through disturbances like indigestion,

from interfering with the free movement of the

spirits. Pantagruel makes appropriate recommen-

dations about Panurge’s diet before sleeping.

Other topics include rejection of magical rituals

associated in antiquity with oniromancy, such as

that of placing under the pillow certain leaves or

precious stones, or even “the left shoulder of the

crocodile and chameleon” (“l’espaule guausche

du crocodile et du chameleon”). The major

theme, however, is the uncertainty of dreams, as

expressed in the image found in Homer and Vir-

gil of the two gates of ivory and horn. The Rab-

elaisian episode seeks to distinguish between nat-

ural dreams, which inform the doctor about his

patient’s health, dreams of divine inspiration, by

which God sends us warning, and finally dreams

of diabolical origin, by which Satan cunningly

seeks to deceive us. Despite this uncertainty,

which Panurge seeks to exploit ingeniously in his

own favorable interpretation, Pantagruel is given

the last word with his confident and amply illus-

trated reading of the dream as inauspicious and

as prophesying cuckoldry.

The title of Habert’s poem, and no doubt the

increasingly bizarre, nightmarish nature of epi-

sodes in the Fourth Book and Fifth Book, gave

yet another imitator the idea for a posthumous

pseudo-rabelaisian work, the Songes drolatiques

de Pantagruel (1565). This collection of wood-

cuts derived from Bosch and Breughel illustrat-

ing monstrous figures has become associated

with Rabelais in many subsequent editions.

Readings: Roland Antonioli, “Rabelais et les son-

ges,” Cahiers de l’Association internationale des etu-

des francaises 30 (1978): 7–21; Francois Berriot, ed.,

Exposicions et significacions des songes (Geneva:

Droz, 1989); F. Berriot, ed., “A propos des chapitres

XIII et XIV du Tiers Livre,” RHR 23 (1986): 5–14;

Jean Ceard, La nature et les prodiges (Geneva: Droz,

1977); Richard A. Cooper, “Deux medecins royaux

onirocrites: Jean Thibault et Auger Ferrier,” Le Songe

a la Renaissance, ed. Francoise Charpentier (St.

Etienne, 1990); Richard A. Cooper, “Bibliographie

sommaire d’ouvrages sur le Songe publies en France

et en Italie jusqu’en 1600,” Le Songe: 255–71; Norma

L. Goodrich, “The Dream of Panurge,” ER (Geneva:

Droz, 1967): 94–103.

Richard Cooper

DU BELLAY, GUILLAUME (1491–1543) A

French diplomat and long-standing patron,

friend, and protector of Rabelais. The first offi-

cial record of a meeting between the two men

dates from 1534, the year in which Rabelais ac-

companied Guillaume’s brother Jean to Italy.

Even before that, however, the future physician

and author may well have met and formed a

friendship with the wealthy and well-educated du

Bellay brothers, who according to tradition were

educated at the monastery of La Baumette—the

same cloister where Rabelais himself is reputed

to have taken his priestly vows sometime after

1510. Although du Bellay, unlike Rabelais, did

not become a monk or enter the priesthood, he

himself was a minor writer, a humanist, a staunch

supporter of the French king, and a voice of com-

promise and moderation in debates between Re-

formist and Catholic factions during the 1520s

and 1530s. During his illustrious career Guil-

laume du Bellay, Sieur de Langey, was repeat-

edly involved in negotiations between Francis I

and Charles V, facilitated the divorce of Henry

VIII by enlisting the support of France, and

served as governor of Turin (1537–39) and Pied-

60 Du Bellay, Jean

mont (1539–42). During Langey’s term of office

in Piedmont, Rabelais accompanied his patron

and served him in the capacity of secretary and

naturalist, returning with him to France late in

1542. Du Bellay’s death in early 1543 had a so-

bering effect on the Gallic physician, who incor-

porates the event into his meditation on the

Death of Heroes (4BK 26–27) in the Fourth

Book.

Readings: V.-L. Bourrilly, Guillaume du Bellay,

seigneur de Langey, 1491–1593 (Paris: Societe nou-

velle de librairie et d’edition, 1905); Michael A.

Screech, Rabelais (London: Duckworth, 1979).


DU BELLAY, JEAN (1493–1560) French hu-

manist, diplomat, and powerful prelate who, like

his brother Guillaume, was a friend and patron

of Rabelais. The earliest documented interaction

between the author and Jean du Bellay dates

from 1534, when the physician accompanied his

fellow clergyman, then bishop of Paris and suf-

fering from sciatica, to Rome. Upon his return to

France later the same year, Rabelais dedicated

his edition of Marliani’s Topography of Ancient

Rome to Jean du Bellay, whose patronage both

helped shield the writer against attacks from the

Sorbonne and likely enhanced his ability to win

the ear of powerful and aristocratic audiences. In

1535 Rabelais again accompanied Jean du Bellay

to Rome, this time for the bishop’s investiture as

cardinal; and the author joined the cleric there

again in 1547, when du Bellay was dispatched to

supervise the French cardinals in Rome follow-

ing the death of Francis I and the accession of

Henry II. Some scholars even suggest that Ra-

belais’s stay in Metz during 1546–47, long

viewed as a period of exile following the publi-

cation of his controversial Third Book, was in

reality a mission for the cardinal, while others

hypothesize that the du Bellay family, which had

connections in Metz, arranged the visit to protect

Rabelais from his detractors. What is certain is

that du Bellay was one of the more colorful and

powerful figures of the French Renaissance. De-

spite his powerful position within the Church,

which garnered him several votes for the papacy

upon the death of Paul III, the prelate was known

as a Reform sympathizer and assisted his brother

Guillaume in negotiations with the German Prot-

estants during the 1530s. In addition to being a

diplomat and prelate, Jean du Bellay like many

other humanists was a writer as well, whose lit-

erary output includes Latin verse, printed with

Salmon Macrin’s Odes in 1546, and a collection

of lively (but mostly unpublished) correspon-

dence.

Readings: Richard Cooper, “Les poesies de jeu-

nesse de Jean du Bellay,” Melanges offerts a Guy De-

merson, ed. Jacques-Philippe Saint-Gerand (Paris:

Champion, 1993) 97–111; Donald Frame, Rabelais

(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977); “Jean

du Bellay,” The 1911 Edition Encyclopedia, http://

www.1911encyclopedia.org /D/DU/DU_BELLAY_

JEAN.htm; Remy Scheurer, Correspondance du car-

dinal Jean du Bellay. Tome II: 1535–1536 (Paris:

Klincksieck, 1973); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais

(London: Duckworth, 1979).


E

ECOLIER LIMOUSIN (LIMOUSIN

SCHOOLBOY) (P 6) A university student

traveling from Paris to Limoges whom Panta-

gruel encounters outside the gates of Orleans.

The Limousin student speaks what the chapter

heading identifies as counterfeit French by in-

serting Latin words with French endings into ver-

nacular syntax in order, as he claims, to enrich

the French language, or “le locupleter de la re-

dundance latinicome.” In fact, posterity has in

part vindicated his efforts since many of his un-

usual words have since entered standard French

usage, rendering his speech less strange than it

would have been to Rabelais’s first readers. In

the story, Pantagruel punishes the Ecolier for his

pretentious speech, causing him to revert to his

native Limousin dialect. The episode ends with

a resounding victory for common usage rein-

forced by an appeal to Julius Caesar’s condem-

nation of archaic diction recorded in Aulus Gel-

lius’s Noctes Atticae.

The encounter between Pantagruel and the

Limousin scholar has provoked a great deal of

commentary, some of it indignant and some in-

terpretive. The first critic to respond to the epi-

sode was Etienne Pasquier in a letter addressed

to Claude de Kerquefinen dated circa 1560,

where Pasquier identifies the Ecolier as a parody

of Helisenne de Crenne, author of the novel Les

angoysses douloureuses d’amour. Pasquier initi-

ated a common theme of Rabelais criticism when

he labeled the Ecolier’s language “un langage

escorche-latin,” or skinned Latin. Subsequent

critics have pointed out that one of the first

phrases pronounced by the Limousin replicates a

phrase from the preface to Geoffroy Tory’s

Champ fleury where the author deplores certain

linguistic abuses, including those perpetrated by

the “Escumeurs de Latin.” Criticism has identi-

fied numerous other references to the skimmer or

skinner of Latin in middle French literature, sug-

gesting that Rabelais’s episode participates in a

widespread genre of linguistic satire.

The episode, like others from Pantagruel, also

participates in a debate on natural language.

When the Ecolier reverts from his hybrid uni-

versity jargon to his native dialect, Pantagruel,

whose violence has induced this change, con-

gratulates him for speaking naturally, though his

speech is equally strange in both instances. By

juxtaposing a regional dialect with a national lan-

guage and a professional jargon, this chapter

seems to relativize the notion of natural language

and to substitute for it an ideal of national usage,

somewhat like chapter 9 where Panurge speaks

in various languages before making himself un-

derstood in French.

One way to deepen our understanding of the

Ecolier Limousin is to examine his strange Lat-

inate diction more closely and to attempt to iden-

tify its literary antecedents. The Ecolier employs

a variety of Latinate forms, including the prefixes

sub, omni, and super, the suffixes bond, come,

ose, and ique, and superlatives in issime. How-

ever, by far the most distinctive lexical feature

of the Ecolier’s speech is his insistent use of the

Latin diminutive endings ulus or culus. He uses

no fewer than thirteen of these diminutives in the

course of the chapter, including eleven nouns and

two adjectives. The same diminutive form recurs

constantly in the hybrid prose of Francesco Co-

lonna, arranged in the most impossible combi-

nations with other ostentatious Latinisms. Thus,

when the Ecolier admires “ces meritricules ami-

cabilissimes,” we can detect an unmistakable

echo of the Hypnerotomachia. At the same time,

according to Jacques Chomarat and others, the

diminutive form ulus is one of the most distinc-

tive features of Erasmus’s prose style, deriving

most likely from the influence of Lorenzo Valla’s

62 Economy, in Renaissance France

Elegantiae. In this way, when he imagines the

extravagant speech of his Limousin scholar, Ra-

belais offers us not so much a moral satire as a

verbal experiment, what Raymond Queneau

called an exercise of style, following in the tra-

dition of some of the most original prose writers

of the European Renaissance.

Readings: Jacques Chomarat, Grammaire et rheto-

rique chez Erasme (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1980);

Gerard Defaux, Pantagruel et les sophistes (The

Hague: Nijhoff, 1973); Georges Gougenheim, “La re-

latinisation du vocabulaire francais,” Annales de

l’Universite de Paris 29 (1959): 5–18; Etienne Pas-

quier, Choix de lettres sur la litterature, la langue et

la traduction (Geneva: Droz, 1956).

Eric MacPhail

ECONOMY, IN RENAISSANCE FRANCE

The Renaissance enjoyed a period of economic

growth without precedent in history. It was the

age of the Fugger and the Medici, two families

who grew rich through commerce and controlled

the banking system in important marketplaces

such as Lyon and Antwerp. During the sixteenth

century, the internationalization of capital was

not only a European phenomenon but also a

world reality. The “discovery” of the New World

and the creation of trading posts in the Orient

enabled commercial capital to acquire a global

dimension. The circulation of goods intensified

within a continually expanding market that

crossed political and cultural boundaries. The

new breed of merchant travelers, like Dinden-

ault, adapted to cultural differences with relative

ease. Business was in general free of prejudices,

and the bourgeoisie accepted diverse mores and

customs as long as they did not interfere with its

primary economic activity. A product of this new

cultural logic was a utilitarian vision of the world

that promoted the free circulation of individuals

throughout the world. In many respects, it resem-

bled what we would in modern terms call “free

trade.”

The very notion of work was also redefined in

the Renaissance. Indeed, the social and eco-

nomic reality of the time placed labor and pro-

duction at the heart of all human activities. Work

became so prevalent in defining the individual

that it invaded all spheres of human endeavors,

including literary and artistic production. Society

itself was often understood in terms of one’s re-

lationship to the prevailing mode of production.

Hence, the Renaissance defined society (at least

its productive part) in three distinct categories,

each related to its respective economic function:

laborers, craftsmen, and merchants. The negative

image of merchants during the Middle Ages was

rapidly changing. The secular became irremedi-

ably separated from the sacred, and work increas-

ingly preoccupied the centralized state. Images

and metaphors based on production, exchange,

and accumulation abound during the Renais-

sance. Economic terms found their way into the

literary works of the time, especially Rabelais.

The novelty is that this lexicon defined social

relations as well. Once freed from religious con-

siderations, economic discourse shaped and re-

defined the linguistic practices of everyday life.

The historian Fernand Braudel defined the

Renaissance as a time of economic exchange, but

it was also a time of monetary change. The di-

versity of currencies (coins) that circulated

throughout Europe required a stable system of

exchange to facilitate commerce. In his Treatise

of Merchandise and the Perfect Merchant, Be-

nedetto Cotrugli spoke of currency exchange as

the essential seasoning for all sorts of commerce.

New practices started to appear on markets (dry

change, manual change, letters of exchange,

etc.), and the Italian merchant-bankers intro-

duced new accounting techniques in France. The

iconography of the Renaissance provides numer-

ous images of merchants and bankers involved

in changing or weighing golden and silver coins.

Once again, literature offers us a good under-

standing of the importance of changing money

in the Renaissance. Panurge, for example, was

an expert in the art of changing coins for profit.

Money rapidly became the social sign par excel-

lence, providing the measure of success or failure

in any number of human endeavors.

If one cannot, per se, speak of political econ-

omy during the Renaissance (Montchrestien will

coin the term in the early seventeenth century),

we can nonetheless assert that economic consid-

erations increasingly occupied a central place in

moral, social, and even religious matters during

the Renaissance. Inflation, lending, debts, usury,

hoarding and the building up of capital, market

protections, and the like, generated numerous

Education 63

discussions which transcended their immediate

economic reality. Once more, Rabelais offers his

own comic reflection on these problems (see, for

example, the famous Praise of Debts, or the ep-

isode of the Chats-fourrez in the Fifth Book).

Despite the rapid expansion of markets, one

must also recognize that, for most sixteenth-

century people, the region remained the imme-

diate environment for daily life and work. For

the vast majority of the population, the provincial

and local markets represented the world. Unlike

merchants, laborers and craftsmen depended on

local markets for their economic well-being. At

this level, innovations multiplied as local travel

became easier. The improvement of roads and

rivers facilitated the distribution of goods and ac-

celerated the circulation of foodstuffs. The pe-

riod’s literature exploited images of local peas-

ants en route to market. The city was rapidly

becoming the center of all economic activities.

The episode of the fouaciers or bakers in Gar-

gantua provides a glimpse of this new reality,

where even war is sparked by a breakdown in

regional commerce.

Readings: Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Cap-

italism, 15th–18th century, 3 vols. (New York: Harper

& Row, 1982–84); Philippe Desan, L’imaginaire

economique de la Renaissance (Paris: Presses de

l’Universite de Paris IV—Sorbonne, 2002); Immanuel

Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist

Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-

Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Aca-

demic Press, 1974).

Philippe Desan

EDUCATION A central theme of Rabelais’s

mock epic and of numerous other Renaissance

works. The intellectual ferment of the restitutio

litterae, which took hold in Italy in the late four-

teenth century and swept northward during the

next two hundred years, brought with it a reas-

sessment of the medieval cursus studiorum and

an outpouring of alternative educational models,

including The Education of the Gentleman (c.

1404) by Vergerius, The Education of a Chris-

tian Prince (1516) by Erasmus, and On the

Transmission of Knowledge (1531) by Juan Luis

Vives. Inspired in part by humanistic pedagogi-

cal models of this type, which advocate time-

efficient, stimulating methods of teaching and a

wide-ranging curriculum based mainly on texts

from antiquity, Rabelais’s treatment of education

is also informed by the birth/education/prowess

format of fifteenth-century chivalric tales, by the

educational thrust of the epic and of initiatory

myths in general, and by the heated confrontation

in early sixteenth-century France between the

New Learning and the scholastic canon.

While the theme of education subtends all five

Books of Pantagruel, it is in the letter on learning

from Gargantua to Pantagruel (P 8) and in the

six chapters chronicling Gargantua’s own edu-

cation (G 14–15, 21–24) that Rabelais confronts

pedagogical issues most directly. In the famous

letter, which like Alberti’s Book of the Family

links the young gentleman’s learning to the glory

of his family and the progress of humankind,

Gargantua exhorts his son to become an “abyss

of knowledge,” a Gallic version of Italy’s Ren-

aissance Man or uomo universale. Borrowing

language that dates back to Petrarch, the Uto-

pian king decries the “darkness” of medieval

pedagogy, which he mocks elsewhere for its rote

repetition and intellectual closure, and extols the

“light” of classically inspired studies. The am-

bitious course of studies Gargantua lays out for

his son modifies and expands the medieval Triv-

ium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) to include the

languages of humanistic scholarship (classical

Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldean),

Greek and Roman rhetorical models (Plato and

Cicero), and history, a shibboleth of humanistic

curricula. In addition to covering the Quadrivium

(geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy),

which Pantagruel begins at the age of five or six,

Gargantua rounds out his humanistic curriculum

with civil law (in opposition to the canon law

typically taught in French universities), the nat-

ural sciences, and medicine; advocates the study

of biblical texts in the original Greek and He-

brew; and, in typical Renaissance fashion,

stresses the importance of both military training

and morality. The letter’s apparent value as an

educational model is strengthened by the rollick-

ing satire of the scholastic antimodel—its logic,

rhetoric, institutions, and scholarly writings—in

adjacent episodes and by the typically humanistic

chronology and interpersonal dynamics of the

curriculum that Gargantua outlines.

Although Pantagruel’s first teacher is his fa-

64 Emblems

ther, the archetype of authority and tradition,

Gargantua chooses to instill in his young son a

“taste” for mathematics and music rather than

force-feeding him, thereby awakening in Panta-

gruel an appetite for knowledge and preparing

the prince to become an active agent in his own

education. To be sure, Gargantua advocates ex-

tensive memorization, which might seem at first

to align the king with his own scholastic tutors

(G 14–15). If the humanists frequently scoff at

the medieval penchant for “memorizing by rote,”

however, proto-Renaissance theorists such as

Manetti (On the Dignity and Excellence of Man

[De dignitate et excellentia hominis], 1396)

nonetheless embrace memory itself as a sine qua

non of man’s dignity and ability to progress. Far

from proposing a methodology based solely on

memorization, moreover, the king engages a hu-

manistic tutor (Epistemon) for his son to emu-

late and converse with; emphasizes the impor-

tance of observation, discussion, and judgment;

and addresses the imperative for doing as well as

learning.

In his Gargantua, written two years later, Ra-

belais adds painting, sculpture, physical educa-

tion, and even the study of industry and tech-

nology to his giant’s curriculum, which is

remarkable for its innovative methods as well as

its ambitious content. In contrast to the scholastic

system of Thubal Holoferne and Jobelin Bride (G

14–15), which is so boring and repetitive that it

causes young Gargantua to regress, the time-

efficient and interactive curriculum designed by

Ponocrates, the humanistic tutor who replaces the

theologians, actively seeks to engage the stu-

dent’s interest and intellect. Lively discussions,

first-hand observations, and hands-on experience

supplement traditional book learning, and instead

of being restricted to a stationary classroom or

chapel, young Gargantua is taught in different

rooms of the castle and makes field trips to a

plethora of sites.

Because Rabelais’s treatment of education is

interwoven into a mock-epic framework, some

scholars contend that his fictional curricula, and

particularly the letter on learning, function more

as satires of scholastic encyclopedism or as par-

odies of humanistic hubris than as either serious

pedagogical models or tributes to the New Learn-

ing. Although not universally accepted, this cau-

tionary reading finds partial support in the more

overtly skeptical Third and Fourth Books, which

explore alternate sources of information (inter-

views with learned men, forays into the occult,

geographical exploration), the gap between learn-

ing and doing, the value of self-knowledge, and

the problematic nature of truth in a pluralistic

world (see also Humanism; Scholasticism).

Readings: Gerard J. Brault, “ ‘Ung abysme de sci-

ence’: On the Interpretation of Gargantua’s Letter to

Pantagruel,” BHR 28 (1966): 615–32; Gerard Defaux,

Pantagruel et les sophistes. Contribution a l’histoire

de l’humanisme chretien au XVIe siecle (The Hague:

Nijhoff, 1973); Edwin M. Duval, “The Medieval Cur-

riculum, The Scholastic University, and Gargantua’s

Program of Studies (Pantagruel, 8),” Rabelais’s In-

comparable Book (Lexington, KY: French Forum,

1986); Elizabeth Zegura and Marcel Tetel, Rabelais

Revisited (New York: Macmillan, 1993).


EMBLEMS Pantagruel, published in 1531 or

1532, appeared at about the same time as the first

book of emblems, the Emblematum libellus of

Andrea Alciato. This emblem book was pub-

lished in Augsburg in 1531 and in Paris in 1534

by Chretien Wechel, with each of the 113 Latin

emblems accompanied by a complementary

woodcut in Wechel’s edition. Several other Par-

isian editions quickly followed, including a

French translation by Jean Lefevre. An emblem

book, properly speaking, should have a tripartite

structure like that of Alciato’s book, with each

entry consisting of a picture, motto, and short

text (either poetry or prose). The texts often re-

sembled those in books of proverbs. The picture

is not exactly an illustration, and the motto is not

exactly a caption. In a true emblem book, the

parts together express an abstract, moral, or spir-

itual truth, and the reader must participate in de-

ciphering the meaning suggested by each em-

blem. There were also books of personal or

heraldic devices (imprese in Italian) with mot-

toes, often with symbolic content. Gargantua’s

hat medallion was such a device (G 8).

Between the first publication of Pantagruel

and the publication of the expanded version of

the Fourth Book in 1552, several emblem books

Emblems 65

appeared in France. The popularity of emblem

books may have contributed to the appeal of Ra-

belais’s works, and vice versa. Among contem-

porary emblematic publications were the Theatre

of Virtuous Devices (Theatre des bons engines)

by Guillaume de La Perriere and the Hecatom-

graphie of Gilles Corrozet, both published in

1540 in Paris by Denis Janot. This same pub-

lisher had produced Les cronicques du roy Gar-

gantua et qui fut son pere et sa mere (c. 1532),

as well as The Disciple of Pantagruel (Le disci-

ple de Pantagruel [c. 1538?]), each with a full-

page woodcut illustration on the title page. The

Cronicques featured David and Goliath with an

army of soldiers with spears behind the two main

figures, and the second work (usually referred to

as the Navigation) depicted a gigantic Pantagruel

holding the Divine Bottle. Other books by Ra-

belais were published in Lyon, a hotbed of Al-

ciato publishing by Bonhomme and Rouille be-

tween 1548 and 1552. Sebastian Gryphius in

Lyon issued several works edited by Rabelais,

including texts relating to medicine in the early

1540s. During this same period, Gryphius pub-

lished a textual edition of Horapollo’s Hiero-

glyphics (Hieroglyphica), which was followed by

illustrated editions in Paris. Renaissance scholars

thought that Horapollo’s symbols contained an-

cient, pristine wisdom; this “essence” of truth is

a recurring theme in Rabelais’s opus.

Although Gargantua includes satirical treat-

ment of both heraldic devices and emblems, il-

lustrated editions of this text present several pic-

tures that should be read emblematically. An

example is a woodcut in the Gargantua of 1547

published in Valence, in which one man points

another toward the entrance to the Abbey of

Theleme, with a poetic text below the woodcut

explaining precisely what types of people are not

permitted to enter the abbey (226). Another ex-

ample is a woodcut in the Gargantua published

in Lyon in 1542, with two women and a man

seated at a table with various objects on it. This

enigmatic picture opens the chapter of the enig-

matic prophecy (f. 151v). There are also many

thematic connections between Rabelais’s books

and subjects treated in contemporary emblem

books. Corrozet’s Hecatomgraphie features sev-

eral such topics, such as an emblem “Against As-

trologers” (“Contre les astrologues”) with an as-

trologer pointing to the sun, moon, and stars,

accompanied by a poetic text stating that it is not

for us to know the secrets of the heavens, but for

God (fK6v).

Renaissance readers approached various types

of books with text and images, such as the Hi-

eroglyphics of Horapollo, with the idea of dis-

covering arcane meanings and hidden symbol-

ism. Moreover, Renaissance books without

emblematic pictures sometimes contained em-

blematic structure, featuring descriptive visual

imagery in juxtaposition with narrative or ex-

planatory text. The combination of this imagery

and text functioned emblematically, so that read-

ers could comprehend the hidden message by

“reading between the lines.” Much of Rabelais’s

writing functions in this manner, for example, his

descriptions of the hideous Furry Cats (Chats-

fourrez) and of the glorious Androgyne. The Di-

vine Bottle was often illustrated in technopa-

egnia (the words reflecting the shape of the

object), another emblematic approach to litera-

ture. As we have come to realize, the hidden

meanings in Rabelais expressed his Evangelical

sympathies and the tenets of Renaissance Neo-

platonism. For Neoplatonism, the image was a

vital link between external reality and the essence

of truth; what we now call “applied emblemat-

ics” was one of Rabelais’s most fruitful literary

tools.

Readings: Francois Rigolot and Sandra Sider,

“Fonctions de l’ecriture emblematique chez Rabelais,”

EC 28.2 (1988): 36–47; Daniel Russell, “A Note on

Panurge’s ‘Pusse en l’aureille’,” ER 11 (1974): 82–87;

Daniel Russell, “Panurge and His New Clothes,” ER

14 (1977): 89–104; Martine Sauret, Gargantua et les

delits du corps (New York: Peter Lang, 1997); Jerome

Schwartz, “Gargantua’s Device and the Abbey of The-

leme: A Study in Rabelais’ Iconography,” YFS 47

(1972): 232–242; Jerome Schwartz, “Scatology and

Eschatology in Gargantua’s Androgyne Device,” ER

14 (1978): 265–275; Michael Screech, “Emblems and

Colours: The Controversy over Gargantua’s Colours

and Devices (Gargantua, 8, 9, 10),” Melanges

d’histoire du XVIe siecle: Offerts a Henri Meylan (Ge-

neva: Droz, 1970) 65–80; Sandra Sider, “Emblematic

Imagery in Rabelais,” Diss. University of North Car-

olina, 1977; Florence Weinberg, “Layers of Emblem-

66 Encyclopedism

atic Prose: Rabelais’ Andouilles,” SCJ 26.2 (1995):

367–377.

Sandra Sider

ENCYCLOPEDISM Rabelais refers twice to

the “encyclopedia,” by which he means the “cir-

cle of learning.” Thaumaste, the “great scholar”

from England, wishes to test Pantagruel’s learn-

ing but is treated instead to a disputation, in sign

language, with Pantagruel’s “disciple” Panurge,

whose obscene gestures Thaumaste interprets as

revealing the occultist knowledge transmitted by

Pantagruel: “He [Panurge] has uncovered for me

the true well and abyss of the Encyclopedia” (P

18). This term would have struck many contem-

porary readers as unfamiliar, as esoteric in itself.

It had only entered the French language some ten

years earlier, in about 1522, in one of the various

works in which Rabelais’s correspondent Guil-

laume Bude, the great humanist, meditated on

the “circle of learning” that had been called en-

kyklios paideia by the ancient Greeks, orbis doc-

trinae by the ancient Romans, and encyclopedia

by Italian humanist grammarians such as Angelo

Poliziano. This “circle” meant different things at

different times. For the ancients, it was not in the

least esoteric but instead largely denoted a cycle

of preliminary, propaedeutic instruction given to

boys in order to teach them philosophy (the

Greeks) or rhetoric (the Romans, who based this

cursus mainly on the liberal arts—see Quintil-

ian, The Orator’s Education, 1.10.1). In the late

fifteenth century, for Poliziano and others, this

“circle” was even more substantial: the encyclo-

pedia now consisted in detailed knowledge of the

extant corpus of ancient texts; that knowledge

qualified a person to practice philology. Eras-

mus put greater emphasis on study of the Bible

as the most valuable outcome of this humanist

“circle of learning.” Bude’s notion of the ency-

clopedia was influenced by both Erasmus and

Poliziano. These humanist notions of the “circle

of learning” differed from ancient ones in that

they emphasized extraordinary erudition rather

than ordinary education.

It is possible that Rabelais is imagining, in the

figure of Pantagruel, an amazing synthesis of

these twin ideals: the giant’s extraordinary eru-

dition, that so impresses Thaumaste, is the out-

come of his adolescent cursus of studies. To in-

terpret Rabelais in this way, one has to argue that

Thaumaste’s reference to the “Encyclopedia” that

Panurge has communicated to him also refers,

more implicitly, to the education received by

Pantagruel in earlier chapters. This reading is

strengthened by the verbal echo between Thau-

maste’s “abyss of the Encyclopedia” and the

“abyss of knowledge” which Gargantua urged

Pantagruel to acquire through his education (P

8). However, this high-minded reading needs to

be balanced against the fact that this alleged “En-

cyclopedia” is revealed to Thaumaste only by

Panurge’s obscene and scatological gestures.

Rabelais represents the “Encyclopedia” as in-

volving occultist knowledge in particular. Thau-

maste thinks he has been discussing with Pan-

urge not only philosophy but also magic,

alchemy, the kabbala, geomancy, and astrol-

ogy. Indeed, the only other place where Rabelais

uses the term (in a deformed version) is on the

title page of the 1544 almanac that he probably

composed, under the name of “Seraphino Cal-

basy, doctor in the most noble discipline of as-

trology and medicine of the entire Encyclope-

dia.”

Soon after Rabelais’s time, some book com-

pilations of learning began to be called encyclo-

pedias. Certain modern scholars, going beyond

actual occurrences of the term, have defined as

Renaissance encyclopedism any attempt to

shape knowledge—whether in a book or in the

learner’s mind—into an internally coherent circle

of learning, set out in a metaphysically signifi-

cant order. Renaissance encyclopedism, in its dif-

ferent varieties, differed from its modern coun-

terparts in that it did not claim exhaustiveness:

only knowledge deemed necessary was included

in the circle of learning. It was not until the En-

lightenment Encyclopedie that the modern notion

of the encyclopedia as a comprehensive, alpha-

betically arranged reference work began to be-

come dominant.

Readings: Guy Guedet, “Guillaume Bude, parrain

d’‘encyclopedie’ ou le vrai texte de l’Institution du

prince,” Le genie de la forme: Melanges de langue et

litterature offerts a Jean Mourot (Nancy: Presses

Universitaires de Nancy, 1982); Neil Kenny, The Pal-

ace of Secrets: Beroalde de Verville and Renaissance

Conceptions of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1991); Franco Simone, “La notion d’encyclopedie:

England 67

element caracteristique de la Renaissance francaise,”

French Renaissance Studies, 1540–70: Humanism and

the Encyclopedia (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

Press, 1976).

Neil Kenny

ENGLAND Estimating Rabelais’s reception in

early modern England and Scotland is compli-

cated by the presence of a now lost chapbook,

probably called The History of Gargantua, trans-

lated from the Croniques admirables sometime

around 1567, and by the Songes drolatiques Pan-

tagruel (1565), ascribed to Rabelais on its title

page and used by Inigo Jones to help costume at

least one court antimasque. Many allusions to

Gargantua in the period must mean the chap-

book giant, even if as Rabelais became better

known some must have equated them. Other

pseudorabelaisian works had minimal impact, al-

though in 1628 the satirist and explorer Robert

Hayman translated two poems by Francois Ha-

bert which he thought were by Rabelais because

they were published in some editions of Rabe-

lais’s Oeuvres.

The role of Rabelais’s own works in the Eng-

lish or Scottish imagination can be traced

through borrowings (most extensively in John

Eliot’s Ortho-epia Gallica, 1593) and the admir-

ing or dismayed allusions that began slowly in

the later sixteenth century and increased rapidly

thereafter. Those wishing to read Rabelais would

have welcomed Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 French-

English dictionary, which cites him frequently

and at times imitates his style. In 1653 Thomas

Urquhart published a translation of the first two

books with a verve and imagination that have

never been surpassed. He also did a partial trans-

lation of the Third Book, and this, together with

a more subdued English version of the remaining

two books was published by the Huguenot emi-

gre Peter Motteux in 1693–94.

The list of those who quoted or alluded to Ra-

belais before he was translated is impressive. It

includes John Donne; the great antiquary John

Selden; Ben Jonson (who owned a copy of his

Oeuvres); the fiction-writer and satirist Thomas

Lodge; the court poet and dramatist James

Shirley; John Webster; Francis Bacon; the witty

translator of Ariosto, Sir John Harington; the

poet Michael Drayton; Thomas Browne; Robert

Burton; the satirist (and future bishop) John Hall;

and King James I. Many relished and sometimes

imitated his verbal inventiveness, others his fan-

tasy, and yet others his scatology or similar ges-

tures toward Carnival materialism—gestures

sometimes oversimplified or misread as the myth

of Rabelais the dirty-mouthed celebrator of drink

and sex took hold. With some exceptions, most

of those who left evidence of having read or

heard of Rabelais were from a set of overlapping

social and intellectual circles: the court, the the-

ater, and the legal world of London’s Inns of

Court. To quote or name him was, in these cir-

cles, to signal an urban(e) wit, good education,

and, sometimes, a touch of what would in France

come to be called a “libertin” attitude: skeptical,

amused, worldly.

That very tone led others, especially those of

a “Puritan” persuasion, when writing polemics or

moral treatises to cite Rabelais with dislike or

contempt and to besmirch opponents by associ-

ating them with his supposed drunkenness, athe-

ism, and ridiculous fictions. Sometimes the vil-

lain is Gargantua, who may or may not be the

Rabelaisian giant, but often he is Rabelais him-

self, the writer’s Bacchic imagery and exhorta-

tions read literally as personal alcoholism and his

Franciscan (or Humanist) anticlerical humor read

as cynical irreligion. It is this other reputation,

one that would prosper in later centuries but with

a more positive spin, that explains the occasional

ambivalence in individual English reactions to

Rabelais. Edmund Spenser’s friend Gabriel Har-

vey, to cite the clearest example, praises Rabelais

in the manuscript marginalia he scribbled in var-

ious books but denigrates him in printed attacks

on his enemy Thomas Nashe.

Did Rabelais have much influence in the Brit-

ish Isles? One can find traces of him in the writ-

ings of Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, and Francis

Bacon. Others, most notably Harington and the

irrepressible Thomas Nashe, may have learned

something about verbal tumble from him, about

lists or other methods of verbal proliferation,

teasing postponements, and self-reflexive narra-

tive intrusions by the author. Donne, and perhaps

others, imitated his fantasy library (P 7) or Ep-

istemon’s vision of Carnival reversal in Hades

(P 30), although it can be difficult to distinguish

his influence from that of Lucian. Largely miss-

68 Enigmatic Prophecy

ing from British understanding of Rabelais is his

evangelical seriousness on the one hand and his

more disturbing comic ironies on the other. An

exception may be Shakespeare, and there may

have been many others who did not record their

views or readily submit to “influence.” In any

case, Rabelais’s ambiguous image was now set,

and his fame and influence after Urquhart’s

translation only increased. In later centuries he

would find perceptive imitators in Laurence

Sterne (Tristram Shandy), Jonathan Swift (Gul-

liver’s Travels), and, less expectedly, the Victo-

rian cleric Charles Kingsley (Waterbabies). Nor

is his influence over, as witness J. K. Toole’s

Menippean Confederacy of Dunces. The word

“Rabelaisian” still modifies one sort of humor,

and a recent Japanese monster film, War of the

Gargantuas, demonstrates the globalization of

Rabelais’s most famous giant, if not of his own

Pantagruelism.

Readings: Huntington Brown, Rabelais in English

Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1933); Huntington Brown, ed., The Tale of Gargantua

and King Arthur by Francois Girault c. 1534 (Cam-

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932); Marcel

de Greve, “La legende de Gargantua en Angleterre au

XVIe siecle,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire

38 (1960): 765–94; Anne Lake Prescott, Imagining

Rabelais in Renaissance England (New Haven, CT:

Yale University Press, 1998).

Anne Lake Prescott

ENIGMATIC PROPHECY (ENIGME EN

PROPHETIE) (G 58) Abruptly situated at the

end of Gargantua (58), this poem is immediately

followed by contradictory interpretations offered

by Gargantua and Frere Jean. With the excep-

tion of the first two and last ten verses, the poem

was formerly attributed to Mellin de Saint-

Gelais, although this conjecture has been largely

discredited. It is more likely the poem attributed

to Saint-Gelais in a 1574 edition of his works

was taken from Rabelais’s poem. The enigma

was a popular genre that consisted in elaborate

and obscure descriptions of common or obscene

things. Once the key to the enigma was discov-

ered, little critical interest remained. Frere Jean

follows this practice by explaining that this

apocalyptic-sounding poem refers to a game of

jeu de paume (see Games). However, with the

additional twelve verses not found in the Saint-

Gelais version of the poem, Pantagruel’s inter-

pretation of the enigma, as an allegory of the

suffering of evangelical Christians in France, is

also viable. Read in an evangelical context, the

double interpretation can be seen as a device to

thwart those who might attack the author’s re-

formist text by offering the anodyne interpreta-

tion of Frere Jean. However, neither interpreta-

tion is exclusive, and both offer only a partial

understanding of the text. Although both inter-

pretations are correct, both are incomplete.

Meaning is reached only through a combination

of these opposing views. Along with the Fran-

freluches antidotees chapter (G 2), this poem

helps to frame the larger work and illustrates the

complicated hermeneutics put forward in the pro-

logue. This underscores the polysemic nature of

Rabelais’s work, in which various meanings

compete and contradict one another, leaving the

reader unable to reach a complete understanding

through traditional modes of hermeneutics.

Readings: Jerome Schwartz, Irony and Ideology in

Rabelais: Structures of Subversion (Cambridge, MA:

Cambridge University Press, 1990); M. A. Screech,

Rabelais (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1979);

Andre Tournon, En sens agile: Les acrobaties de

l’esprit selon Rabelais (Paris: Champion, 1995).

E. Bruce Hayes

ENNASIN, OR ISLAND OF THE ALLI-

ANCES (4BK 9) An exotic escale, or port of

call, visited by Pantagruel and his company in

the Fourth Book. In the symbolic system of the

Chronicles, each of these visits holds up to scru-

tiny the institutions and attitudes of sixteenth-

century France. On Ennasin, or the Island of Al-

liances, the people have noses like the ace of

clubs; Ennasin means noseless. Their unions are

no more than wordplay. To find what this island

signifies in the economy of the voyage, three

components are necessary: the symbolism of

noses, the marriage symbol, and the context in

which the episode is to be considered.

The island is triangular. Whatever symbolic

significances the triangle may have, Rabelais

uses it here as a marker to bring into association

four episodes that on the surface are not con-

nected, inviting the reader to find what they have

in common. The topic common to all is lan-

Epistemon 69

guage. The Frozen Words adventure (4BK 55–

56) deals with the relationship between words

and ideas and features an equilateral triangle that

contains “the Manor of Truth where Words,

Ideas, Examples, and portraits of all things past

and future reside.” The three other triangular fig-

ures deal with aberrations of the relationship be-

tween words and truth. In the second prologue to

the Fourth Book, Rabelais roundly condemns the

factional disputes of idle scholars. With Priapus

as his mouthpiece, Rabelais proposes that such

disputes be extinguished on the noses of a tri-

angle of petrified quarrelling scholars. In the

Physetere episode (see Papimanes and Pap-

efigues), the monster is silenced by three jave-

lins through mouth and tongue, forming a trian-

gle and shutting off the flow of foul water—

sectarian disputes—from it.

If these two episodes deal with the distortion

of truth created by factionalism, the Ennasin mar-

riage marks a rupture between idea and word.

Marriage in the Rabelaisian allegory is the con-

secrated union of Mind and Idea (see Symbolic

System). The marriages of the Island of Ennasin

are couples of words only, without significance,

engaging neither the mind nor ideas. ENNAS is

a condensed anagram of sans sens, meaning

“senseless.”

The nose is a symbol of wisdom, of native wit;

the Allianciers have no noses, no wit. How many

empty words are being bandied about in mid-

sixteenth-century France by people with no real

understanding of the issues? Rabelais dismisses

those who speak thus as “mal plaisans” (4BK

10), or “objectionable.”

Readings: Fred W. Marshall, “Papimania, the

Blessed Isle: Rabelais’ Attitude to the Roman

Church,” AJFS 31.3 (1994): 245–58; Verdun-L. Saul-

nier, Rabelais II: Rabelais dans son enquete: Etude

sur le “Quart” et le “Cinquieme” livre (Paris:

SEDES, 1982); Emile V. Telle, “L’ile des Alliances

ou l’Anti-Theleme,” BHR 14 (1952): 159–75; Marcel

Tetel, “Theme et structure du Quart livre,” BAARD 2

(1968): 217–19.

Fred W. Marshall

EPISTEMON When Pantagruel first meets

Panurge in the ninth chapter of Pantagruel,

Panurge speaks several real and imaginary lan-

guages. At first, Epistemon does not even rec-

ognize the specific languages that Panurge is

speaking, but when Panurge speaks Hebrew, Ep-

istemon understands and even compliments Pan-

urge on his correct Hebrew pronunciation. In

chapter 24, Epistemon once again demonstrates

his command of Hebrew by translating the He-

brew words “Lamah hazabthani,” which Christ

says to his Father on the cross, as “Why have

you abandoned me?” This is, of course, a quo-

tation from the Gospel according to Saint Mat-

thew 27.46. Epistemon’s knowledge of Hebrew

enables him to read the Old Testament in the

original version, and for this reason his under-

standing of the Old Testament has not been dis-

torted by inaccurate translations. Gargantua had,

in fact, developed a very similar argument in P

8 when he told his son that the two most impor-

tant languages for a learned Christian were He-

brew and Greek because the Old Testament was

written in Hebrew and the New Testament in

Greek.

Epistemon is not just a biblical scholar. He

combines very nicely an active life with his

scholarly pursuits. During the storm sequence in

the Fourth Book (18–22), he joins all his com-

panions, with the noticeable exception of the

hypocrite Panurge, in working very hard to save

the lives of all the crew and passengers. In Pan-

tagruel, he also participates in the war against

the Dipsodes and he even loses his head in battle,

but Panurge very kindly sews his head back on.

Once he begins breathing again, Epistemon tells

his friends what he saw in the other life. All is

reversed there. Those who were virtuous but

poor in this life now can eat as much as they

want, but those who abused their power on earth

must now pay for their sins. Epistemon indicates

that those who sold indulgences suffer for eter-

nity in Hell because they had shown contempt

for Christianity by claiming that people could

buy their way out of Purgatory. Protestant re-

formers such as Martin Luther had condemned

the sale of indulgences as an abomination. Those

who sell indulgences grant to themselves a power

that belongs to God alone. Many contemporary

Catholic thinkers including Erasmus, whom Ra-

belais greatly admired, agreed with Luther that

selling indulgences was incompatible with Chris-

tianity.

It should be noted that Rabelais places in Hell

70 Erasmus, Desiderius

those who sell indulgences, and this is the same

mortal sin committed by Panurge. Through his

fictional character Epistemon, Rabelais illustrates

how a learned and sincere Christian can reconcile

his intellectual commitment to Christianity with

the practice of his faith. Rabelais contrasts the

morally admirable Epistemon with the amoral

Panurge, and this serves to discredit Panurge in

the minds of Rabelais’s readers.

Readings: Donald M. Frame, Francois Rabelais: A

Study (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1977);

Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press, 1979).

Edmund J. Campion

ERASMUS, DESIDERIUS (1469–1536) Ra-

belais, like many contemporary writers, profited

from the classical scholarship, reforming theol-

ogy, and satirical wit of the preeminent humanist

Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. In the only

known letter between them, Rabelais evokes

their “old friendship,” though he also describes

Erasmus, fulsomely, as his “father and mother”

in scholarship, and seeks to impress the great

man with some shameless name-dropping. Eras-

mus’s reply (if any) has not survived, but the

influence of his writings on Rabelais is obvious.

His great compilation of ancient wisdom, the Ad-

agia, regularly augmented after its first appear-

ance in 1500, provided an immense repertoire of

proverbs and related commentary.

Most significant is Rabelais’s adaptation, in

the prologue to Gargantua, of the adage Sileni

Alcibiadis (3.3.1), which demonstrates how, like

an image of the god Silenus, Socrates’s foolish

appearance concealed his divine wisdom. Al-

though Rabelais here strips the adage of Eras-

mus’s syncretic reading (Christ is another Sile-

nus) and applies it instead to the problem of

literary exegesis, its exploration of appearance

and reality informs much of Rabelais’s theology

and satire. Another of its characteristic figures,

Diogenes the Cynic, similarly dominates the

prologue to the Third Book.

Rabelais’s exposure, in both Pantagruel and

Gargantua, of the hypocrisy and linguistic ob-

fuscation practiced by the Sorbonne theologians

echoes Erasmus’s own acrimonious disputes with

the University of Paris, not least with Noel Beda,

syndic of the Sorbonne and perhaps the model

for Janotus de Bragmardo (G 17–20). The con-

tempt for monasticism embodied in Frere Jean

and voiced by Gargantua (G 40) similarly ech-

oes Erasmus’s excoriation of empty vows and

ostentatious formalism. Both writers had taken

the difficult path of escape from the cloister and

reentry to the secular world. The practical piety

of Erasmus’s philosophia Christi, embodied in

his Enchiridion (1503), finds its place in the ed-

ucational programs of Rabelais’s first two books,

while Erasmus’s innovative pedagogical meth-

ods, based on freedom and pleasure in learning,

are more distantly echoed in Ponocrates’s pro-

gram for Gargantua (G 23).

Rabelais’s Christianity, with its rejection of

scholastic formalism and its recourse to the re-

vealed word of God in the scriptures, also reflects

the evangelism formulated in France, following

Erasmus’s lead, by Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples

(possibly the inspiration for Hippothadee in

3BK 30) and Guillaume Briconnet. Erasmus’s

ethical humanism, expounded in the Education

of a Christian Prince (1516), influences Rabe-

lais’s prescriptions for monarchy in Gargantua,

where he quotes almost verbatim Erasmus’s con-

demnation of war, “which must never be under-

taken until everything else has been tried” (cf. G

28), and shares his distaste for crusading (see G

33 and also P 29).

Erasmus’s most famous work, The Praise of

Folly (1511), revived the techniques of Lucianic

satire, including that of the self-conscious nar-

rator embodied in Rabelais’s alter ego Alcofry-

bas Nasier, and highlighted the playful ambi-

guity of the fool. At the end of the Third Book

Rabelais portrays two inspired fools, Bridoye

and Triboullet, whose actions and utterances

echo the spiritual prestige associated with Eras-

mus’s Folly at the end of her speech, where the

allusions, especially to Saint Paul’s own ecstasy,

invite the reader to contemplate the supreme

folly of Christ crucified. Similarly, Pantagruel’s

identification of Panurge’s malady as philautia

(self-love; 3BK 29) echoes important moral con-

clusions in the Praise of Folly, while the latter’s

genre, mock-panegyric, is reproduced in Pan-

urge’s Praise of Debts (3BK 3–4) and in the

eulogy of the Pantagruelion (3BK 49–52).

Again, Rabelais’s dialogue often reproduces

the racy satirical style of Erasmus’s Colloquies

Eulogy, Satirical 71

which began life, like the Adages, as a schoolboy

manual but developed into a portrait of the vices

(and occasionally the virtues) of sixteenth-

century society. The pilgrims in Gargantua (38)

and the storm episode in the Fourth Book (24)

owe much to, respectively, the colloquies Pere-

grinatio (Pilgrimage) and Naufragium (Ship-

wreck). Rabelais’s debt to Erasmus is thus

immense, but in one passage he appears, unex-

pectedly, to mock his mentor, describing the et-

ymologist of bellum (presumably a reference to

Erasmus’s adage Dulce bellum inexpertis [4.1.1])

as “a patcher-up of old rusty Latin” (3BK prol.).

A rare moment of ingratitude!

Readings: Edmund J. Campion, Montaigne, Rabe-

lais, and Marot as Readers of Erasmus (New York:

Edwin Mellen Press, 1995); Erasmus, The Collected

Works of Erasmus, vol. 27 (Praise of Folly, Education

of a Christian Prince), 31–36 (Adages), 39–40

(Colloquies) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,

1976–); Walter Kaiser, Praisers of Folly: Erasmus,

Rabelais, Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-

versity Press, 1963); Jean-Claude Margolin, “Rire

avec Erasme, a l’ombre de Rabelais,” ER 33 (1998):

9–29; Michael A. Screech, Ecstasy and the Praise of

Folly (London: Duckworth, 1980).

Michael J. Heath

EUDEMON From the Greek endaiÓmvnÓ(“happy, prosperous, blissful”), Eudemon first

appears in Gargantua 15, after which he is only

mentioned sporadically. In reaction to Grandg-

ousier’s dismay at his son’s educational regress,

Philippe des Marays volunteers to demonstrate

the difference between the outdated knowledge

and teaching methods of medieval scholasticism,

dispensed by Gargantua’s past and current pre-

ceptors, Thubal Holoferne and Jobelin Bride, and

modern pedagogy and learning, incarnated by his

page Eudemon and his preceptor Ponocrates. It

has been widely acknowledged that the page

closely follows the model of the Aphthonian

speech of praise, a rhetorical exercise favored by

Erasmus, whose name is a near-perfect anagram

of Eudemon’s master’s, Des Marays. The influ-

ence of Melanchthon’s treatises on rhetoric and

dialectic on this new model, bent on reviving the

ancient ideal, should not be neglected, however.

The German humanist was held in high esteem

by the du Bellay family. Eudemon’s speech is

part of the oratorical contest between him and

Gargantua and ends up proving the vast superi-

ority of the modern method. Gargantua’s infan-

tile response to his twelve-year-old opponent un-

derlines the giant’s embarrassing defeat: he cries,

hides his face, and will not utter a word.

Even though Eudemon’s praise is artificial and

exaggerated, it is not primarily meant to flatter a

powerful prince. Rather, it is a practical appli-

cation of the educational method promoted in

Gargantua’s letter to Pantagruel (P 8), in which

Gargantua praises the superiority of modern cur-

ricula and pedagogy. Moreover, the speech ac-

curately assesses Gargantua’s potential, which,

thanks to his defeat, will now be developed under

the tutelage of his new preceptor, Ponocrates.

Not merely a “defense and illustration” of mod-

ern education, Eudemon’s praise thus acts almost

like a self-fulfilling prophecy, creating a situation

that will lead to its ultimate truthfulness.

Readings: Gerard J. Brault, “The Significance of

Eudemon’s Praise of Gargantua (Rabelais, I, 15),”

KRQ 18 (1971): 307–17; Olivier Millet, Calvin et la

dynamique de la parole (Paris: Champion, 1992).

Bernd Renner

EULOGY, SATIRICAL (ELOGE PARA-

DOXAL) Defined as the defense of “an unex-

pected, unworthy, or indefensible object,” satiri-

cal eulogy or, as it is sometimes called, rhetorical

paradox, suited the early modern desire to use

rhetorical skills to provide an open, unfettered,

and, at times, self-critical vision of the world

(Colie 1966: 3). There were notable examples in

Synesius’s praise of baldness, Lucian’s praise of

the fly, and Ovid’s praise of the nut. In his En-

comium moriae, Erasmus used folly to explore

the concept of docta ignorantia (learned igno-

rance), a major theme of the Reform theologians

as they reflected upon the teachings of Saint

Paul and the perils of prying into areas beyond

human control.

Fond of forms that were both liberating and

self-critical, Rabelais set his considerable rhetor-

ical and linguistic skills to work to create a series

of satirical eulogies. V.-L. Saulnier has described

three types of satirical eulogies: verite originale

or contre verite, curiosite remarquable, and ver-

ite contre-apparence (Saulnier 1950: 91). Rabe-

lais has examples of both the first and second

72 Eulogy, Satirical

types in his work. The verite originale or contre

verite is founded upon the premise that the public

holds a belief and that the rhetorical paradox

aims at persuading the public to take a different

view or to call into question the accepted view.

Rabelais’s Praise of Debtors (3BK 3–4) and the

Praise of the Codpiece (3BK 8 [“How the cod-

piece is the premier piece of equipment among

people at war”]) are two examples of this type

of praise in Rabelais’s work.

The Third Book also includes an example of

the curiosite remarquable, a form that departs

from the traditional goal of paradox, persuasion,

to develop an elaborate vision of an expected cu-

riosity (Losse 1980: 68). This is the case for the

Praise of the Pantagruelion (3BK 49–53). The

narrator posits a world held together by the

qualities and uses of the plant, Pantagruelion,

which bears a healthy resemblance to the

strengths and virtues of its creator and inventor,

Pantagruel, but also to hemp—a necessary ma-

terial for the expansion of world commerce and

exploration through the many uses of rope both

on land and at sea.

All three of the above satirical eulogies fall

into the category of lyrical paradoxes as defined

by Marcel Tetel, in which the end is lyricism and

verbal effusion to show off the poetic gift of the

writer rather than the attack of a social institution

or social abuse (Tetel 1964: 30). Lyrical para-

doxes are free-standing and reflect a pause in the

narration, where the reader is invited to marvel

at the eloquence of the eulogist (Tetel 71). The

detachment permits a fuller exploration of the ar-

gument, through the classical components of the

eulogy: narration, confirmation, and conclusion,

necessary in the case of contre-verites since the

argument runs counter to accepted opinion. The

open form unattached to narrative plot allows the

eulogist to amplify through such rhetorical de-

vices as enumeration and gradation.

Quite distinct from lyrical paradox is bur-

lesque paradox, where the goal is to ridicule and

where the paradox is linked to the narrative de-

velopment and comic interaction (Losse 66; Tetel

30). Burlesque paradox has many of the elements

of farce. In Rabelais’s Fourth Book, two bur-

lesque praises come to mind. First, Dindenault’s

praise of his sheep (4BK 7) extols both the prac-

tical and mythical virtues of the sheep: the fertile

powers of the sheep’s urine and excrement along

with the quality of the heel bone, compared to

the bones used by the Emperor Augustus for

playing the game of tales (here a word play on

talon and tales). Ambiguity about the comic in-

tent is removed by the ludic juxtaposition of sca-

tology and epic comparison. However, the flow

of his praise is interrupted by the baser vocabu-

lary used by Panurge and his companions. The

praise ends with Panurge throwing one of the

prized sheep into the sea and the consequent

drowning of the other sheep, as they follow the

first overboard. In a vain effort to stop the mass

drowning of sheep, Dindenault takes hold of one

and is carried overboard by the powerful sheep.

It seems a fitting end to the boastful rhetoric of

the merchant.

In Homenaz’s praise of the Decretals (4BK

51–53), Rabelais intensifies his satire by paro-

dying the elevated, inflated style of the Church

and using the tools of epideictic rhetoric: enu-

meration, gradation, and alliteration. As in the

earlier lyrical Praise of Debts or of the Panta-

gruelion, Homenaz posits the benefits to world

order brought by “ces sacrosainctes Decretales.”

However, the virtues are not based on universal

charity and love, for those who are judged

heretics will not receive their beneficial effects:

“You feel the blazing fire of divine love in your

heart aflame with charity toward your neighbor,

as long as he is not a heretic” (“Vous sentez en

vos coeurs enflammee la fournaise d’amour di-

vin, de charite envers vostre prochain, pourveu

qu’il ne soit Hereticque” [4BK 51]). Explicit

within the satirical eulogy itself is the contradic-

tion of Catholic orthodoxy—the violence await-

ing those who arouse papal ire. Caritas is not

based on unconditional love but on the strict ob-

servance of church law as interpreted by those

who are supposed to be the guardians of the

faithful (Losse 85). The second part of Hom-

enaz’s praise is appropriated by Panurge and his

friends, who recount the horrors of those who put

the sacred Decretals to more practical use: toilet

paper, sewing patterns, target practice. As in the

praise of Dindenault’s sheep, the comic juxta-

position of inflated rhetorical style and everyday,

often scatalogical language, serves to highlight

the unequivocal satirical intent of the text.

Readings: Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica.

The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1966); Deborah N. Losse,

Evangelism 73

Rhetoric at Play. Rabelais and Satirical Eulogy

(Berne, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 1980); Verdun-L.

Saulnier, “Proverbe et paradoxe du XVe au XVIe

siecle,” Pensee humaniste et tradition chretienne aux

XVe et XVIe siecles (Paris: Centre National de la Re-

cherche Scientifique, 1950); Marcel Tetel, Etude sur

le comique de Rabelais (Florence: Leo S. Olschki,

1964).


EVANGELISM An early sixteenth-century,

principally French, movement among scholars,

humanists, theologians, and the laity to reform

Church practices by emphasizing the study and

the practice of the Evangile, or Gospel books of

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Initially indis-

tinguishable from the Protestant Reformation,

the evangelical movement distinguished itself by

its confidence in human nature when inspired by

faith and charity. Evangelical doctrine is most

closely linked with the teachings of Saint Paul.

The writings of Rabelais, Erasmus, Thomas

More, Lefevre d’Etaples, Marguerite de Na-

varre, and Clement Marot reveal an evangelical

sensibility.

Imbued with references to Holy Scripture as

well as Greco-Latin erudition, Rabelais’s literary

works frequently allude to religious issues of the

day. Rabelais’s giant protagonists, Gargantua

and Pantagruel, incarnate his own brand of

evangelism. Gargantua’s eloquent letter of advice

and encouragement to his adolescent son Panta-

gruel, with its emphasis on the perfectibility of

man’s intellect, is a prescripton for evangelical

humanism. He urges him to become an “abyss

of knowledge” in science, classical languages,

and all the arts but concludes that “knowledge

without conscience is but the ruin of the soul and

thus you must serve, love and fear God . . . this

life is transitory but the Word of the Lord en-

dures forever” (P 8). Gargantua’s own initial tu-

tor, Thubal Holoferne, evokes laughter as well as

disgust with his mania for the mindless recitation

of secondary devotional texts backwards and for-

wards. He represents the meaningless religious

education that Rabelais abhorred. Knowledge of

God is not only possible but the only noble aim

for all people. This point is underscored in the

Third Book (1546) by one of Rabelais’s few

wise theologians, Hippothadee, who insists that

God has made Himself and His desires known to

humans by describing them clearly in the Gos-

pels (3BK 30).

As a satirist, Rabelais comically targeted what

he perceived as inauthentic Christian positions by

Catholics and Protestants alike. Consequently,

commentators on both sides castigated him

equally. At the request of Catholic theologians, all

four Pantagrueline chronicles were censured by

either the Sorbonne, Parlement, or both. By

1549, Rabelais himself was commonly seen as a

threat to faith in general. In that year, the Catholic

Gabriel du Puy Herbault claimed that Rabelais

vomited a poison that infected everywhere bit by

bit, while six years later John Calvin compared

him to an enraged dog spewing its filth counter to

God’s majesty. Charges of atheism were common

but are easily belied by the strong declarations of

God’s power throughout his works.

With the 1552 publication of his final work,

the Fourth Book, for which he had received a

protective Privilege du Roy, Rabelais expanded

his caricatures of religious leaders of all stripes.

Quaresmeprenant and the Andouilles are mon-

strous representations of adherents to Protestant-

ism, while the Papefigues and Papimanes, in-

habitants of two warring islands, symbolize

Reformers and apologists of the Pope (4BK 45–

54). Interestingly, Pantagruel donates generously

to this latter pair of islanders, treating both

groups evenhandedly and with muted criticism.

Throughout his books Rabelais targets the in-

terpreters of Christian doctrine rather than the

doctrines themselves. For instance, his works

rarely allude either to the sacraments of the

Church or to the Virgin Mary. However, Rabe-

lais does consistently ridicule rote devotional

practices and misplaced mechanical prayer to the

saints. Pilgrims are targeted in Gargantua when

they so timorously refuse to acknowledge them-

selves that Gargantua plucks them with his let-

tuce and starts to chew them up with his salad

(G 38). His father Grandgousier later admon-

ishes pilgrims hoping to avoid the plague by

making an offering to Saint Sebastian. His judg-

ment is harsh, claiming that Church leaders who

advocate pilgrimage as a means of forestalling

calamity blaspheme the just and saintly by re-

ducing them to mere devils who only make trou-

ble for humans. He advises the pilgrims not to

undertake useless trips and, rather, to stay home,

work, and take care of their families and to live

74 Evangelism

as “the good apostle Saint Paul taught you,” an

allusion to Ephesians 4–5 (G 45).

Rabelais plumbs medieval anticlerical satire,

such as seen in Dante, for further sources of hu-

mor. Gargantua explains that monks are the out-

casts of the world because of their inaction:

“They do not work as do the peasants, do not

defend the country as do soldiers, do not heal the

sick as do doctors, not preach or teach as do

Evangelical doctors, do not import goods as do

merchants . . . therefore they are . . . hated and

abhorred.” Worse, their prayers are useless as

they “say many paternosters, interlarded with

‘Hail Mary,’ without reflecting on or understand-

ing the meaning of what they say, which truly I

call mocking of God” (G 40). His good friend

Frere Jean is the exception for he is “neither

bigot nor hypocrite” and is constantly active,

helping others. The monk’s Abbey of Theleme,

best known for its motto “Do as you will,” is

often cited as Rabelais’s take on the highly con-

tentious issue of free will in his day (see Grace

and Free Will). This free will is at the root of

Theleme’s success, but it is a free will that must

be well disciplined and educated. Only then will

“people have an instinct, a compass called honor

which prods them to act virtuously and which

distances them from vice” (G 57). This optimistic

view of human nature, one saved by grace where

reason is formed by knowledge, is fundamental

to Rabelais’s evangelism and at the same time

runs counter to the Protestant view that humans

are fundamentally corrupt and fallen.

Frere Jean becomes one of Rabelais’s most

memorable characters and serves as a counter-

point to another friend, the self-centered and spir-

itually weak Panurge. During the storm scene

in the Fourth Book Panurge, petrified with fear,

prays to various saints that he, with no reference

to his fellow crew members, will be saved and

in return he vows that he will build chapels in

their honor. In contrast, Pantagruel makes a fer-

vent plea directly to God that they all be saved

but that ultimately His will be done (4BK 19,

21). While depending on God alone, Pantagruel

works feverishly to save his ship, hence by his

actions rejecting the Lutheran notion of the fu-

tility of human conduct.

The eventual bitter rift between Protestants

and evangelicals is epitomized by the mutual an-

tipathy between Rabelais and Calvin. Probable

onetime acquaintances, Calvin accused Rabelais

of “diabolical effrontery” in his Treatise on

Scandals (Traite des scandales). Rabelais pro-

vided a scathing riposte in the Fourth Book, with

the generally understated Pantagruel describing

“les Calvins demoniaques” as deformed mon-

sters in direct opposition with nature (32).

The theme of the inherent goodness of nature

distinguishes Rabelais’s religious thought. Ra-

belais’s works champion the notion that igno-

rance of nature, be it that of the human body or

any of God’s creations, is ignorance of God. It

is difficult to discern a coherent religious doc-

trine from a comic work. As Rabelais never

chose to expound on his doctrinal preferences for

Reform in religious treatises or other more

straightforward writings, it can be assumed that

he preferred expressing his evidently strongly

held beliefs in a fictional narrative that could best

represent the humor and paradoxes of the human

condition.

While taking issue with aspects of the eccle-

siastical state, it is notable that Rabelais never

broke from the Roman Church. Indeed, he re-

mained a priest all of his life, first Franciscan,

then Benedictine, and finally secularized. In 1540

he succeeded in having his two living children

legitimized by the Pope. At his death, he received

a Catholic burial.

Published evangelical writings tended to di-

minish as religious disputes between the state,

Protestants, and Catholics hardened and became

militant. Thirteen years passed between the pub-

lication of Rabelais’s Gargantua and his Third

Book. After the official advent of the Religious

Wars in 1559, evangelical traces in literary writ-

ings are couched in stark Protestant or Catholic

terms. In Montaigne’s Essays (1590–98), evan-

gelical themes disappear as he prefers to consider

humans in and of themselves rather than as

God’s creations (see Religion).



1998); Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pan-

tagruel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,

1991).

Margaret Harp

F

FANFRELUCHES ANTIDOTEES This puz-

zling chapter is found in Gargantua 2 and is a

purported translation by the narrator of a treatise

found at the end of a genealogy of Gargantua.

The narrator explains that the document was

found inside a large bronze tomb uncovered in

the Chinon region. The treatise was partially de-

stroyed by rats and is thus incomplete. The word

fanfreluches is derived from fanfeluce, meaning

“trifle,” and vulgar Latin fanfaluca, meaning “air

bubble.” Cotgrave’s Dictionary of the French

and English Tongues defines it as “vanities, fop-

peries, fooleries, fond tricks.” As for “antido-

tees,” meaning “provided with an antidote,” this

term first appears in French in Pantagruel 33.

The meaning of this poem resists interpretation,

although references to the Pope and Charles V

are evident. Within the larger context of Gar-

gantua, this chapter parallels the Enigmatic

Prophecy at the end of the book, and both poems

appear in a later collection of Mellin de Saint-

Gelais’s poetry (1574). The Fanfreluches anti-

dotees and the Enigmatic Prophecy frame Gar-

gantua and recall the prologue where the reader

is advised both to discover the “sustantificque

mouelle” or marrow of this seemingly popular

book and to avoid overly eager allegorical inter-

pretations a la frere Lubin. While traditional her-

meneutics are called into question in this chapter,

it has also been suggested that this enigma is an

attempt to illustrate the graphic nature of lan-

guage, building on Geoffroy Tory’s linguistic

theories in Champ fleury.

Readings: Jean Plattard, “Rabelais et Mellin de

Saint-Gelais,” RER 9 (1911): 90–108; Jacques Pons,

“Recherches sur les ‘Fanfreluches antidotees,’ ”

BAARD 8 (1999): 471–84 and 9 (2000) 569–88; Eva

Tsuquiashi-Paddesio, “Le bruissement silencieux de la

graphie dans ‘Les fanfreluches antidotees,’ ” EC 28

(1988): 48–57.

E. Bruce Hayes

FARCE, ELEMENTS OF The late fifteenth

and early sixteenth centuries were a watershed

era for farce in France. From this period, nearly

two hundred farces survive, the most popular be-

ing the Farce de Maistre Pathelin. The influence

of this genre on Rabelais’s work is pronounced

and takes on two principal forms: explicit refer-

ences to contemporary farces, which arguably

number in the hundreds (with nearly two dozen

references to Pathelin alone), and structural,

where certain episodes within Rabelais’s work

contain many of the mechanisms of farce. One

of the few self-references Rabelais makes in his

work refers to a farce in which he performed

while a medical student in Montpellier, the Farce

de la femme mute (3BK 34). Structurally, many

episodes within Rabelais’s work resemble farces.

More obvious examples are the public debate be-

tween Panurge and Thaumaste (P 19–20), Pan-

urge’s attempted seduction and humiliation of the

Haughty Parisian Lady (P 21–22), his encoun-

ter with the sheep merchant Dindenault (4BK 6–

8), and the Lord Basche episode (4BK12–15).

These episodes include theatrical indicators such

as stage directions, an audience, and an emphasis

on physical gestures, and, in the case of the Pan-

urge and Dindenault episode, the prose narrative

is momentarily interrupted with a theatrical dia-

logue, a phenomenon found elsewhere in Rabe-

lais’s work (e.g., Panurge’s conversation with

Trouillogan [3BK 36] and Panurge and Panta-

gruel’s discussion of Triboullet [3BK 38]).

Some of the episodes containing farcical ele-

ments are Pantagruel’s encounter with the Eco-

lier Limousin or student from Limoges (P 6) and

his meeting with Panurge (P 9). Each of the

books presents farcical episodes, such as Janotus

de Bragmardo’s harangue in Gargantua (19)

and Judge Bridoye in the Third Book (39–42).

While the subject matter of the farces of this pe-

riod focused on marital jealousies and petty con-

76 Fezandat, Michel

niving, Rabelais’s farcical episodes center on hu-

manistic debates of the time. Instead of the

anonymous characters found in traditional farce,

the participants in Rabelais’s work represent op-

posing systems of thought. Rabelais’s inventive

and innovative use of farce produces a new kind

of farce, more radical and critical than its popular

counterpart, as well as a new hybrid form of hu-

manist satire.



1998); Carol Clark, The Vulgar Rabelais (Glasgow:

University of Glasgow, 1983); Gustave Cohen, “Ra-

belais et le theatre,” RER 9 (1911): 1–72; Emmanuel

Philopot, “Notes sur quelques farces de la Renais-

sance,” RER 9 (1911): 365–422.

E. Bruce Hayes

FEZANDAT, MICHEL (ff. 1538–77) Pari-

sian bookseller who published the “definitive”

edition of the Third Book and the first edition of

the complete Fourth Book, both in 1552. The

Fourth Book was quickly reprinted, also for him,

before several pirated editions appeared illegally

(see also Printing).

Readings: Stephen Rawles and Michael A. Screech,

A New Rabelais Bibliography: Editions of Rabelais

Before 1626, ER 20 (Geneva: Droz, 1987).

Stephen Rawles

FICINO, MARSILIO (1433–99) Florentine

humanist, philosopher, and philologist who was

largely responsible for disseminating Neopla-

tonic theories throughout Europe during the Ren-

aissance. Chosen by Cosimo de’ Medici to trans-

late the works of Plato and to head the Platonic

Academy in Florence, Ficino was also trained as

a physician and ordained as a priest in 1477. In

general his writings effect a reconciliation of Pla-

tonic and Christian love; and although he at-

tacked astrology in a 1477 treatise entitled Dis-

putation against the Judgment of Astrologers

(Disputatio contra iudicium astrologorum), other

writings of his, such as the Book of Life, bespeak

a fascination with magic, astrology, and mysti-

cism. Whether Rabelais, who shared many of

these interests, actually borrowed directly from

Ficino is uncertain. Clearly, echoes of Platonism

and Neoplatonism—including references to di-

vine love, the quest for a transcendent Ideal, Bac-

chic furor, allegory, hidden meanings, and even

the “Ideas of Plato”—abound in the Pantagrue-

line tales, but often the treatment of these Pla-

tonic topoi or commonplaces is mock serious;

subverted by scatology, humor, and empirical

considerations; or counterbalanced by alternative

philosophies. As a result, some scholars contend

that Rabelais is actually parodying Ficino’s the-

ories in such examples of satirical eulogy as the

Praise of Debts and the Messer Gaster epi-

sodes. Whether one accepts or rejects this inter-

pretation, many experts agree that Plato’s influ-

ence on Rabelais is far greater, and much more

positive, than any specific echoes of Ficino that

inform the Pantagrueline tales.


tic and the Platonic-Hermetic Tradition (Albany, NY:

State University of New York, 1969); Christine Raf-

fini, Marsilio Ficino, Pietro Bembo, Baldassare Cas-

tiglione: Philosophical, Aesthetic, and Political Ap-

proaches in Renaissance Platonism (New York: Peter

Lang, 1998); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London:

Duckworth, 1979).


FIFTH BOOK (CINQUIESME LIVRE) The

posthumous Fifth Book has long fueled the in-

terest of Rabelais critics. As early as 1549, we

find a Fifth Book of the Feats and Sayings of

Noble Pantagruel (Cinquiesme. Livre des faictz

et dictz du noble Pantagruel. Auquelz sont com-

prins, les grans Abus, et d’esordonne vie de, Plu-

sieurs Estatz, de ce monde. Composez par M.

Francoys Rabelays D’octeur en Medecine et

Abstracteur de quinte Essence), which was in

fact a compilation of two other works: first, the

Regnars traversant by Jean Bouchet, Rabelais’s

friend from Poitou, which featured a virulent

condemnation of the nobility, the Church, justice,

courtesans, hypocrites, and monks; and second,

an adaptatation of Sebastian Brant’s Ship of

Fools (Grand Nef des fols), published by Fran-

cois Juste in 1530, which may be realistically

attributed to Bouchet, perhaps in collaboration

with Rabelais. This compilation of older texts is

a violent satire of the justice system and of

monks, and it is difficult to know whether the

two friends backed the updating of this attack on

the “folles fiances du monde.”

In 1564 the Fifth Book of Heroic Feats and

Fifth Book 77

Sayings of the Good Pantagruel appeared with

no indication as to the place of publication or

editor. However, a final quatrain was signed “Na-

ture quite,” an anagram used by the doctor Jean

de Mayerne, known as Turquet. In comparison

to Ringing Island published two years earlier,

the work reprises all of the preceding volume

with the exception of the chapter on the Apedef-

tes or “ignorant ones,” adding a prologue and

thirty-two additional chapters. This long version

is found in an unsigned manuscript of the six-

teenth century containing the fragment of a pro-

logue, but without the two chapters devoted

to the ball in the kingdom of Quinte-Essence

(a game of chess transposed from Francesco

Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili). In the

chapter on the Lantern supper, the manuscript

also includes a list of dances inspired by the Dis-

ciple de Pantagruel (accompanied by a note from

the copyist indicating that “the following is what

was marginal or not understood in the present

book: Servato in 4. lib. Panorgium ad nuptias”

[“Having watched over Panurge in four books

up to his marriage”]).

Since the seventeenth century, critics have

been divided on the authenticity of this work: is

it the creation of forgers, or is it completely or

partially authentic, a Rabelaisian text revised by

an interpolator or editors? If Rabelais is the au-

thor, moreover, does the volume figure as the

conclusion of the Fourth Book voyage? Or is it

instead an assemblage of disparate fragments? In

debates on these issues, analyses of content (fo-

cusing on the author’s familiarity with Touraine,

his erudition, the intertexts that are utilized) and

style lead to contradictory conclusions: some

point to plagiarism, while others construct hy-

potheses assessing the degree to which the frag-

ments are complete and their date of composi-

tion.

An examination of the three known forms of

the text yields three parallel readings of two

groups of manuscripts, which are difficult to de-

cipher. (This explains the multiple variants in the

transcriptions of proper names, the erasures, and

the blanks in the manuscript.) The modifications

affecting the beginnings of chapters seem to re-

flect poorly classified papers and a desire to

avoid disparities in the succession of chapters.

For the end of the text, the copyist and editor

have made selections and reclassified certain

sketches. In the manuscript we find Rabelais’s

memories of his youth in Poitou, along with a

mention of the lantern of Pierre Lamy.

The first series of documents, present in all

three forms of the text, corresponds to the first

fifteen chapters of Ringing Island, which con-

tains an apocryphal sixteenth chapter on the Ape-

deftes (“the ignorant”) with its satire of the Court

of Auditors (“Cour des Comptes”) and the finan-

cial world that is far removed from Rabelais’s

usual linguistic habits. The two other forms of

the text introduce in its place a segment entitled

“Outre,” an incomplete chapter that is incompat-

ible with the episode of the Apedeftes, but which,

beginning in 1567, editors nonetheless include in

the Fifth Book as chapter 7.

The second series of sketches is composed of

a prologue, which is in fact a draft of the Third

Book prologue, and a narration detailing the end

of the navigation with the episodes of Quinte-

Essence, the Isle of Odes, the Freres Fredons, the

Pays de Satin, the Pays des lanternes, and the

Oracle of the Bottle. Certain critics see in this

book the completion of the Fourth Book voyage.

It could also be the journey initially envisioned

at the end of the Third Book, a voyage with sym-

bolic steps which was scheduled to take the he-

roes from Saint-Malo, along the French coast

(the kingdom of Quinte, Brest; the Isle of the

Fredons, Oleron, with a stop at La Rochelle, and

probably a river navigation, suggested by the Isle

of Odes), through Poitou, the country of Lan-

terns, and all the way to the Dive Boutille in

Chinon—the first town in the world: this French

itinerary is underlined in the text itself by geo-

graphical indications.

Whereas the first series of sketches contains

virulent religious and judicial satire, punctuated

with monsters and echoes of contemporary voy-

ages that recall the Fourth Book, the second se-

ries, despite its Freres Fredons and critique of

monastic orders, Lent, and confession, is distin-

guished primarily by its hermeticism. Panurge

experiences a true ritual initiation, presided over

by Quinte, the Lantern queen, and the priestess

Bacbuc, replete with ancient and mysterious

symbolism: the descent by tetradic degrees fol-

lows the psychogony of Plato’s Timaeus. How-

78 Folengo, Teofilo

ever, it is impossible to determine the narrator’s

attitude toward these traditional symbols.

Is the Artistotelian character Entelechy the

mistress of world harmony, the embodiment of

essence in its most perfect and consummate

form? Yet her officers, alchemists claiming to ex-

tract essence from matter, are prone to activities

labeled inanis opera or “foolish works” by Eras-

mus in his Adages, and the port of Quinte es-

sence is called Mateotechnie or “vain science.”

In fact, Panurge’s poetic furor seems to be a fu-

sion of Platonism and hermeticism, unless it is

parodic. An alchemical interpretation of the

book, with its introduction of different steps in

the production of the philosopher’s stone (subli-

mation in the episode of Quinte, rubification in

the narration of Bacchus’s conquest of India), is

clearly suggested. This version of the Fifth Book,

perhaps intended at its inception for a small num-

ber of initiates, is inscribed in the alchemical

book’s rise to fashion during the 1560s, when

editors or printers published multiple works of

alchemical poetry, alchemical narrative, reflec-

tions on the antiquity of alchemy, alchemical

readings of Francesco Colonna, and writings by

Paracelsus. It is possible that this Paracelsian

context prompted Doctor Jean Turquet de May-

erne to publish a narrative featuring Quinte-

Essence. While the episode may not be Paracel-

sian by design (although one wonders if

Paracelsus was known earlier in France, through

the intermediary of German humanists connected

to the du Bellay circle), it became so by virtue

of its reception.

In this work, we also find all the characteristics

of the the crypted and steganographic text typical

of Rabelais, who uses polysemic names (quinte,

“quinte essence,” a musical term and “caprice;”

esclots, “clogs” and “slaves”) and a surfeit of al-

lusions in the style of Lucian, who continues to

inform the Rabelaisian text. Indeed, the country

of lanterns already appears in True History.

This editorial hoax involved passing off read-

ing notes and texts from different drafts, in var-

ious stages of completion, as the Fifth Book, at-

tempting to persuade us that Rabelais penned a

sequel to the Fourth Book voyage which he con-

cluded with the words “Sela. Beuvons” (sela, the

last word of psalms; beuvons, or “let us drink,”

corresponding to the end of Erasmus’s Praise of

Folly). They forged the chimera of a Fifth Book,

which is of inestimable worth in gauging the

measure of Rabelais’s creation; but it is not the

Quint livre that Rabelais would have given us.

Readings: Claude Gaignebet, A plus hault sens

(Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1986); Alfred Glauser,

Le faux Rabelais ou de l’inauthenticite du Cinquiesme

livre (Paris: Nizet, 1975); Mireille Huchon, Rabelais

grammairien—De l’histoire du texte aux problemes

d’authenticite (Geneva: Droz, 1981); M. Huchon, Le

cinquiesme livre—Actes du colloque international de

Rome (16–19 octobre 1998), ER 40 (Geneva: Droz,

2001); Mireille Huchon, “Sur la nef des fols du monde

avec le pretendu Ve livre apocryphe de Rabelais de

1549,” Marginalite et litterature (Nice: ILF-CNS,

2000); Verdun L. Saulnier, Rabelais dans son enquete

II. Etude sur le Quart et le Cinquiesme livre (Paris:

Nizet, 1975).

Mireille Huchon

FOLENGO, TEOFILO (1491–1544) Bene-

dictine monk and well-known macaronic poet,

mentioned three times by Rabelais: in the giant

genealogy of P 1, a propos of his creation Fra-

cassus; at the end of the list of books in the Li-

brary of Saint-Victor (P 7), as author of a pa-

tria diabolorum; and in the Third Book, chapter

11, during a discussion about dice (OC 1268 n.

9).

Of Folengo’s works in macaronic, that is, syn-

tactically and metrically correct Latin verse in-

terspersed with regional and dialect “Italian,” his

mock epic Baldus had an enormous influence on

Rabelais’s “chronicles.” Unfortunately, too many

critics are unaware that there are four very dif-

ferent versions of the Baldus, known respectively

as the Paganini (1517), Toscolana (1521), Cipa-

dense (early 1530s), and Vigaso Cocaio (1552).

The French “translation,” or rather adaptation, of

1606, the Histoire Maccaronique de Merlin Coc-

caie prototype de Rabelais . . . is based on the

Vigaso Cocaio version, which Rabelais could not

have known, and is also much influenced by Ra-

belais himself. It should not therefore be quoted

as a source.

The Baldus, in the Toscolana version that is

probably Rabelais’s inspiration, is an enormous

mock epic in twenty-five cantos. After a comic

invocation to the Macaronic Muses, who live on

a lake of milk with shores of butter on which

Food 79

cauldrons perpetually cook pasta, the first canto

recounts the love of Baldus’s parents in the con-

text of a courtly tournament. Cantos 2–10 are set

in Cipada, where Baldus grows up ignorant of

his origins as a youthful hooligan, with his

friends the rogue Cingar, the giant Fracassus, and

the dog-man Falchettus. The following cantos

trace Baldus’s gradual transformation into an

epic hero, via fantastic adventures including a

storm at sea, a battle with pirates, stones of in-

visibility, and a dragon who turns into a beautiful

woman, and encounters with—among many oth-

ers—a sorceress, a centaur, assorted devils and

mythological beings, a personified Manto (foun-

der of Mantua), and the helpful magician Mer-

linus Coccaius (Folengo’s pseudonym). The ad-

ventures have no conclusion, but simply end, in

a pumpkin where feigning poets have to have a

tooth extracted for every lie they tell.

This surrealist spoof of Virgil contains more

violence than Rabelais’s “chronicles,” more sca-

tology, and more raucous laughter, but Rabelais

found in it, besides the storm and sheep-

drowning episodes, a number of congenial ele-

ments: the trickster Cingar (Panurge), the

fleet-of-foot Falchettus (Carpalim), the boy-hero-

turned-Christian-prince, the frequent change of

tone and style (chivalric to earthy to erudite to

fantastic), the pointed satire of monks, and the

corruption of the Catholic Church. Folengo, un-

like Rabelais, was probably a Lutheran sympa-

thizer, but they agreed on many doctrinal mat-

ters.

The language barrier is regrettable, because

stylistic similarities abound. Rabelais uses a

number of Folengo’s metaphors and colorful

curses, and they shared a linguistic gusto which

loves playing with quotations (Omnia vincit

amor, tamen ipsa [hunger] superchiat amorem)

and inventing new language: the cry of an en-

raged Charon as he bears down on the heroes is

“Cra cra: tif trafnot: sgneflet: canatauta: riogna.”

Readings: Barbara C. Bowen, “Rabelais and Fol-

engo Once Again,” Rabelais in Context: Proceedings

of the 1991 Vanderbilt Conference, ed. Barbara C.

Bowen (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications,

1993); Carlo Cordie, “Sulla fortuna di Teofilo Folengo

in Francia e in particolare sull’ Histoire maccaronique

de Merlin Coccaie, prototype de Rabelais,” Cultura

letteraria e tradizione popolare in Teofilo Folengo:

Atti del convegno tenuto a Mantova il 15–17 ottobre

1977, ed. Ettore Bonora and Mario Chiesa (Milan: Fel-

trinelli, 1979); Teofilo Folengo, Baldus, ed. Emilio

Faccioli (Turin: Einaudi, 1989; text of Vigaso Cocaio

ed., with Italian translation); Opus Merlini Cocaii, ed.

Angelo Nuovo et al. (Mantua: Associazione Amici

Merlini Cocai, 1994; facsimile reprint of Toscolana

edition in black-letter); Anthony Presti Russell, “Epic

agon and the Strategy of Reform in Folengo and Ra-

belais,” CLS 34 (1997): 119–48.

Barbara C. Bowen

FOOD Probably no work of fiction is more

thoroughly stuffed with references to food than

Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel. Rabelais

uses food and eating habits to delineate character

and to illustrate his humanistic polemic toward

every imaginable topic, and from the marrow-

bone to the Holy Bottle, food and drink are em-

ployed with comic effect to subvert the normal

order of the universe. Throughout the text, de-

portment at mealtime is also used as an index of

refinement and civility as his characters learn to

curb their base and unfettered instincts.

The prologue to Gargantua offers clues to the

reader on how his book should be ingested. Al-

though the text may be coarse and unpromising

at first sight, like a marrowbone, with gnawing,

doglike persistence the reader will finally reach

the nourishing interior and be able to lick out the

savory substance. Which is to say that despite the

ribaldry, Rabelais had a serious message to im-

part, and by drawing his unwitting audience in

with crude and often grotesque depictions of in-

gestion and bodily expulsion, he teaches them a

lesson.

The mock-heroic account of Gargantua’s

birth is a case in point. We are introduced to a

carnivalesque feast in which Gargamelle, his

mother, succumbs to the overwhelming prenatal

craving to gorge on tripe drawn from 367,014 fat

oxen. This induces labor, and the first words of

the infant giant are Da mihi potum—“Give me

drink.” These characters are driven by pure un-

controlled and insatiable appetite, as befits their

names, which all refer to the capacity of their

enormous gullets. Although one can only expect

an infant’s behavior to be totally unrestrained,

Rabelais is reminding his readers that uncouth

peasants are equally uncivilized. The fare would

80 Food

have been immediately recognizable to a

sixteenth-century audience as the food of peas-

ants: tripe, sausages, smoked tongues, and organ

meats all washed down with copious drafts of

cheap plonk. But more specifically these were

festival foods, to be consumed during Carnival

before the Lenten food restrictions imposed by

the Catholic Church went into effect and when

all meat had to be consumed in one wild, orgi-

astic, gluttonous debauch.

But Gargantua does eventually learn to curb

his urges. After a failed education at the hands

of scholastics who give him bacon and goat stew

and teach him to drink early in the morning, he

is eventually placed under the tutelage of the hu-

manist Ponocrates. Only then does he learn to eat

sober and frugal meals according to the recom-

mendations of Galenic medicine, with which Ra-

belais the physician would have been thoroughly

conversant. This didactic episode, as with many

others, traces the development of self-control in

precisely the ways that humanists such as Eras-

mus were prescribing for the upbringing of boys.

It also serves to remind readers that it is only

base peasants who comport themselves without

manners, eat without rule, and give vent to their

bodily functions in public.

Rabelais is not always so unequivocal about

his attitude toward food, and most passages leave

considerable ambiguity. For instance, in 4BK 59,

where Pantagruel visits the land of the Gastro-

latres, or worshippers of the belly, it is not en-

tirely clear whether he means this as a simple

parody of his own religion in its most grotesque

form, or simply a rhapsodic paean to the pleas-

ures of the palate. For several pages he cata-

logues a voluminous menu of foods that includes

items that would not be out of place on the royal

banqueting table. Noticeable here are white

bread, salads, chilled wine, various elegant meat

pies, venison, dozens of wild fowl, rice and al-

mond paste, and even sturgeon and whales. The

items stand in dramatic contrast to the peasant

fare of other books, and the names of the dishes

are almost certainly taken from cookbooks of the

era. Presumably his readers’ mouths would be

watering at such succulent provender, until the

god Gaster presents them with a plate of his own

feces to examine. Rabelais’s own attitude to

these delicacies remains ambiguous. It is neither

a clear-cut criticism of noble eating habits nor a

simple gastronomic tour of sixteenth-century

France. Rabelais’s food imagery cannot be writ-

ten off as a simple exhortation advocating mod-

eration.

At the very end of Book 5, Pantagruel and

his companions reach the Temple of the Holy

Bottle, wherein the oracle dispenses truth. Its mi-

raculous draughts savor of whatever the drinker

imagines, a different variety for each palate. In

the presence of the high priestess Bacbuc, the

supplicant Panurge is delivered unto the Holy

Bottle; and it is hardly surprising that when Pan-

urge consults this bottle about whether or not he

should marry, the sage advice issued forth is:

“Trinch” (“Drink”). Eating the text of his fate,

he is transported to an ecstatic union with the

divine and succumbs to poetic frenzy. Intoxica-

tion literally reunites the group with their primal

creative energy, and as the inscriptions proclaim,

“In wine there is truth” (5BK 45). What the

group actually recites, however, is more bawdy

verse, perhaps reminding the reader that there is

no mystery beyond the satisfying of the most

fundamental urges: eating, drinking, and sex. Al-

though the authorship of this last book has been

disputed, this final idea is unmistakably Rabelai-

sian. Laughter may be man’s proper lot, but to

get there one must drink deeply, whether by way

of taking in the pleasures of the body or the joys

of learning—and ideally, both.

Readings: Michel Jeanneret, “Et tout pour la tripe!”

Litteraire 319 (1994): 36–39; Michel Jeanneret, A

Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Ren-

aissance, trans. Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes

(Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1991); Michel Jean-

neret, “ ‘Ma patrie est une citrouille’: Themes alimen-

taires dans Rabelais et Folengo,” Litterature et gas-

tronomie: Papers on French Seventeenth Century

Literature, ed. Ronald W Tobin (Paris, 1985); Michel

Jeanneret, “Quand la fable se met a table: Nourriture

et structure narrative dans Le Quart livre,” Poetique:

Revue de theorie et d’analyse litteraires 13.54 (1983):

163–80; Elise-Noel McMahon, “Gargantua, Panta-

gruel and Renaissance Cooking Tracts: Texts for Con-

sumption,” Neophilologus 76.2 (1992): 186–97;

Anthony Phelan, “Rabelais’s Sister: Food, Writing,

and Power,” Gunter Grass’s Der Butt: Sexual Politics

and the Male Myth of History, ed. Philip Brady, Tim-

othy McFarland, and John J. White (Clarendon: Ox-

Forests 81

ford Publication, 1990); Daniel Soudan, “La Table de

Rabelais,” BAARD 6.1 (2002): 39–40.

Kenneth Albala and Robin Imhof

FOOLS AND FOLLY Fools of various stripes

inhabit all of Rabelais’s works, but none more

so than the Third Book. It is here that the reader

finds endless echoes of Erasmus’s Praise of

Folly (1509), from Panurge’s Praise of Debts

at the beginning of the work to the concluding

mock encomium of the Pantagruelion. Pan-

urge’s seemingly endless series of consultations

is brought to a pseudoresolution with the “ad-

vice” offered by the fool Triboullet (45) that

Panurge interprets as a call to go in search of the

Dive Bouteille or Holy Bottle. Seven chapters

earlier, Pantagruel and Panurge engage in an

exchange that can be characterized as a Rabelai-

sian Praise of Folly. In the intervening chapters,

the reader discovers Judge Bridoye, a fool who

is perfectly rational about his irrational behavior.

Panurge’s character is that of the farcical buffoon

or badin, and the Third Book can be seen as a

confrontation between wise and foolish fools.

Fools occupied an ambiguous position in both

medieval and Renaissance society, both privi-

leged and marginalized. Although fools were

sometimes seen as diabolic, they also spoke the

unspeakable, which provided them with a repu-

tation as seers. This ambiguity of meaning con-

cerning fools’ pronouncements is prominently on

display in the Third Book.

As Rabelais’s work makes clear, fools and the

nature of folly were extremely popular topics

among Renaissance humanists. At the end of the

fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries,

works such as Guyot Marchand’s Danse maca-

bre (1486) and Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools

(1494) popularized the idea of a pervasive folly

that existed in all levels of society. In his mock

encomium Praise of Folly, Erasmus posited a

double notion of folly, worldly and divine. Al-

though the former category essentially repeated

the negative connotations of universal human

folly put forward in many medieval texts, the lat-

ter built upon the Pauline notion of Christian

folly and the idea that Christians are viewed as

fools by the wise of the world. Erasmus also

drew upon the tradition of the morosophe, or

wise fool, while his narrator Stultitia constantly

vacillates between wise and foolish folly. The

morosophe is central to the debates that encom-

pass the Third Book and Panurge’s perplexity.

This multidimensionality of folly leads to ambi-

guity in Rabelais’s work, leaving to debate which

type of folly each character displays and whose

pronouncements the reader can trust.

Readings: Elizabeth Chesney, “The Theme of Folly

in Rabelais and Ariosto,” JMRS 7 (1977): 67–93; Ger-

ard Defaux, “Sagesse et folie d’Erasme a Moliere,”

MLN 91.4 (1976): 655–71; Edwin M. Duval, The De-

sign of Rabelais’s Tiers livre de Pantagruel (Geneva:

Droz, 1997); Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie a

l’age classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972); Walter Kai-

ser, Praisers of Folly: Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963).

E. Bruce Hayes

FORESTS Forests in sixteenth-century France

were divided between the crown, the Church, no-

blemen, and the peasantry who had common-law

pasture and felling rights in certain areas. The

forest had long contributed significantly to local

economies, with different social groups making

various and often competing demands on the re-

sources: as pasture, heat source, raw materials,

income for impoverished lords who sold their

wood, or hunting grounds. With the population

increases in the eleventh and twelfth centuries

there had been significant deforestation, but in

the Middle Ages the transformation of forests

into agricultural land was seen as a victory of

civilization and Christendom over wild and pa-

gan spaces, and there was little sense of the forest

as a finite resource. However, sixteenth-century

France, also subject to rapid population increase,

witnessed a crisis of sorts in the management of

forest resources, and significant steps were taken

toward a centralized royal policy. Deforestation

was gradually seen less as a victory of civiliza-

tion and more as an attack on precious national

resources.

Several French forests are featured in Rabe-

lais’s first two books, and the forests of the last

three books are almost all imaginary, although

fact and imagination are often blended. The most

far-fetched forest is that on the Ile des Ferre-

ments, or Toolmaking Island, where the trees

grow weapons (5BK 9). Yet the episode gives

rise to a weighty scientific discourse on why trees

82 Fourth Book

are animate. Panurge’s fable of the fox and lion

(P 15) is set in the forest of Fontainebleau (called

at that time Biere), transforming it into a myth-

ical space in which animals talk. The Parisians

send Gargantua’s mare to live in this forest (G

21), although the narrator tells us he thinks she

is no longer there. Fontainebleau had long been

exploited for its sandstone, which had signifi-

cantly damaged the foliage: it is perhaps for this

reason that it had a popular reputation as a grim

and sterile desert, which Rabelais refers to when

describing the Ile de Cassade (5BK 10). The Bois

de Vede, near Rabelais’s ancestral home, be-

comes strategic territory in the Picrocholine wars

(G 34). Theleme, which is, we are told, near the

forest of Port-Huault on the Loire, also has its

own fictitious forest on the edges of which lodge

the tailors and artisans that provide for the The-

lemites (G 52, 56). The episode in the “forest of

Beauce” rewrites the environmental history of

the region, which in reality had always been a

steppe, creating a legendary originary forest on

French soil that had never really existed (G 16).

Some scenes indicate the importance of the

forest to economic life in Rabelais’s time. The

felling of trees is paired with economic consid-

erations in the prologue to the Fourth Book

through the character of Couillatris, a woodcut-

ter. The forest on the Ile des Macreons (com-

pared to the Ardennes) may be full of ancient

monuments, but it also resembles a utopian syl-

van economy (4BK 25): it is sparsely populated,

all old-growth trees, and the islanders are car-

penters. Panurge’s Praise of Debts includes a

discourse on deforestation and economics (3BK

2). Panurge has felled the trees on his property

and sold the ashes: selling old wood was com-

mon among landowners, but Panurge, selling

ashes, has ruined rather than helped his estate’s

finances. He prefers the symbolic profit of having

proven his “strength,” boasting of having trans-

formed the savage, dark forest into bright clear-

ings. This is a very medieval view of clear cut-

ting, set against a more pragmatic and arguably

more modern view of profit and resource man-

agement. As this discourse shows, forests in Ra-

belais serve as sites of contention between mul-

tiple discourses.

Readings: Michel Deveze, La vie de la foret fran-

caise au 16e siecle (Paris: SEVPEN, 1961); Raphael

Larrere and Olivier Nougarede, Des hommes et des

forets (Paris: Gallimard, 1993); V. L. Saulnier, Rabe-

lais dans son enquete, vol. 2 (Paris: SEDES, 1982).

Louisa Mackenzie

FOURTH BOOK (QUART LIVRE) The final

version of Rabelais’s last complete Pantagrueline

chronicle was published in 1552, a decade after

the publication of the Third Book and one year

before the humanist’s death. Replete with mock-

heroic episodes, it recounts the voyage under-

taken by Pantagruel to assist his ne’er-do-well

friend Panurge in seeking the advice of the Di-

vine Bottle. The intent and destination of the trip

are rarely mentioned and are ultimately unfulfil-

led. By establishing a sea voyage to unknown

lands as the narrative premise of the Fourth

Book, Rabelais incorporated a topic that both ex-

cited and challenged his contemporaries. The

multiple transformations occurring in European

society due to the Italian Wars, the nascent Re-

form movement, and scientific advances were

forcing the established medieval community to

change and, increasingly, to splinter and be at

odds with itself. The Fourth Book functions as a

cautionary, albeit comic, tale. It provides both a

caricature of the multiple, often divisive, groups

that were isolating themselves from each other in

European society and a model of a diverse but

coherent community that accommodates, and in-

deed welcomes, change but remains faithful to

traditional Christian doctrine. Pantagruel and his

fellow travelers on the ship the Thalamege rep-

resent this latter group. From the outset of the

Fourth Book, Rabelais takes great care to estab-

lish the primacy of the Pantagruelian community.

Throughout his oeuvre, Rabelais makes liberal

use of the term Pantagruelism, but it is only in

the definitive prologue of the Fourth Book that

he defines it: “a certain gaiety of spirit confected

in disdain for fortuitous things.” The narrative

proceeds to indicate that this gaiety is based on

a resolute faith and generous regard toward oth-

ers.

The Fourth Book is unique among Rabelais’s

writings in that a prototype for it exists. This

work, containing only eleven chapters, was pub-

lished by Rabelais’s Lyonnais editor, Pierre de

Tours, in 1548, under the title Le Quart Livre de

Pantagruel. It remains unclear whether Rabelais

Fourth Book 83

authorized the publication of the 1548 version.

Abundant typographical variations and changes

exist between the two editions. Even where epi-

sodes remain basically the same, myriad small

differences appear. The most striking addition to

the opening paragraph of the 1552 Fourth Book

is the parenthetical reference to the early Chris-

tians at prayer. For Rabelais, as for all evangel-

ical humanists of his time, the first Christians

constituted the definitive ideal community. His

evocation of these people establishes an evan-

gelical tone in the text and underscores the rap-

port between these few faithful and the Panta-

gruelists.

In the narrative of the initial version, only five

of the islands also described in the 1552 edition

appear. They comprise the first section of the

later edition, and their stories are decidedly less

satirical than the episodes that follow. Many of

the islands that appear only in the 1552 Fourth

Book such as those of the Papimanes and the

Papefigues reflect political events dating from

1550 and 1551. Furthermore, the original 1548

episodes mentioned above reappear more fully

developed and detailed in the definitive version.

The 1552 Fourth Book contains sixty-seven

chapters, resulting in a narrative over six times

as long as its prototype. Several auxiliary texts

that accompany the 1552 Fourth Book also dis-

tinguish it from Pantagruel, Gargantua, and the

Third Book. Not only does it have the expected

prologue, but it is introduced with a letter of ded-

ication from Rabelais to his benefactor, the car-

dinal of Chastillon, Odet de Coligny. Following

the 1552 text, there is a glossary entitled the Bri-

efve Declaration, which elucidates terms and

names used in the chronicle. Although it is

doubtful that Rabelais wrote the Declaration, its

clarifications are of interest because for nonread-

ers of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin it provides a

French translation of the names Rabelais often

fabricated from combinations of terms from clas-

sical languages. The fact that Rabelais did not

himself include such a glossary suggests his as-

sumption that readers of the Fourth Book would

be learned scholars.

Finally, the initial chapters of the Fifth Book,

the apocryphal work long considered Rabelais’s

final text, may be considered an extension of the

Fourth Book. Scholars generally agree that while

the 1564 publication is little more than an awk-

ward attempt to copy Rabelais’s style, they none-

theless consider its first sixteen chapters to have

been composed by Rabelais. Relating additional

encounters between newfound islands and the

Thalamege, the chapters serve as an epilogue to

the Fourth Book. Hence, the Fourth Book is ex-

tremely rich: not only does it have two versions,

each with its own prologue, but its definitive ver-

sion’s introductory letter, glossary, and supple-

ment render it encyclopedic.

The Fourth Book’s theme and complex but

finely crafted narrative make it arguably Rabe-

lais’s most intriguing work. While retaining his

previous fictional characters, Rabelais tempers

his customary gaulois humor and satire with a

rich and sophisticated commentary on the limi-

tations and ambiguities of language, the anxiety

and promise of characterizing contemporary so-

ciety, and the import and controversial nature of

evangelical concerns. In contrast with the earlier

books, the Fourth Book reveals a more thought-

ful and reflective author who nonetheless main-

tains his comic tone. Care is taken in revealing

the complexity of relationships between Gargan-

tua, Pantagruel, Frere Jean, Panurge, and Al-

cofrybas.

Some of Rabelais’s more memorable charac-

ters as well as lyrical passages appear in the

Fourth Book. There is Monsieur Gaster, “pre-

mier master of the arts of the world,” who is the

personification of hunger (4BK 57). His influ-

ence is pervasive and accounts for all of human-

kind’s creations, both good and bad. Pantagruel

witnesses and abhors the elaborate culinary of-

ferings of adoration made by Gaster’s subjects.

The Gaster episode provides a strange mix of hu-

mor and monstrosity, leaving unclear Rabelais’s

purpose in composing it. Like other episodes,

Rabelais may well not have designed it for one

specific interpretation. When viewed as a parody

of Marsilio Ficino’s portrayal of Love, the pas-

sage’s comic elements become more evident.

However, Pantagruel’s anger against the adora-

tion of Gaster belies a purely farcical episode.

The Thalamege’s encounter with the parolles

gelees (Frozen Words) highlights Rabelais’s

fascination with the nature and value of language

(55–56). Sailing in the open sea, the ship’s crew

hears men’s voices but can see no one. The pilot

84 Francis I

explains that they are crossing the Glass Sea,

near where a fierce battle took place a year be-

fore. The frigid winter air froze the sounds of

combat, but in the temperate weather they melt

and allow themselves to be heard. Pantagruel

reaches up and grabs a handful of words, throw-

ing them on deck. The narrator Alcofrybas

wishes to conserve the frozen words in jars of

oil, but Pantagruel refuses him, saying it is fool-

ish to save words; they come in abundance, par-

ticularly for jovial Pantagruelists such as them-

selves. This scene emphasizes Pantagruel’s role,

like that of all humanists, as an explorer and

seeker of the truth through the study of language

and text.

Rabelais’s last complete work is ultimately

comic, and it carries a positive and at times joy-

ful message to its reader. It is noteworthy that

the book concludes with Pantagruel’s hearty

laugh (chapter 67). Often considered Rabelais’s

most hermetic work, the Fourth Book defies strict

genre classification. Its communities are pre-

sented as comical, grotesque, satirical, sad, chi-

meric, or wise. Rabelais’s final work is unique in

that it demonstrates the optimistic and evangeli-

cal traits of early French Renaissance writings,

while still revealing the concern and disillusion-

ment that led to the Religious Wars.

Readings: Elizabeth A. Chesney, The Countervoy-

age of Rabelais and Ariosto: A Comparative Reading

of Two Renaissance Mock Epics (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 1982); Edwin Duval, “La messe, la

cene, et le voyage sans fin du Quart Livre,” ER 21

(1988): 131–41; Margaret Harp, The Portrayal of

Community in Rabelais’s Quart Livre (New York: Pe-

ter Lang, 1997); Paul J. Smith, Voyage et Ecriture:

Etude sur le Quart Livre de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz,

1987).

Margaret Harp

FRANCIS (FRANCOIS) I (1494–1547) Son

of Charles, comte d’Angouleme, and Louise de

Savoie, ruled France from 1515 to 1547. In 1514

he married Claude de France, daughter of Louis

XII, and became king when Louis died without

sons. Most of Francis’s reign was spent at war

or in negotiations with the major powers of the

period: Henry VIII, Charles V, the Pope, and the

Sultan of Turkey. Francis did not hesitate to draw

up treaties or switch alliances when he deemed

such actions to be in the interests of France. His

endless campaigns all but exhausted the French

treasury and forced him to suspend domestic cul-

tural programs from time to time. At home, he

attempted to reform the country’s financial sys-

tem and the Parlement and to tame the ever-

growing power of the Sorbonne.

Not only a soldier, Francis was deeply com-

mitted to making his reputation as a patron of

learning and the arts. He appointed poets, pain-

ters, and scholars as “gentlemen of the chamber,”

his confidants and private staff. He brought Le-

onardo da Vinci to France in 1516, giving him a

pension and a house. Although Leonardo painted

little in the three years before his death, he had

brought with him many of his masterpieces, in-

cluding the Mona Lisa, which remained in Fran-

cis’s possession. Eager to acquire other works of

art, Francis sent buying agents to Italy. Whether

inspired by a desire for land, gold, or knowledge,

Francis also sent explorers like Verrazano and

Cartier to the New World. He developed an in-

terest in architecture and built several chateaux,

most notably Chambord and Fontainebleau. At

Fontainebleau, he surrounded himself with paint-

ings, tapestries, enamel works, classical and con-

temporary sculpture, and a library of over three

thousand books and manuscripts. An ardent ad-

mirer of Petrarch and Erasmus, Francis en-

couraged French humanists, providing pensions

and protection to writers like Clement Marot,

Saint-Gelais, and Rabelais and scholars such as

Lefevre d’Etaples and Guillaume Bude. In

1529, to promote classical studies, he established

the chairs of Greek, Hebrew, and mathematics,

forming the foundation of the College de France.

He patronized and protected printers, especially

the scholar Robert Estienne, who published hu-

manist texts and translations of the Bible.

The king’s position on the Reform often ap-

pears contradictory. A traditional Catholic, he de-

nounced Lutheranism but disagreed with the Sor-

bonne as to what constituted heresy. His

personal attitude seems to have been one of sym-

pathy with the moderate reformers whom he pro-

tected while at home but who were at risk from

the Sorbonne as soon as Francis left Paris. Al-

though many cite the Affair of the Placards as

having turned the king against the evangelicals,

his policy was mostly influenced by a desire to

Frere Jean 85

keep the peace at home and by political expedi-

ence abroad, which required Protestant sympa-

thies when negotiating with Henry VIII or the

German princes and a pro-Catholic stance when

dealing with Charles V or the Pope.

Francis enjoyed the work of Rabelais and

granted the author a ten-year privilege on the

publication of the Third Book in 1546. Rabelais

sprinkles his books with reminders of the king—

playing on his favorite oath, “faith of a gentle-

man,” inserting his jester Triboullet as a char-

acter (P 30; 3BK 38–45), and alluding to the

beautiful paintings at Fontainebleau (4BK 2). In

Gargantua (34, 50), Rabelais refers directly to

historical events: “If I were king of France . . . I

would castrate all those who ran away from the

field at Pavia leaving their dear prince stranded”

and “as a ransom we might have extorted

[money], holding his eldest sons as hostages.” At

the same time, Rabelais does not hesitate to sat-

irize war and the dying cult of chivalry (G 8),

both dear to Francis’s heart.

Readings: Gilbert Gadoffre, La revolution cultu-

relle dans la France des humanistes: Guillaume Bude

et Francois Ier (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Robert J. Knecht,

Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Fran-

cis I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);

Desmond Seward, Prince of the Renaissance (New

York: Macmillan, 1973).

Megan Conway

FRERE JEAN (FRERE JAN, FRIAR JOHN,

BROTHER JOHN) Frere Jean is a monk who

recognizes the importance of connecting the re-

ligious and social dimensions of life. When he

first appears in the twenty-seventh chapter of

Gargantua, he is living in a monastery in the

central French town of Seuilly. When the soldiers

of Picrochole invade this monastery, the other

monks are so afraid that they do nothing, but

Frere Jean concludes that the prayer “Deliver us

from our enemies” requires him to drive these

invaders from the monastery’s vineyard so that

wine can still be available both for the Eucharist

and for earthly enjoyment, and this is what he

does. Thus, he has preserved sacred space from

those who tried to destroy vines that are needed

to produce wine for masses. Frere Jean will not

permit evil to triumph over good, and his first

appearance in the four books definitely written

by Rabelais reveals how he will react to evil in

later episodes. As a sincere priest, he must serve

the social and spiritual needs of those whom he

serves. He believes that religion should be a lib-

erating force that brings people joy. After his de-

feat of Picrochole’s soldiers, Gargantua builds

Frere Jean a new type of monastery called The-

leme. This word means “will” in Greek, and Ra-

belais shows us that in this monastery “free will”

and not arbitrary rules govern the daily actions

of the male and female residents. Only well-

educated men and women may live there. Frere

Jean believes that those who combine free will

with respect for others will naturally accept the

deep truths of Christianity. Religious faith for

him relies on the free discovery of moral values

by liberated men and women.

As a priest who determines whether or not to

grant absolution to penitents who confess their

sins to him, Frere Jean has become a good judge

of human character. Like many other characters

in Rabelais’s four fully authenticated books,

Frere Jean sees through Panurge’s bad faith. He

knows that neither he nor any priest could per-

suade Panurge to accept the simple truth that

Christian marriage should be based on religious

commitment and on mutual love and respect.

When Frere Jean realizes that Panurge is resort-

ing to black magic in order to determine whether

or not to marry, he decides to humiliate Panurge

in an effort to shock him into a religious con-

version. In chapter 28 of the Third Book, Frere

Jean correctly calls Panurge “a sinner” who may

well have been “predestined” to cuckoldry. He

reduces the serious theological discussion as to

whether people are saved by faith alone or by

faith plus good works to an absurd level. He tells

Panurge how he can be “saved.” According to

Frere Jean’s tongue-in-cheek argument, Panurge

will become a cuckold only if his wife is beau-

tiful. If his wife is beautiful, she will treat him

well, he will have many friends, and therefore he

will be “saved.” Frere Jean understands that Pan-

urge will not respond positively to logical argu-

ments, and for that reason he tries to force him

into facing his own bad faith. Frere Jean has not

given up on Panurge, but Panurge has clearly

given up on himself. He refuses to change, and

that is why he is not receptive to the basic relig-

ious truths that Frere Jean tries to teach him.

86 Friendship

In the Fourth Book, Panurge once again pre-

tends to seek religious help from Frere Jean, but

this sincere priest is not fooled this time either.

Chapters 18 to 22 in the Fourth Book describe

a storm at sea that is very reminiscent of the

storm sequence described by Saint Paul in the

twenty-seventh chapter of his Acts of the Apos-

tles. In chapter 19, Panurge pretends that he has

just had a religious conversion. He wants Frere

Jean to stop helping the sailors and to hear his

confession. Frere Jean realizes that God will for-

give Panurge’s sins if Panurge’s repentance is

sincere even without confession to a priest. At

that moment it is more important for Frere Jean

to save lives. He certainly offers to hear Pan-

urge’s confession after the storm, but, as he sus-

pected, Panurge’s religious faith disappears as

soon as the danger ends.



Press, 1968); Thomas M. Greene, Rabelais: A Study

in Comic Courage (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-

Hall, 1970); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press, 1979).

Edmund J. Campion

FRIENDSHIP A central theme, perhaps even

an ethos, of the Rabelaisian text. The earliest

known treatise on friendship is found in the Lysis

of Plato. Other classical sources include the

eighth and ninth books of Aristotle’s Nicoma-

chean Ethics and Cicero’s Laelius (De Amicitia).

These texts provided the starting point for Ren-

aissance thinkers who wrote their own treatises,

dialogues, and letters on the subject of friend-

ship. In particular, the dissemination of Cicero’s

De Amicitia cultivated an ideal of intimate affec-

tion between men of equal standing which be-

came instrumental to Renaissance theorizations

of friendship.

The pairing of Panurge and Pantagruel

stands as one of the most famous of all Renais-

sance friendships. Pantagruel conceives a spon-

taneous liking for Panurge whom he casts in the

role of Achates to his Aeneas (P 9). This situates

Panurge within the classical tradition of the epic

companion, or comes, who faithfully accompa-

nies the hero on his adventures. But Panurge is

no silent partner, and his stagy personality owes

more to the later development of the comes re-

lationship in medieval epic than to earlier clas-

sical prototypes such as Patroclus and Achilles,

Diomede and Ulysses, and Achates and Aeneas.

The medieval epic promoted the companion from

the classical role of loyal subordinate to that of

a foil or double for the epic hero. Often consid-

ered to outshine his friend and master, Panurge

fills this more capacious role with ease. He takes

the place of Pantagruel in the compromising de-

bate with Thaumaste and is never far from the

center of the action (P 18–20).

The later books do not deny the famous chap-

ter title—“How Pantagruel found Panurge,

whom he loved all his life” (P 9)—but the nature

of their friendship changes. The question of Pan-

urge’s marriage, which dominates the Third

Book, threatens entirely to supplant the older

claims of friendship. Panurge as prospective hus-

band and future cuckold becomes a less redeem-

able figure, and his relationship with Pantagruel

slips into an admonitory mode. Increasingly, the

giant takes on a more paternal role, scolding and

humoring Panurge by turns, so that the Cicer-

onian ideal of equitable friendship becomes com-

promised.

Although this possibility is never explicitly

stated, the voyage of the Fourth Book with its

all-male crew may be understood as a reaffir-

mation of masculine friendship. It takes place un-

der the shadow of Pantagruel’s promise to accept

a wife of Gargantua’s choosing when he re-

turns: the quest defers the moment when love

between men and women must supersede friend-

ship (3BK 48). Panurge and Pantagruel, accom-

panied by Epistemon, Gymnaste, and Gargan-

tua’s old friend Frere Jean, embark upon a

glorious, if troubled, bachelor party.

The convivial relationship between narrator

and reader in Rabelais’s sympotic prologues of-

fers a different model of friendship-at-first-sight

to rival that of Panurge and Pantagruel. At once

audience and drinking partner, the reader is

coaxed, cajoled, and welcomed into a commu-

nity of friends the moment he opens the book.

Readings: Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’


1991); Ullrich Langer, The Perfect Friendship (Ge-

neva: Droz, 1994).

Andrea Walkden

Frozen Words 87

FROZEN WORDS (PAROLES GELEES)

(4BK 55–56) A curious event during the voy-

age of the Fourth Book that occurs between the

extensive episodes of the Decretals and Messere

Gaster. After leaving the Island of Papimania,

Pantagruel and his companions are enjoying

themselves eating and talking when Pantagruel

suddenly hears strange sounds. Soon, everyone

on board can hear the disembodied voices of

men, women, and children, as well as the sounds

of horses and guns. Predictably, Panurge is ter-

rified, and Pantagruel seeks to reassure his friend

by proposing four possible explanations for the

noises. First, Pantagruel recalls a Pythagorean

philosopher and mathematician named Petron

who thought that there were one hundred and

eighty-three interrelated worlds equally dispersed

on the sides and at the angles of an equilateral

triangle at the center of which Truth resided.

Throughout the ages, words, ideas, models, and

representations from this abode of Truth would

occasionally drop on certain humans like “dew

on Gideon’s fleece.” Pantagruel then remembers

that Aristotle referred to Homer’s words as “fly-

ing.” His third explanation suggests that they are

hearing some words of Plato that froze when

spoken during the winter in some harsh country.

The last hypothesis proposes that the words are

the result of the wind blowing over the severed

head and lyre of Orpheus. At this point, the pilot

interrupts the giant’s conjecturing to say that a

great and cruel war had been fought the preced-

ing winter at that very place—the edge of the

Frozen Sea. All the sounds of the battle had fro-

zen, but now that the weather was warming, the

war cries of the men, the words of the women,

the whinnying of the horses, and the clash of

arms could all be heard as they melted. To amuse

the company, Pantagruel catches several handfuls

of still frozen words and tosses them on the deck

where they shimmer in different colors. As the

companions warm the words in their hands, the

words melt and release their sounds. Unfortu-

nately, the sounds are incomprehensible and

largely unpleasant. When the narrator wishes to

save some of the red words, Pantagruel refuses,

saying it was foolish to “hoard a commodity we

were never short of.” The episode ends with Pan-

urge wishing wistfully that he had found the

word of the Dive Bouteille among the frozen

words so that the long voyage would have ended

there.

Given Rabelais’s preoccupation with words,

the incident merits close attention. Faced with

trying to explain the unlikely situation, Panta-

gruel searches for meaning in the classical world,

and the four explanations he offers are cloaked

in a delicate combination of humor and beauty.

For the space of a few paragraphs, the bawdy,

raucous boisterousness of the Utopians is sus-

pended in a poetic moment. Pantagruel’s expla-

nations underscore his philanthropic nature, for

he is determined to interpret the Frozen Words

in terms of essential philosophical truths, Pla-

tonic ideas, or, at the very least, divine music.

Unfortunately, such things are not accessible to

everyday mortals, and the words that promised

such perfection for a brief moment are revealed

to be nothing more than the sounds of strife and

incomprehensible babble. Rabelais melts his

readers’ expectations along with the Frozen

Words with the reminder that words are espe-

cially the domain of lovers who lie and lawyers

who sell them but that they are never in short

supply.

Critical response to this episode has shifted rad-

ically over the past century since Arthur Tilley

(1907) dismissed the whole scene in a single sen-

tence: “The account of the frozen words . . . is not

productive of much mirth, but it is interesting as

showing that the travelers had now reached the

confines of the Glacial Sea” (1967:237). Sixty

years later, Marcel Tetel recognized the episode as

“a climax in [Rabelais’s] experiments with word

play” (80), and Alfred Glauser perceived Rabe-

lais’s whole oeuvre as composed of frozen words.

M. A. Screech sees the episode and the chapters

that follow it as Rabelais’s attempt to “confront

ambitiously the problem of the possibility of hu-

man knowledge within this transitory life.” More

specifically, Duval interprets the juxtaposition of

Pantagruel’s classical idealism and the brutal

sounds of battle as a devastating satire of Plato’s

theory of the Ideal and as an essential part of Ra-

belais’s strategy to push the Utopians inexorably

away from their idealistic certainty, at the begin-

ning of the voyage, that they will find the Truth at

the end of Panurge’s quest. Berry’s analysis inter-

88 Frozen Words

prets this episode as a key to our understanding of

the Decretals and Gaster by defining two oppos-

ing views of language in the “frozen” versus

“thawed” words.

Readings: Alice Berry, The Charm of Catastrophe:

A Study of Rabelais’s Quart Livre (Chapel Hill: Uni-

versity of North Carolina, 2000); Edwin Duval, The

Design of Rabelais’s Quart livre de Pantagruel (Ge-

neva: Droz, 1997); Alfred Glauser, Rabelais createur

(Paris: Nizet, 1964); M. A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press, 1979); Marcel Tetel,

Rabelais (New York: Twayne, 1967); Arthur Tilley,

Francois Rabelais (London: Kennikat, 1907).

Megan Conway

G

GALEN (A.D. 129–c. 199) Greek physician

whose work, often stemming from and expand-

ing on Hippocratic texts, largely informed Ra-

belais’s writing and medical practice. Taking fur-

ther the Hippocratic theory of humors, Galen

developed a classification of temperaments Ra-

belais employed in the formation and transfor-

mation of characters such as the anxious Pan-

urge and the bellicose Picrochole. Advice given

by Ponocrates to Gargantua and his Parisian

friends to leave the city and go to the countryside

one day each month for relaxation and diversion

directly stems from Galen’s practical treatise on

health maintenance: De sanitate tuenda (Hy-

giene). Also originating from Galenic theory is

the frequent Rabelaisian encouragement to read-

ers to find balance through simplicity and hu-

mility; avoiding extremes and correcting exces-

ses are deemed essential to staying in good

health—health being the most important pos-

session and indeed the primary source of happi-

ness, confidence, assurance, and ease. In practice,

Galen’s promotion of hygiene and what we

would today call “physicians’ bedside manner”

so directly influenced Rabelais’s work as a doc-

tor that mortality rates dipped 2 to 3 percent dur-

ing his tenure at the Hotel-Dieu Hospital in

Lyon. Relating closely to patients, being a model

of good health and compassion so as to inspire

confidence and foster a collaborative spirit on the

part of the sick—such were some of the most

effective tools Galen made available to the Ren-

aissance doctor in his work and writing.


cine, ER 12 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1976); Gilles

Henry, Rabelais (Paris: Librairie Academique Perrin,

1988).

Lesa Randall

GAMES Rabelais’s work contains hundreds of

references to games, real and imagined. The most

elaborate mention of games is found in the list

of 217 games Gargantua plays (G 22). This en-

cyclopedic list includes card games, games of

chance, and sports. The list not only contains

games, but also terms used in games (e.g., “de-

fendo,” no. 187) or ways of playing a game

(e.g., “coquinbert, qui gaigne perd,” no. 30).

Also contained in the list are swear words asso-

ciated with gaming (e.g., “reniguebieu,” no. 52)

as well as suggestive words with sexual conno-

tations (e.g., “vendre l’avoine,” no. 94, “ventre

contre ventre,” no. 109, “semer l’avoyne,” no.

184, etc.). Approximately the first third of the

list refers to card games, while the majority of

terms refer to sports. In French society, begin-

ning in the late thirteenth century, the Church,

municipal governments, and the crown issued

decrees banning certain types of games, espe-

cially card and dice games. Humanists such as

Thomas More and Erasmus criticized games

of chance, while Rabelais’s view on this matter

is more ambiguous. Immediately following this

exhaustive list of games in Gargantua 22 is a

much reduced and more refined list of games

Gargantua plays on the advice of his humanist

tutor Ponocrates. One of these is a game that

stood apart in both society and Rabelais’s work—

jeu de paume, the sport that evolved into

modern-day tennis. By decree in 1527, Francis

I established jeu de paume as an official sport

whose professional players should be compen-

sated. The end of Gargantua (58) contains an

elaborate enigmatic poem that describes the jeu

de paume in apocalyptic terms (see Enigmatic

Prophecy).

Readings: Jean-Marie Mehl, Les jeux au royaume

de France (Paris: Fayard, 1990); Michel Psichari, “Les

jeux de Gargantua,” RER 4 (1908): 1–37, 124–81,

317–61; 7 (1909): 48–67.

E. Bruce Hayes

90 Ganabin

GANABIN (4BK 66–67) The episode of Gan-

abin (which is Hebrew for “thieves” according

to the Brief Declaration) is the last one of the

Fourth Book and one of the most enigmatic. The

episode consists of two chapters, which in turn

can be subdivided into distinctive narrative parts.

Chapter 66 begins with a description of the island

by Xenomanes, who informs his companions of

the sinister nature of its habitants. Pantagruel

gives a clue for the global interpretation of the

episode by comparing its two-peaked mountain

to Mount Parnassus. In the following discussion,

Panurge and Frere Jean are as diametrically op-

posed as they are in other episodes of the Fourth

Book: Panurge wants to flee, while Frere Jean

wishes to attack. Pantagruel decides to go ashore

only to get fresh water from the island’s fountain

(“the most beautiful fountain of the world,”

which probably is an allusion to Hippocrenas, the

mythological source of inspiration). At the insti-

gation of Frere Jean, he decides to fire a salvo at

the island, in order “to salute the Muses of this

Mount Antiparnassus.”

Chapter 67 relates how Panurge, who has hid-

den himself in the ship’s storeroom, comes up on

deck, frightened by the cannonades. In his hand

he holds a cat, called Rodilardus, which, in the

dark of the ship’s hold, he had taken for a devil.

He is scratched and soiled with his own excre-

ment. The narrator explains that Panurge’s def-

ecation is a natural effect of fear and illustrates

this with two lengthy exempla, one of which is

the apocryphal ancedote of Francois Villon in

England. Pantagruel “[cannot] help laughing”

and summons Panurge to take a bath and to “put

on a clean white shirt.” At this Panurge bursts

out in a joyful litany of fifteen synonyms of the

word “shit,” finishing with the exclamation

“Sela! Beuvons,” the intriguing, concluding

words of the Fourth Book.

This episode has given rise to very different

appraisals and interpretations. Since Jean Fleury

(1877), critics such as Manuel de Dieguez, Al-

fred Glauser, Floyd Gray, and Jean Larmat have

considered this and the other final episodes of the

Fourth Book to be a sign of the author’s fatigue

or lack of interest, judging the last scatologic

scene in particular to be “tasteless,” “easy

comic,” and “without any conclusion, not even

provisional” (for a critical survey, see Paul J.

Smith 1987). More recently, critics have looked

for deeper significance in the final episode. For

Marcel Tetel, the Ganabin-episode is an allegory

of literary creation, imitation, and plagiarism; for

Verdun-L. Saulnier, Ganabin is the island of re-

pression, the two-peaked Mount Antiparnassus

symbolizing the Chatelet and the Conciergerie;

for Gerard Defaux, it alludes to the two-peaked

mons Capitolinus, the Roman Capitol, which

stands for the Catholic Inquisition. Alice F. Berry

and Paul J. Smith underscore the presence of the

themes of baptismal initiation undergone by Pan-

urge (descent into the dark underground, struggle

with the devil, rebirth symbolized by white cloth-

ing).

Recently, Edwin M. Duval has argued that

Ganabin constitutes the final step of a series of

three islands “that contain increasingly sinister

forms of anticaritas”: “diabolical ingenuity (Gas-

ter), sanctimonious hypocrisy (Chaneph), and

predatory force against the defenseless (Gana-

bin)”: “to find a more suitable telos than Ganabin

[the questing Pantagruelians] must not continue

beyond it but turn around and retrace their steps.”

The new study by Myriam Marrache-Gouraud,

who identifies Panurge scratched by Rodilardus

with the Mate, one of the trumps of the tarot,

proves that the final word on this crucial but en-

igmatic episode has not yet been heard.

Readings: Alice Fiola Berry, Rabelais: Homo

Logos (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina,

1979); Alice Fiola Berry, The Charm of Catastrophe.

A Study of Rabelais’s Quart Livre (Chapel Hill: Uni-

versity of North Carolina, 2000); Gerard Defaux, Ra-

belais agonistes: du rieur au prophete (Geneva: Droz,

1997); Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s

Quart Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1998); My-

riam Marrache-Gouraud, ‘Hors toute intimidation’.

Panurge ou la parole singuliere (Geneva: Droz,

2003); V.-L. Saulnier, Rabelais II. Rabelais dans son

enquete. Etude sur le Quart et le Cinquieme Livre

(Paris: SEDES, 1982); Paul J. Smith, Voyage et ecri-

ture. Etude sur le Quart Livre de Rabelais (Geneva:

Droz, 1987); Marcel Tetel, “La fin du Quart Livre,”

Romanische Forschungen 83 (1971): 517–27.

Paul J. Smith

GARGAMELLE Wife of Grandgousier,

mother of Gargantua. Her name, derived from

the Provencal, means “throat.” Gargamelle fea-

Gargantua 91

tures briefly at two moments of Gargantua. Her

first and longest appearance is during the chap-

ters (3–4, 6) detailing Gargantua’s conception

and birth, which develops Rabelais’s preoccu-

pation with the interiority and exteriority of bod-

ies, but enables the author to speculate on the

particular nature of the female body. Garga-

melle’s pregnancy lasts eleven months, a sign

that her son is destined for great things. The birth

is brought on by her excessive consumption of

tripe (animal intestines). As the tripe enters her

body, space becomes so limited that Gargantua

is forced into the world, but Gargamelle’s anus/

vagina is blocked. Gargantua travels through his

mother’s body and is eventually born through her

left ear, revealing the female body to be a series

of previously unknown passageways, whose

meaning and function are successfully deci-

phered by the male child. M. A. Screech inter-

prets this unusual birth as a means of challenging

the reader’s belief in the Christian Nativity story.

Although greeted with laughter from Grandgou-

sier, Gargamelle’s remark that she regrets not

cutting off his penis to avoid the pain of child-

birth demonstrates the perceived threat to mas-

culinity posed by the pregnant woman. In this

light, Gargamelle’s marginalization from Gar-

gantua’s education can be read as a restoration

of patriarchy. When Gargamelle’s death is an-

nounced to Grandgousier later in the work, he

responds by expressing his lack of interest in her

and all other women.

Readings: Francoise Charpentier, “Un royaume qui

perdure sans femmes,” Rabelais’s Incomparable

Book: Essays on his Art, ed. Raymond La Charite

(Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986); Jefferson

Humphries, “The Rabelaisian Matrice,” RR 76.3

(1985): 251–70; Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Lon-

don: Duckworth, 1979).

Pollie Bromilow

GARGANTUA The story of the father of Pan-

tagruel, covering the earliest period in the fic-

tional chronology of Rabelais’s giant princes.

The publication date (1534–35) is unsure, but

Gargantua certainly appeared after Pantagruel

(1532–33). Like Pantagruel, it exploits charac-

ters borrowed from the anonymous Grandes et

inestimables cronicques, rather undistinguished

comic tales about giants.

Gargantua falls roughly into five parts: pre-

liminaries (“Aux lecteurs,” prologue, chaps. 1–

2); Gargantua’s birth and early childhood (3–

13); Gargantua’s education (14–24); war against

Picrochole (25–51); and Abbaye de Theleme

(52–58). There is no overall plot; rather, we have

simply an episodic, chronological account of

Gargantua’s deeds. The interpretation of the

book is disputed. Some maintain that it is essen-

tially of aesthetic interest or primarily an inter-

pretational challenge. Others hold that it has a

substantial message, but they often disagree

about what the message is. One can at least say

that Gargantua raises topics such as education,

religion, and war, while it also highlights the

reader’s role as interpreter (see Reading).

The preliminaries center on the “Prologe de

l’Auteur.” The title-page calls the author Alco-

frybas Nasier, a pseudonym of Francois Rabe-

lais. However, the author or (more accurately)

narrator in the prologue is so idiosyncratic that

he becomes a character in his own right, not

merely a spokesman for Rabelais. He hails his

readers as drunks and syphilitics. This greeting

invites the reader to imagine himself in a kind of

drunken familiarity with Alcofrybas. Alcofrybas

also contradicts himself: for example, he claims

first that his book contains “horrific mysteries,”

but later that it is just trifles. Clearly, the narrator

is unreliable, and the reader must think for him-

self.

The first issue is precisely whether to take the

book seriously. Alcofrybas raises the question in-

sistently in the prologue. He concedes that the

title suggests a light work (like the Cronicques)

but offers three analogies that imply seriousness:

he compares Gargantua first to the philosopher

Socrates, whose wisdom contrasted with his

clownish exterior; then to a bone, from which the

reader, like a dog, should extract marrow; and

finally to ancient literary works, which were pa-

gan but in which devout sixteenth-century read-

ers nonetheless saw allegories that foreshadowed

Christianity (see Allegory). The first analogy is

plausible: like Socrates, Alcofrybas acts the

clown, and like Socrates, he could have some-

thing profound to say. On the other hand, Alcof-

rybas casts doubt on his own third analogy by

declaring that, though credulous readers may de-

tect hidden meanings in Gargantua, he did not

92 Gargantua

knowingly include any! Although scholars de-

bate the precise implications of these analogies,

two points seem clear. First, in promising serious

content, Alcofrybas indicates a reality: some

chapters do treat serious matters straightfor-

wardly (e.g., justifications for war [1, 46]). Sec-

ond, in suggesting that the book is a puzzle, he

indicates another reality: some chapters may or

may not be about serious matters, but certainly

set the reader a problem to solve (e.g., the mean-

ing of the enigma [58]).

Gargantua is born during a feast, which con-

tinues the merry tone of the prologue. More re-

markably, his mother’s pregnancy lasts eleven

months, and he is born through her ear. Alcof-

rybas maintains that long gestation befits a future

hero. The birth itself, he claims, is no odder than

that of many others; and besides, if God so

willed, it would be so. Allusion to God’s power

could be part of a polemic against conservative

theologians, outright blasphemy, or a harmless

joke. Whatever one’s view, clearly Alcofrybas

continues the tantalizing, challenging vein of the

prologue: having acknowledged that readers may

doubt the reality of this birth, he adds dismissi-

vely: “If you don’t believe it, I don’t care.” The

account of Gargantua’s early childhood partly

stresses his alleged intelligence. Thus, experi-

mentation shows him how pleasurable it is to

wipe his behind with a gosling. This insight so

impresses Grandgousier that he decides to have

Gargantua educated.

Grandgousier entrusts Gargantua first to theo-

logians who, in fifty years, make Gargantua ut-

terly stupid and idle. Grandgousier then places

him with humanist teachers, under whose guid-

ance he swiftly masters classical literature, mod-

ern Latin writing, botany (or pharmacy), and

other subjects. He also acquires physical strength

and dexterity, particularly in martial exercises.

This transmutation of the character comes not

only from intensive teaching, but also from Gar-

gantua’s own motivation: he is introduced to

learned people, wishes to hold his own, and so

acquires the urge to study. The extreme contrasts

between clerical and humanist education make

this a conspicuously satirical part of the work.

Gargantua’s studies are interrupted when King

Picrochole invades Grandgousier’s kingdom. The

immediate cause of war, a brawl about cakes, is

part of a satire on warmongers. This section in-

cludes discussion of the value of peace (as sought

by Grandgousier), of just war and of the reasons

why, in practice, unjustified wars occur. The text

ascribes these last mainly to the moral failings of

rulers, while stressing that Christian princes’

waging wars of conquest against each other is

utterly scandalous. However, the text indicates

that Picrochole himself has become mad and thus

impervious to ordinary restraints. The possibility

of such rogue princes implies that peace is a dif-

ficult ideal to realize. Some scholars prefer a

more specific interpretation, identifying Picro-

chole as a caricature of the emperor Charles V,

the rival of France, and treating the Picrocholine

war as propaganda. The war also introduces the

character Frere Jean, a monk and bloodthirsty

fighter. Although the massacres which he per-

petrates are comic, it is paradoxical that the

peace-loving Grandgousier prizes his services.

Perhaps the paradox simply reflects the reality of

a world where there are kings like Picrochole,

wars occur, and even peaceable rulers need pug-

nacious servants. Frere Jean is also a vehicle for

religious satire, for he is presented as both a typ-

ical and an atypical monk: typically, he is

drunken, greedy, and lecherous; atypically, he is

active and useful.

After the war, Grandgousier rewards his fol-

lowers. The Abbey of Theleme is founded osten-

sibly for Frere Jean, but Gargantua plans this in-

stitution. Only nominally an abbey, it is a utopia

where rich, cultivated men and women live in

harmony. The harmony comes not from rules im-

posed on the inmates, as in a monastic house, but

from the Thelemites’ internal sense of “hon-

neur,” which is partly innate, partly due to edu-

cation and social influence. “Honneur” is also

sustained by Christianity, for the inhabitants have

individual chapels, and preachers are welcome in

Theleme. Harmony is not, however, the last

word. Under the abbey is discovered an obscure

poem, whose meaning Frere Jean and Gargantua

debate (58) (see Enigmatic Prophecy). The

monk thinks it a comically mysterious descrip-

tion of tennis. For Gargantua, it evokes the per-

secutions that Christians must endure on earth.

His interpretation recalls that Theleme is an ideal

and that reality can be brutally different. Frere

Jean’s reading, however, recalls the Alcofrybas

Gargantua 93

of the prologue: as he dismissed the Christian-

izing of ancient texts, so too the monk dismisses

the possibility of “grave allegories” in the poem.

The work ends, as it began, by inviting the reader

to make up his own mind—but, this time about

a text which, in the religious intolerance of the

1530s, may relate to matters of life and death.

Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, L’œuvre de Francois

Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Age et sous

la Renaissance, trans. Andre Robel (Paris: Gallimard,

1970); Guy Demerson, “Rabelais et la violence,” Eu-

rope 757 (1992): 67–79; Jerome Schwartz, Irony and

Ideology in Rabelais (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 1990); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Lon-

don: Duckworth, 1979); Olivier Zegna-Rata,

“L’acheminement vers la parole, ou l’education de

Gargantua,” ER 30 (1995): 7–29.

Ian R. Morrison

GARGANTUA Giant featured in the Gargan-

tuan Chronicles, and believed by many to have

folkloric origins, who appears as the title char-

acter’s father and the voice of patriarchy in Ra-

belais’s Pantagruel (1532) and as the youthful

protagonist, son of Grandgousier, in its prequel

Gargantua (1534). Gargantua frequently is

viewed as a progressive figure, because he laughs

and embraces the future rather than mourning his

wife’s death in Pantagruel 3, and as a model

and champion of the new learning, by reason of

his own humanistic education and the ambitious

curriculum he sets forth for his son (P 8). He

nonetheless exhibits retrogressive tendencies that

have elicited a good deal of critical attention in

recent years. Mentioned first in Pantagruel’s ge-

nealogy (P 1) with the likes of Grandgousier,

Atlas, Polyphemus, and Fierabras, the king of

Utopia figures in the Pantagruel and Third Book

as the conservative antipode of his son’s upstart

companion, Panurge, thereby generating a ten-

sion between old and new, legitimacy and ille-

gitimacy, imitation and invention.

Ancient, larger than life, pedigreed, lawful,

and godly, in contrast to the thirty-five-year-old

Panurge’s dubious origins, medium stature, un-

abashed lechery, and thieving ways, Gargantua

appears at first to embrace progress in his famous

letter on learning (P 8), which Rabelais inserts

strategically just prior to the introduction of Pan-

urge in chapter 9. Upon closer inspection, how-

ever, the Utopian patriarch who once strapped

Pantagruel to his cradle seems less bent on fos-

tering independence in his child than on ensuring

the continuation of his own values. Despite Gar-

gantua’s forward-looking assertion that even

“brigands” and “henchmen” know more than the

“doctors” and “preachers” of his own era, he

characterizes his son not in terms of progress or

newness but rather as his “own visible image in

the world,” “a mirror” perpetuating the sameness

of the father. Although Gargantua authorizes

Pantagruel to embark on humanistic studies and

become an “abyss of knowledge,” a trail that he

himself has already blazed, he forbids the pursuit

of knowledge through illegitimate means such as

astrology, urges his son to eschew unsavory

companions who might lead him astray, and in-

structs him to return home and defend the pat-

rimony whenever it is threatened.

True, Gargantua as a youth was scatologically

inclined and played his own share of pranks, in-

cluding stealing the bells of Notre Dame and uri-

nating on the people of Paris, both of which

might suggest a kinship with Panurge and an ef-

fort on Rabelais’s part to enliven his occasionally

stodgy patriarch. Born through the ear of his

gluttonous mother, however, Gargantua—whose

name, we are told, means “what a big throat you

have”—develops through trial and error into a

wise and temperate youth governed primarily,

like Minerva, by the upper bodily strata. In keep-

ing with the advice he gives his son in Panta-

gruel 8, young Gargantua returns home after

sowing his wild oats, defends the patrimony, and

emulates Grandgousier’s temperate style of gov-

ernance (“unwilling . . . to degenerate from the

hereditary mildness and clemency of my parents”

[G 50]) in his speech to the vanquished, effec-

tively mirroring the words and will of his wise

and generous father. Indeed, one might even ar-

gue that the Abbey of Theleme, Gargantua’s gift

to Frere Jean, replicates Utopia in its institu-

tionalization of fair play, in the respect for others

evident in all facets of the cloister’s organization

and operation, and in the likemindedness of the

abbey’s virtuous and educated residents.

In contrast, Panurge whets Pantagruel’s fasci-

nation with alterity or otherness, thrives on con-

flict rather than consensus, and—in his role as a

surrogate fils revolte or rebellious son—is re-

94 Gargantuan Chronicles

sponsible for distancing the Utopian prince from

his father by embroiling the young giant in his

own adventures. Following the introduction of

Panurge, Gargantua virtually disappears from the

narrative. In Pantagruel 17 he is translated into

the land of Morgan the Fairy, only to be resur-

rected in the Third Book as an authority figure to

whom the companions bow (35) and as a cau-

tionary voice warning against unorthodox prac-

tices. For example, he abjures the use of dice for

fortune telling (3BK 11); credence in the visions

of hermits (3BK 13), of which Gargantua is

leery; and unsanctioned, clandestine marriages

(3BK 36, 43, 48), used to circumvent patriarchal

control of marital alliances in the sixteenth cen-

tury.

True, the exchange of letters and gifts between

Gargantua and Pantagruel in the Fourth Book

(3–4) emphasizes the bond of affection, shared

interests and memories, mutual respect and trust,

and intellectual curiosity linking father and son

despite their differences. The Utopian king even

expresses friendship for Panurge in his missive,

which is delivered by messenger pigeon. Rabe-

lais still draws a subtle distinction between father

and son, however, in the choice of gifts he at-

tributes to each character. Although Gargantua

selects books, associated with learned culture and

patriarchal authority, as presents for his son, Pan-

tagruel opts to send alternative texts to his father:

both a tapestry that shows rather than tells the

story of Achilles, and a group of exotic animals

representing nature rather than culture that differ

markedly from what “ancient writers made them

out to be” (4BK 3).

Readings: Carla Freccero, Father Figures, Gene-

alogy and Narrative Structure in Rabelais (Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Walter Stephens,

Giants in Those Days (Lincoln: University of Ne-

braska Press, 1989).


GARGANTUAN CHRONICLES (CHRO-

NIQUES GARGANTUINES) The term Chro-

niques gargantuines designates a series of pop-

ular tales published around 1530–40 featuring

the character Gargantua. In the prologue to

Pantagruel, narrator Alcofrybas Nasier men-

tions the first of these texts. In fact, in praising

his book’s merits, he compares it to the Great

and Inestimable Chronicles of the Enormous Gi-

ant Gargantua (Grandes et inestimables Chron-

icques de l’enorme geant Gargantua), boasting

that “more copies have been sold by printers in

two months than Bibles are bought in nine years”

(P prol.). This anonymous work which appeared

in Lyon in 1532, shortly before Pantagruel, may

have been written by Rabelais. But if he is not

its author, he surely helped in the publication of

this work, if only by writing the table of contents,

as Mireille Huchon maintains. Several commen-

tators suggest that it was the great publishing

success of the story of the giant Gargantua that

persuaded Rabelais to continue it with stories

about his son Pantagruel.

Five main textual groups can be distinguished

among the Chroniques gargantuines: (1) the

Grandes et inestimables Cronicques du grant et

enorme geant Gargantua [ . . . ], to which the

narrator refers at the start of his book; (2) the

Vroy Gargantua [ . . . ] or Real Gargantua,

which probably appeared in 1533 and has char-

acteristics that make it very similar to Rabelai-

sian tales. (3) Quite different in tone is the Great

and Marvelous Life of the Most Powerful and

Fearsome King Gargantua (Grande et merveil-

leuse vie du trespuissant et redoubte Roy de Gar-

gantua [ . . . ]) signed by the acrostic “Francois

Girault” and published around 1530–35. Last are

two compilations: (4) the Cronicques du Roy

Gargantua [ . . . ], which merges the Grandes et

inestimables Cronicques and the Grande et mer-

veilleuse vie, and (5) the Admirable Chronicles

of the Powerful King Gargantua (Croniques ad-

mirables du puissant Roy Gargantua [ . . . ]),

very close to the Vroy Gargantua, which it re-

peats in addition to including whole chapters of

Pantagruel. The Disciple de Pantagruel, pub-

lished in 1538 or slightly later, is the terminus a

quo of this series.

In their borrowings, compilations, and succes-

sive rewritings of episodes, these counterfeit ver-

sions of chivalrous material are parodies of the

unrhymed knightly romances that had returned to

public favor in the second half of the sixteenth

century and become veritable bestsellers during

the reign of Francis I. They include characters

from the Arthurian tradition, such as Merlin the

wizard, Queen Guinevere, and Lancelot. How-

ever, with the title “chronicles,” these popular

Gaster, Messere 95

books also evoke the tradition of the great annals

and their histories. In the comic mode, they trace

the genealogy of the hero, his marvelous birth,

his childhood, and finally his great feats of arms

and contain numerous burlesque and scatological

elements (see Scatology). The very character of

the giant Gargantua and several passages of the

Rabelaisian epics reveal themselves in fact to be

rewritings of episodes from the Chroniques gar-

gantuines. For example, the description of the

giant’s clothing, Gargantua’s trip to Paris as well

as his theft of the bells of Notre-Dame, which he

attaches to the neck of his mare, are all borrowed

from the Grandes et inestimables Cronicques du

grant et enorme geant Gargantua [ . . . ]. The

reference to the hollow tooth also suggests a pas-

sage in the Vroy Gargantua [ . . . ]. Moreover, in

the sixteenth century, the tales of Rabelais were

often printed together with the Chroniques gar-

gantuines, reflecting printing and composition

processes and an understanding of authorship

that are quite different from our modern practices

and concepts.

Readings: Les chroniques gargantuines, ed. Chris-

tiane Lauvergnat-Gagniere and Guy Demerson (Paris:

Nizet, 1988); Francois Cornilliat, “L’Autre geant: Les

chroniques gargantuines et leur intertexte,” Litterature

55 (1984): 85–97; Diane Desrosiers-Bonin, “Les chro-

niques gargantuines et la parodie du chevaleresque,”

ER 32.1 (1996): 85–95; John Lewis, “Towards a Chro-

nology of the Chroniques gargantuines,” ER 18

(1985): 83–101; Francois Rabelais Œuvres completes,

ed. Mireille Huchon, coll. “Bibliotheque de la Pleiade”

(Paris: Gallimard, 1994).

Diane Desrosiers-Bonin

GASTER, MESSERE (4BK 57–62) The Gas-

ter episode occupies chapters 57–62 of the

Fourth Book. Pantagruel and the crew of the

Thalamege descend upon an island whose sum-

mit is at the end of a steep and rocky climb. At

the peak is an earthly paradise reminiscent of the

Garden of Eden. Pantagruel identifies the place

as the Manor of Arete recalling Hesiod’s descrip-

tion in Works and Days of the plateau of virtue

accessible only through great struggle.

However, the allegory is complicated by the

appearance of “Messere Gaster” (“Signor

Belly”), the “governor” of the island and first

“master of arts” in the world. The allusion to the

Belly as the ruler of virtue and the arts introduces

a troubling irony into the episode. In addition to

deflating the concept of human virtue and indus-

try, Rabelais appears to be writing a satire of

Ficinian Platonism. In his Commentary on

Plato’s Symposium, Ficino identifies Love as the

governor and ruler of the arts, while Rabelais

suggests there is no greater inspiration than the

implacable gut (Marichal 1956: 190–92).

Through Gaster, Rabelais develops a discus-

sion of the value of linguistic signs and contrasts

artificial language with brute reality. Following

Erasmus, Rabelais informs us that Gaster, the

hungry stomach, was created with no ears (Ad-

ages, II, 8, 84). Gaster cannot be deceived since

he does not hear the arguments of others. Yet he

is an imperious ruler whose own commands must

be obeyed upon penalty of death. Gaster and his

regent Penury are driving forces in nature and

society, causing birds to sing and humankind to

initiate all arts as well as the voyages of immi-

gration and discovery and many of the techno-

logical advances of the day.

Despite his many accomplishments, Gaster is

unworthy of undue glorification and himself ad-

mits to being not a god but a vile creature, send-

ing his worshipers to his chamber pot to see the

evidence of his base humanity.

At his court, Gaster is served by two cate-

gories of followers: the Engastrimythes, or

ventriloquists, and the Gastrolatres, or Belly-

worshipers. The Gastrolatres are bands of lazy

sectarians who never work, fearing to “offend”

the stomach and shrink it. Rabelais identifies

them with those whom Saint Paul in his Epistle

to the Philippians deems enemies of the cross,

explaining that the god they worship is their own

belly and that their paradise is of this world.

Reminiscent of members of religious orders, the

Gastrolatres respond to the call of a bell and ar-

range themselves in order of rank and seniority

for a procession behind the Carnival figure of

the voracious Manduce. Servants offer up “dry

toasts” and copious amounts of food and drink

to their god in a satirical representation of the

Catholic mass, which Rabelais presents as for-

malistic routine and a transformation of the Eu-

charist into an idolatrous feast (Duval, 1988:

132–34).

The vituperation of Gaster and his followers

96 Gastrolatres

continues as the stomach is presented as the

cause of the recent diabolical creation of gun-

powder. Since the seeming Manor of Virtue or

Garden of Eden proves to be a false paradise ac-

cessible only through the sweat of the brow and

devastated by the presence of warfare, Duval

sees the chapters as a retelling of the Fall and a

renunciation of the search to find any ready-made

utopia or truth, the announced goal of the voy-

ages in the Third and Fourth Books themselves

(Design 42–8). Other critics, such as Michel

Jeanneret, see Rabelais’s Gaster as an essentially

polymorphous force, brutal and devouring, yet

capable of inspiring virtuosity in humanity (22–

5). The assigning of any single or stable meaning

to these chapters is undermined by the contra-

dictions within the text itself, which is essentially

the development of a stomach-god character

based on a very literal reading of a biblical in-

junction against literal interpretation and fetish-

ism.


lais’s Quart Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1998);

Edwin M. Duval, “La messe, la cene et le voyage sans

fin du Quart Livre,” ER 21 (1988): 131–41; Michel

Jeanneret, “Les Paroles degelees (Rabelais, Quart Li-

vre, 48–65), Litterature 17 (1965): 14–30; Robert

Marichal, “Quart livre: commentaires,” ER 1 (1956):

151–202; Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, 1979).

Gerard Lavatori

GASTROLATRES This episode consists of

four distinct parts: a detailed presentation of the

island’s topography (4BK 57); a description of

its inhabitants, the Gastrolatres and Engastrimy-

thes (4BK 58); a summary of their religious rit-

uals (4BK 59–60); and finally an account of Gas-

ter’s many “inventions” (4BK 61–62). Because

of the central role played by allegory, the Gas-

trolatres episode has served as a centerpiece in

scholarly debate on interpretation itself hinging

on questions of allegory, ambivalence, and insta-

bility.

As “Belly-worshipers,” (Briefve Declaration)

the Gastrolatres cultivate an elaborate gastron-

omy described in detail (4BK 59–60) that takes

the episode well beyond a simple condemnation

of gluttony. Because they are also described as

being idle and living together in close-knit so-

cieties, the Gastrolatres have been interpreted as

a parody of monks. Finally, this same idleness,

combined with their association with poverty,

uselessness, and the cockleshell motif (used by

pilgrims as well as by itinerant paupers), suggests

that the Gastrolatres are also informed by social

discourse on pauperism. Indeed, the Lyon of Ra-

belais’s time was the site of one of the Renais-

sance’s public works projects with accompany-

ing rhetoric condemning “idle” paupers.

Beyond this satire, critics have identified a re-

ligious subtext to the Gastrolatres episode. Most

of Rabelais’s attention is indeed accorded to their

most obvious trait, their extravagant idolatry:

they considered Gaster to be a great God, wor-

shiping him as God, sacrificing to him as their

omnipotent God, and recognizing no other God

(4BK 58) while engaging in elaborate rituals to

worship him (4BK 59–60). This association of

idolatry with an extreme glorification of materi-

ality has Pauline resonances: it recalls the con-

demnation of idolatry as one of the “works of the

flesh” (Gal 5.19–21) just as chapter 58 concludes

with a quotation assimilating Belly worshipers to

the enemies of the cross (Phil. 3.18–19). For

some critics, the Pauline intertext has the func-

tion of a kind of master-source for an evangelical

humanist like Rabelais. The episode also reso-

nates with themes sounded by Reformers who,

like Paul, assimilated idolatry to the glorification

(deification) of materiality. Charging the Church

with “idolatry” was a common accusation made

by John Calvin and others.

Not only are the Gastrolatres themselves an

allegorical representation (of the belly and its

drives? of monks? of paupers? of idolaters?), but

the episode is saturated with allegory from the

initial reference to the Rock of Virtue—a con-

secrated topos from Hesiod found in contempo-

rary texts such as Jean Lemaire de Belges’s Con-

corde des deux langages (1511) and Francois

Habert’s Temple de Vertu (1542). The beginning

and end of the episode (4BK 57; 61–62) invite

readers to interpret Gaster and his island allegor-

ically in light of (1) the Neoplatonic conception

of love or (2) the human (postlapsarian) condi-

tion. Gaster’s epithet as “the first Master of Arts

in the world” (“Premier Maistre es Ars de ce

Monde” [4BK 67]) recalls Marsilio Ficino’s

commentary on Plato’s Symposium where love is

Geography 97

said to be the master of the arts. Scholars have

also seen in Gaster and his island an allegory of

humanity’s fallen state of work and violence.

Thus, Gaster’s imperial decree that all his sub-

jects work (4BK 57) echoes the Old Testament

injunction “in the sweat of your face you will eat

your bread.” This episode combines the Old Tes-

tament account of the Fall (Gen 3.17–19) with

classical imagery of the Iron Age from Hesiod

(Works and Days), Virgil (Georgics 1.129–33;

145–46), and Ovid (Metamorphosis 1.123–44).

Seen in this light, his epithet “Premier Maistre es

Ars de ce Monde” refers not only to the Neopla-

tonic conception of love, but also to the “arts and

trades” that characterize humanity’s postlapsar-

ian state of work and war (4BK 61–62).

Whether they allegorize Neoplatonic love or

the human condition, the chapters devoted to

Gaster and his inventions (4BK 61–62) are an

example of ironic encomium (satirical eulogy)

akin to Panurge’s famous Praise of Debtors

(3BK 3–4).

Readings: Terence Cave, “Reading Rabelais: Vari-

ations on the Rock of Virtue,” Literary Theory/Ren-

aissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986);

Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Livre

de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1998); Michel Jeanneret,

“Les paroles degelees,” Litterature 27 (1975): 163–80;

Virginia Krause, “Idle Works in Rabelais’ Quart Li-

vre: The Case of the Gastrolatres,” SCJ 30.1 (1999):

47–60; Robert Marichal, “Commentaires du Quart

Livre,” ER 1 (1956): 183–202; Francois Rigolot, Les

langages de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1996 [1972]),

152–60.

Virginia Krause

GENEALOGIES Evoking both biblical line-

ages (Gen. 10–11, 35–36; Matt. 1.1–17) and the

vogue for encomiastic and embellished family

trees among Renaissance dignitaries, who often

claim heroes from antiquity among their ances-

tors, Rabelais’s own genealogy of the Utopian

princely family (P 1) lends itself to multiple in-

terpretations. Given the plethora of inventors

who figure in the giants’ lineage, the family tree

represents at one level a tribute to humanistic in-

genuity, enriched by a syncretic but improbable

mixture of biblical (Jewish), classical (Roman

and Greek), medieval Christian, and completely

fictional names. However, the specific nature of

the inventions represented, ranging from new

methods of smoking beef tongue to wine flasks

and bespectacled dice games, suggests that the

encomium is partly paradoxical or even a parody

of Renaissance panegyrical genres. Moreover, as

a celebration of patriarchy, the genealogy is gen-

tly undermined by the narrator’s own sugges-

tion that he believes nothing of what he has tran-

scribed (“si ne le croiez, non foys-je, fist-elle” P

1). Rabelais takes up the topic of ancestry again

in Gargantua, where he reveals that Gargantua’s

genealogy—presumably the one transcribed in

Pantagruel—was discovered underground in an

urn, half-eaten by rodents and inscribed with in-

visible letters that have been deciphered by a

drunken scribe named Alcofrybas (G 9). Finally,

the entire patriarchal lineage is arguably cast in

doubt by the narrator’s discussion of eleven-

month pregnancies (G 3), technically legitimate

but biologically problematic.

Readings: Edwin Duval, “Pantagruel’s Genealogy

and the Redemptive Design of Rabelais’ Pantagruel,

PMLA 99.2 (1984): 162–78; Carla Freccero, Father

Figures: Genealogy and Narrative Structure in Ra-

belais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991);

Walter Stephens, Giants in Those Days (Lincoln, NE:

University of Nebraska Press, 1989).


GEOGRAPHY An important element, to dif-

fering degrees, in Rabelais’s five books. Rabe-

laisian geography reflects the multitude of ways

in which sixteenth-century writers thought about

their world, a world whose limits were expanding

beyond anything imagined by classical or medi-

eval cartographers. But it is more than “reflec-

tion”: Rabelais exploits the many narrative pos-

sibilities of this diversity, navigating the reader

through landscapes that invite interpretation,

even while refusing to yield a fixed meaning.

Sixteenth-century geography was largely de-

termined by classical and medieval texts. From

the Middle Ages, the sixteenth century inherited

vast compendia such as Vincent de Beauvais’s

Speculum (thirteenth century, printed in Stras-

bourg in 1476). The known world was described

in mappaemundi, diagrammatic world maps

blending religion, myth, and travelers’ accounts

and dotted with illustrations of fabulous people

98 Geography

and beasts (rather like Rabelais’s text), or T.O.

maps, so called because the three known conti-

nents formed a T within the circle of God’s cre-

ation. The myth of the terrestrial paradise contin-

ued during the sixteenth century and is one of

the comparisons evoked by Rabelais for the is-

land of Gaster (4BK 57).

The most influential cartographer, however,

was Ptolemy (second century a.d.), whose Ge-

ography was widely translated and printed in Eu-

rope after the first edition in 1475. Like many

Renaissance cosmographers, Petrus Apianus in

his Cosmography (1544) reproduced many of

Ptolemy’s notions, such as his three projections,

his location within a geometric coordinate sys-

tem, and his canonical distinction between local

cartography (chorography) and national or inter-

national (geography). Ptolemy’s influence was

added to medieval influences, rather than replac-

ing them immediately, and the Geography’s lim-

its were also being shown by explorers in the

Americas: Da Gama, Vespucci, Columbus,

Verrazano, Cartier, or Cortes. The “original”

maps accompanying Ptolemy’s text (which may

have been added up to the thirteenth century)

were increasingly replaced by modern maps.

As well as enabling numerous editions of old

maps and cartographic texts, the printing press

also produced an explosion in the production of

atlases, cosmographies, geographies, and travel

accounts by contemporary writers. On receipt of

travel accounts from Amerigo Vespucci, the

duke of Lorraine suspended a new edition of

Ptolemy in favor of a world map that would in-

clude contemporary discoveries. The result was

Martin Waldseemuller’s 1507 world map, the

first to show the Americas separated from Asia.

Olaus Magnus’s remarkable navigator’s map of

the northeast Atlantic (1539), deliberately in-

tended to improve upon Ptolemy, was widely

used by cartographers all over Europe and was

known by Rabelais, who uses Olaus as the in-

spiration for his mention of Lapland (3BK 51)

and perhaps for the incident of the physetere

(4BK 33). Ptolemy’s authority started to decline

toward the end of the sixteenth century, with the

influence of Sebastien Munster’s epoque-making

Cosmography (1544), Mercator’s world map

(1554), and the publication of new and more up-

to-date atlases, in particular Ortelius’s Theater of

the World (1570), considered the first modern at-

las.

Travel accounts also proliferate at this time.

Jacques Cartier’s accounts of his first two voy-

ages to Canada (1534, 1535-36), published in

1545, were certainly known by Rabelais. The

itinerary of the travelers in the Fourth Book re-

calls Cartier’s first voyage and the search for the

fabled northwest passage (4BK 1), as do various

other details, for example, the gift of the knife to

queen Niphleseth (4BK 42) and the cannon fire

that frightens Panurge (4BK 66). However, re-

cent criticism has challenged too direct a calqu-

ing of the voyages of the Fourth Book onto Car-

tier’s Brief Account. Although Cartier’s text is

rather sober in its descriptions, other travel ac-

counts revel in the “marvelous diversity” of the

world: for example, Simon Grynaeus’s New

Globe (1532, French translation the same year)

and Joannes Boemus, The Customs, Laws and

Rites of All Peoples (1536, French translation

1549), both collections of travel narratives, some

imaginary. However, travelers often included

hearsay in their accounts, blending direct obser-

vation with old legends: Rabelais comments on

this with his personage Ouy-Dire (5BK 30), who

gives lectures to cosmographers, explorers, and

natural historians.

Accounts of entirely fictitious and fantastic

flora and fauna also enjoyed credibility, confirm-

ing the old notion that the far corners of the

world were inhabited by monsters: Andre

Thevet, Singularities of Antarctic France (1557).

Rabelais’s fourth and fifth books are imprinted

with these narratives of singularities. Recent crit-

icism has also shown the importance of the “in-

sular,” or atlas of islands, to Rabelais’s narrative

structure in these books, arguing that the episodic

structure of travel from island to island gives rise

to an almost limitless narrative and thematic di-

versity.

Nor was there any lack of maps or accounts

of travel within Europe or France. Sebastien

Munster’s new maps for his edition of Ptolemy

(1540) marked a revolution in the mapping of

Europe. In France, the Church often took the in-

itiative in local mapping or chorography, while

the first large-scale map of France was contained

in Orance Fine’s New Description of the Whole

of France (1525). The mapping of the nation

Geography 99

contributed to France’s sense of itself as a terri-

tory distinct from others and to increased mobil-

ity within the country. In Rabelais, the image of

France is that of a nation both expanding out-

ward and opening up within. Recent criticism has

shown the importance of non-French “others” in

Rabelais’s exploration of the psychic and geo-

graphical limits of French identity. And changes

within France, the formation of new communi-

cation networks often prompted by increased

trade, are suggested by the episode on the Ile

d’Odes in the Fifth Book (5BK 25) where the

roads “go” places; that is, they literally move

from one place to another, like rivers.

Another descriptive tradition still very much

alive was that of the Guides for pilgrims and

other travelers. These early travel guides started

mainly as information on the distances between

stages on a particular route and were gradually

embellished with local history, anecdotes, and

the like. Many were concerned with nomencla-

ture and stories of how a particular place got its

name. This etymological interest is marked in

Claude Champier and Gilles Corrozet’s 1537

Catalogue of French towns and landmarks, and

particularly in Charles Estienne’s famous guide

to sixteenth-century France, Guide to the Roads

of France (1552). Rabelais’s French geography

in the first two books explores the narrative pos-

sibilities of such relationships between name,

place, and history, for example, the naming of

the forest of Beauce (G 16); and Pantagruel in

the Fourth Book expounds on the occult causal

relationships between places and their names

(4BK 37). Pantagruel’s tour of French universi-

ties blends local history, actuality, nomenclature,

geography, and imagination. The dolmen near

Poitiers, the “raised stone” (P 5), was and still is

an actual landmark, which Rabelais repositions

within his own particular geography and history.

The France that emerges from the giant’s tour is

thus a liminal space between reality and fantasy,

or one subject to many discursive determinants,

that is still in the process of being defined.

In all of Rabelais’s books landscapes are al-

ternately recognizable and strange. The voyage

to Utopia in Pantagruel (P 24) starts on an itin-

erary that exactly matches that taken by the Por-

tuguese toward the Indies, but then progresses to

places such as Meden (“Nothing”). The Island of

Gaster (4BK 57) evokes the traditions of the

Rock of Virtue and the earthly paradise, but is

also compared to Mount Aiguille in Vercors,

south of Grenoble. The suspension of landscape

between realism and imagination is expressed by

Panurge in a small incident on the Ile Bossard in

the Fifth Book (5BK 4). Having heard the name

of the island, Panurge thinks that his interlocutor

Editue meant to say “the Ile Bouchard,” the name

of a village near Chinon. Editue corrects him,

insisting that the name of the place is indeed Ile

Bossard.

Sometimes, landscapes or landmarks are con-

structed out of linguistic puzzles, games, and de-

bates. The environmental history of the Beauce

region, dry and unable to sustain a forest since

antiquity, is rewritten by Rabelais (G 16) and

named with a pun (“beau ce”). The travelers of

the Fifth Book are taken to task on their pronun-

ciation of “Entelechie,” the name of the kingdom

in which they have arrived (OC 5BK 18; GP

5BK 19). They pass the test, since they do not

say “Endelechie,” as other uneducated travelers

have done. This refers to a contemporary hu-

manist debate about the difference between the

two words in Greek, a debate that had nothing

to do with place names. The relationship between

the human and the nonhuman world, or between

microcosm and macrocosm, subtends many of

Rabelais’s landscapes: the mappemonde that

Frere Jean sees in Panurge’s beard (3BK 28)

literally embodies the known world (without the

Americas, apparently).

Many Rabelaisian landscapes ultimately affirm

the creative power of the author over his narra-

tive space. Nowhere is this more evident than in

the world within Pantagruel’s mouth (P 32),

which the narrator explores as a New World and

where the body of the author’s creation, Panta-

gruel, coterminous with the “body” of his text,

literally becomes its own world. Rabelais often

brings the narrative and the reader back to his

native Touraine, providing very specific refer-

ences to small villages, woods, territories, fords,

and so on, near his family’s land at La Deviniere

near Chinon. In fact, La Deviniere seems to be

the general quarters of the Picrocholine War.

This war, based on a historical local quarrel be-

tween the seigneur of Lerne and the users of the

Loire River, a dispute in which Rabelais’s own

100 Giants

father was involved, reads like a chorography of

the Touraine: the local landscape is ravaged by

the enemy troops, the castle of La Roche Cler-

maud is taken, the Abbey of Seuilly is attacked,

and the Gue de Vede becomes pivotal strategic

territory (G 26–28, 34). Theleme is built on the

Loire River (G 52); one critic has located it quite

precisely between the Loire and Indre.

Toward the end of the Fifth Book, arriving at

the oracle after peregrinations through strange

and marvelous lands, the narrator brings the

reader back to the author’s territory, comparing

the paintings to those in a cellar in Chinon (OC

5BK 34; GP 5BK 35). Chinon is described as the

“first city in the world”: through a false etymol-

ogy (Caynon) linking the name with Cain’s ori-

ginary murder, the narrator inscribes the town

into the beginnings of biblical history and also

sends us back to the beginning of Pantagruel (P

1), where Abel’s blood enriches the soil and pro-

duces the nefles or medlars, at the origin of Ra-

belais’s gigantic mythology. The entire narrative,

then, is framed by Chinon, the text mapping out

a landscape that refers back to the place of origin

of the author himself—an author who makes sure

that we never quite know where we are.

Readings: Numa Broc, La geographie a la Renais-

sance (1420–1620) (Paris: Bibliotheque Nationale,

1980); Francois de Dainville, La geographie des

humanistes (Paris: Beauchesne, 1940); Timothy

Hampton, Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Cen-

tury: Inventing Renaissance France (Ithaca, NY: Cor-

nell University Press, 2001); Abel Lefranc, Les navi-

gations de Pantagruel, etude sur la geographie

rabelaisienne (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967,

1905); Frank Lestringant, “Elements pour une lecture

topographique du Cinquiesme Livre,” ER 40 (2001):

81–102; Frank Lestringant, Le livre des ıles. Atlas et

recits insulaires de la Genese a Jules Verne (Geneva:

Droz, 2002); Frank Lestringant, Ecrire le monde a la

Renaissance (Caen: Paradigme, 1993); Robert Mari-

chal, “Commentaires du Quart livre,” ER 1 (1956):

153–58, 181–88; V.-L. Saulnier, Rabelais: Rabelais

dans son enquete, vol. 1 (Paris: SEDES, 1983); Ga-

briel Spillebout, “Le realisme chinonais,” ER 21

(1988): 69–75.

Louisa Mackenzie

GIANTS “Giant,” “Rabelaisian,” and “Gar-

gantuan” are synonyms in several languages. Ex-

aggeration and the gigantic pervade Rabelais’s

early fiction and saturate his language even after

Pantagruel, Gargantua, and Grandgousier

cease to be consistently portrayed as giants. Be-

fore Rabelais, both serious and facetious culture

discussed giants. Gargantua was the name of a

gigantic hero in cheaply printed tall tales peddled

at fairs, known collectively to modern scholars

as the Chroniques gargantuines, or Gargantuan

Chronicles. Rabelais’s narratorial alter ego, Al-

cofrybas Nasier, praises one such book in the

prologue to Pantagruel, and alludes to it several

times in Gargantua as well. Nineteenth- and

early twentieth-century scholars documented ref-

erences to Gargantua in the oral culture of French

peasants and speculated that the giant had origi-

nated in prehistoric Celtic mythology, perhaps as

a god. Anthropologists investigated “town gi-

ants,” large effigies of founders and other cultural

heroes paraded in French civic pageants from the

late Middle Ages into modern times. The Russian

critic Mikhail Bakhtin interpreted this entire

body of speculation as evidence of a durable

“carnivalesque” popular culture, which ex-

ploited scatology and sexuality to degrade and

“uncrown” the repressive “official” culture of the

medieval Church and affirm the people’s fearless

outlook through laughter.

Medieval Scandinavian folklore, which Rabe-

lais would not have known, told of giants. In

Rabelais’s time, comparable evidence of truly

oral French folklore about giants was not re-

corded; only the Chroniques gargantuines, sur-

viving in few copies, are clearly datable to Ra-

belais’s era, and, aside from their written format,

they show literate influences (e.g., Arthurian ro-

mances). Giants were massively present in offi-

cial or scholarly culture of Rabelais’s time, how-

ever. Described in the Hebrew Bible or “Old

Testament,” they were a standard topic of ancient

and universal history. Christian preachers based

sermons and parables for all audiences on erudite

biblical commentaries; saints’ lives also told of

giants, particularly the legendary convert and

martyr Saint Christopher. Greek and Latin my-

thology recounted how giants and titans had re-

belled against the gods of Olympus. Since an-

tiquity, Jewish and Christian authors had

defended the historical existence of Giants, iden-

Giants 101

tifying pagan myths about them as deformed ech-

oes of biblical truth.

The giants of scholarly culture differed radi-

cally from those of Rabelais, from the hero of

the Chroniques gargantuines, and from the “pop-

ular” giants of modern scholarly speculation.

Biblical and classical giants were evil, not good,

ignorant and savage, not civilized or civilizable;

and they were extinct, precisely because of their

evil nature. Until Saint Augustine (354–430),

many writers defined giants on the basis of Gen.

6:4, which declared that there had been “Giants

in the earth in those days,” before Noah’s Flood,

that their birth had been caused by miscegenation

or racial mixing between the “sons of God” and

the “daughters of men,” and that Noah’s Flood

was sent partly to punish their atrocities. Some

writers identified the “sons of God” as fallen an-

gels, giving Giants a semidemonic genealogy;

several Christian writers disputed this idea, in-

terpreting the “sons of God” as descendants of

Adam’s son Seth and the “daughters of men” as

Cain’s posterity. After Augustine, the Sethian ex-

planation prevailed, despite Augustine’s denial

that giants were a discrete race. Augustine’s idea

that giants were simply deviations from the ge-

netic norm obviated the necessity of explaining

how angels could have fallen a second time, long

after the fall of man, and why, if God sent the

Flood to destroy a race of giants, they had reap-

peared in the time of Moses and David.

Aside from a few giants who converted to

Christianity, like Saint Christopher and some gi-

ants in medieval French and Renaissance Italian

heroic poems, there were no good giants in of-

ficial culture until 1498, when Annius of Viterbo

(Giovanni Nanni, 1432–1502) published a col-

lection of forged chronicles attributed to ancient

Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, and Latin

authors. Skillfully coordinating his bogus texts

and commentaries with histories written by au-

thoritative ancients like Flavius Josephus, Pliny

the Elder, and Diodorus Siculus, as well as the

Book of Genesis, Annius predisposed his readers

to conclude that Noah’s family had been anom-

alous good giants before the Flood and that Noah

had founded an Etruscan empire in postdiluvian

Italy, becoming the first pontifex maximus, pre-

figuring the Papacy, and establishing an admin-

istrative center at Rome. Thus the Pope had in-

herited both spiritual and secular power over the

entire world. Noah invented all civilization, from

bread and wine (prefiguring the Eucharist) to

laws, letters, and culture.

Annius’s forgeries had no success in Italy until

the Medici Grand Duchy. But by 1509, Jean Le-

maire de Belges was busily erasing Annius’s

Etruscans and supplanting them with the Gallic

Celts. Lemaire skillfully reforged Annius in Les

Illustrations de Gaule et singularites de Troie

(1511–13), founding a school of patriotic French

pseudohistory that served monarchs from Louis

XII to Louis XIII. Lemaire coordinated his Gallic

antiquities with earlier medieval myths that Tro-

jan refugees founded France and other kingdoms.

He depicted an eternal French hegemony, claim-

ing that Charlemagne, Louis XII, and all French

monarchs inherited the cultural preeminence and

universal empire of the good Giant, Noah.

Rabelais’s giants burlesque all these bodies of

giant-lore. Like Louis XII and his successors,

Pantagruel and Gargantua trace their genealogy

“depuis l’Arche de Noe jusqu’ a cet age” (from

Noah’s Ark down to our own times). They are

anomalous giants, staggeringly good and pious,

superhumanly erudite. Pantagruel’s herb Panta-

gruelion rivals Noah’s vine for beneficence.

Thus, when the prologue to Pantagruel praised

readers for accepting the egregious lies of the

Chroniques gargantuines like “true believers,”

many could recognize Lemaire’s and Annius’s

pretensions to “Gospel truth” historiography.

Rabelais’s other giants are the evil monsters of

traditional folkloric and scholarly consensus.

Loup Garou and his hordes, even the comical

Bringuenarilles (4BK 17), are enemies of hu-

man life and civilization. By setting good and

evil giants in conflict, Rabelais indulged his love

of exaggeration while mocking the sophistry of

pseudoscholarly nationalistic writers.



Press, 1968); Abel Lefranc, Rabelais: Etudes sur Gar-

gantua, Pantagruel, Le Tiers livre, Introd. by Robert

Marichal (Paris: Albin Michel, 1951); Walter Ste-

phens, Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient His-

tory, and Nationalism (Lincoln: University of Ne-

braska Press, 1989).

Walter Stephens

102 Golden Age

GOLDEN AGE In Ovid’s Metamorphoses,

the Golden Age, presided over by Saturn, was

marked by abundance and the absence of both

private property and conflict among men. First

evoked in Pantagruel 31 in reference to the rees-

tablishment of peace following Anarche’s de-

feat, the image is developed at greater length in

chapter 4 of the Third Book when a world char-

acterized by mutual debt and the unfettered cir-

culation of material goods is described as a

“Golden Age and reign of Saturn.” Taking into

account the irony in Panurge’s substitution of

material debt for caritas as the sine qua non of

an ordered society, both references support Du-

val’s reading of Rabelais’s works as manuals for

good government by an enlightened Christian

monarch.

In chapter 8 of the Third Book, the Golden

Age is implicated in Rabelais’s conflation of sex-

uality and problems of interpretation. When

Panurge asserts that Nature created man with un-

protected genitalia as a mark of chosen status and

that codpieces are a sign of the Age of Iron, his

image of husk and seed echoes traditional exe-

getical language. Although Rabelais’s most di-

rect source is Erasmus’s “Dulce bellum inex-

pertis” (Adagia 4.1.1), references to Erasmus or

Ovid do not fully account for the passage’s

comic tone, its substitution of reproduction for

caritas as the highest goal of human existence,

or its reference to allegorical language. However,

Jean de Meun’s portion of the Roman de la Rose

(c. 1280; printed through 1538) discusses the

Golden Age and its end in the specific context

of economics and marital jealousy (8317–9648,

13845–86) and uses the castration of Saturn as a

metaphor for the separation of sign and meaning

(5505–11; 6898–7154).


Tiers Livre de Pantagruel’(Geneva: Droz, 1997); Jen-

nifer Monahan, “Reading the Rose in the Early Ren-

aissance,” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at

Berkeley, 2000).

Jennifer Monahan

GRACE AND FREE WILL In a Christian

context, grace is defined as the divine gift of un-

merited salvation, while free will (liberum arbi-

trium, libre arbitre) denotes an individual’s un-

constrained ability to accept or reject the saving

message of the Gospel. Controversies opposing

freedom of the will to doctrines such as the bond-

age of the will (servum arbitrium, serf arbitre),

the total depravity of human nature, salvation by

grace alone, determinism, and predestination

have flared up at various times throughout his-

tory and still continue to divide Protestant, Ro-

man Catholic, and Orthodox Christians. At issue

is the extent to which human beings in their

fallen state can, in effect, “take the first step”

toward faith before receiving the gift of divine

grace and then cooperate (synergos) with God in

earning their own salvation.

The major scriptural source of the controversy

is Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, which em-

phasizes the impossibility of attaining salvation

through human effort: “The just shall live by

faith” (1.17), “A man is justified by faith without

the deeds of the law” (3.28), and so on. The Epis-

tle of Saint James, however, seems to offer an-

other vision of salvation: “Even so faith, if it hath

not works, is dead, being alone” (2.17), or “Ye

see then how that by works a man is justified,

and not by faith only” (2.24). It was Augustine

of Hippo’s emphasis on the corruption of human

nature which determined the position of Western

Christianity for over a millennium.

Rabelais would have become familiar with

these issues because Luther’s rereading of Paul

and Augustine launched the Protestant Refor-

mation. In addition, Erasmus and Luther en-

gaged in a bitter polemical exchange opposing

the freedom of the will to the bondage of the

will. As usual, one should not expect from Ra-

belais a coherent, systematic defense of one po-

sition or the other, given the extremely subtle

theological concepts involved and the vernacular

genre that he had chosen as the vehicle for ex-

pressing himself. Indeed, his attitudes seem to

oscillate between optimistic and pessimistic vi-

sions of human nature.

Grandgousier, Gargantua, and Pantagruel

all express their confidence in the value of relig-

ious and secular educational reform as a means

of restraining individual aggression and reform-

ing European society. The way of life adopted

by the Thelemites (G 51–57) is generally cited

as proof that Rabelais had taken the side of the

“optimistic” Erasmus against Luther, “the pessi-

mist”: “Their lives were not ordered and gov-

Gross Medlars 103

erned by laws and statutes and rules, but accord-

ing to their own free will” (“Toute leur vie estoit

employee non par loix, statuz ou reigles, mais

selon leur vouloir et franc arbitre” [GP 124; G

57]). The motto, “Do what you will” (“Fay ce

que vouldras”) seems to indicate a large measure

of confidence in human potential for choosing

good over evil. Finally, the principles of Pan-

tagruelisme (3BK 2) offer a means of intelli-

gently cultivating human happiness.

Rabelais often evokes the catastrophic poten-

tial of humanity’s franc arbitre. When describing

Picrochole’s “oultraiges” and “cholere tyran-

nique,” Grandgousier laments that “our eternal

Lord has consigned Picrochole to the commands

of his own free will, his own sense of what is

right and just, and . . . he can only continue in his

wicked ways because he is not continually

guided by God’s good grace” (G 29). Elsewhere,

humanity is depicted as utterly worthless without

God’s active help: “Isn’t it simply a recognition

of our one and only source of everything worth

having? Isn’t it simply to declare that we all of

us depend on His kindness, that without Him

there is nothing, nothing is worth anything, noth-

ing can happen, if His holy grace isn’t instilled

in us?” (GP 322; 3BK 30).

The dark side of the human condition plays an

increasingly important role in Rabelais’s last two

books. In spite of his numerous gifts, Panurge

has fallen totally under the power of “the evil

spirit” (l’esprit maling [3BK 7, 19]). And while

the consultations with various “experts” are cer-

tainly amusing, they also reveal the inability of

human beings to find any real certainty if left to

their own devices. Finally, the voyage through

the archipelago of the Fourth Book reveals a

succession of creatures intent upon inventing rea-

sons to hate and, ideally, destroy their neighbors,

thereby confirming for some readers the univer-

sal depravity of human beings (and Andouilles).

Readings: Roland H. Bainton, Erasmus of Chris-

tendom (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1969); Edmund

J. Campion, Montaigne, Rabelais, and Marot as Read-

ers of Erasmus (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press,

1995); Erasmus, De libero arbitrio (1524) and Luther,

De servo arbitrio (1525), in Luther and Erasmus: Free

Will and Salvation, trans. E. Gordon Rupp and Philip

S. Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969)

and Erasmus. Luther. Discourse on Free Will, ed.

Ernst Winter (New York: Continuum, 2002); Harry J.

McSorley, Luther: Right or Wrong? An Ecumenical

Theological Study of Luther’s Major Work, “The

Bondage of the Will” (New York: Newman Press,

1969).

William H. Huseman

GRANDGOUSIER Devoted husband to Gar-

gamelle and proud father of the great Gargan-

tua, so named by Grandgousier himself when ut-

tering his first words to the newborn in

astonishment over the impressive size of his

mouth and the volume of his voice when de-

manding a drink (G 7). A caring, affectionate

father, Grandgousier attempts to provide the best

for his son in all areas, selecting with care the

colors and quality of clothing, toys and tutors.

Later, during the Picrocholine conflict, Grandg-

ousier stands out as a model of pacifism and di-

plomacy. Before entering war, he attempts to

soften Picrochole’s ire by sending an ambassa-

dor and responding to accusations of theft by of-

fering a shipment of bread (fouaces) as restitu-

tion (G 31–32). When war can no longer be

avoided, Grandgousier reluctantly participates,

treating prisoners such as Tocquedillon with jus-

tice and kindness, going even so far as to give

Tocquedillon a beautiful sword upon his release

(G 46). Grandgousier’s philosophy and manner

of living in all things positively influence Gar-

gantua to become fair and kind in turn, and to

pass on Grandgousier’s legacy of wise living to

his own son, Pantagruel.

Readings: Carla Freccero, Father Figures: Gene-

alogy and Narrative Structure in Rabelais (Ithaca,


Lesa Randall

GROSS MEDLARS (P 1) Literally and figu-

ratively, this seemingly banal fruit represents the

source and origin of the Chronicques pantagrue-

lines. The narrator tells us that the blood spilled

by Cain’s slaying of his brother Abel—the year

of which is determined by the Druid, that is, pa-

gan, way of measuring time—had rendered the

soil so fertile as to create an abundance of fruit,

particularly said medlars. That year was hence-

forth known as the “year of the gross medlars.”

Anyone eating that invigorating fruit experienced

curious swelling of body parts, and some even

104 Grotesque Realism

turned into giants, which created the race from

which Gargantua and Pantagruel descended.

The importance of the “mixture” seems even

consciously inscribed in the choice of the French

term mesles (medlar) instead of the regular nefle

as well as in the utter temporal and cosmological

confusion that marks the “year of the gross med-

lars,” culminating in the “week of the three

Thursdays” in “October or September,” which

sees the sun and the moon deviating from their

respective courses. Paradoxically enough, as is

often the case in Rabelais, such disturbing fac-

tors, incorporated into this burlesque rewriting of

the Fall, are nullified by the positive result: the

creation of the race of the giants. After all, they

are responsible for saving Noah’s Ark, and now—

in the Christlike figure of Pantagruel, as has been

argued—they have returned to redeem human-

kind once again. In this context, we must not

forget that they are the product of the exact op-

posite of the barrenness that followed the biblical

account of the fratricide; the ensuing upheaval

and confusion could thus be seen to represent a

symbol of revolt against received truths with

Pantagruel as a cleansing force. This ingenious

blending and rewriting of biblical (Genesis) and

pagan history, of realism and fantasy (Jean Le-

maire de Belges’s Illustrations de Gaule has

been mentioned as a likely target) sets the tone

for the entire text.

One should not forget the adjective “gross,”

however, which does not merely indicate the ef-

fect of fertility but also seems to connote the type

of raw, farcical mixture that this first chronicle

will offer. The medlars therefore become the de-

fining element of the book’s narrative structure

as well and end up dominating a text that mixes,

often crudely, humanist learning with farce, often

of an utterly obscene and vulgar nature. In the

Third Book, as the giants’ physical qualities all

but disappear, so do the farce and the “gross

mixture” of the preceding chronicles. Any ob-

scenity or vulgarity will henceforth be expressed

in a more subtle fashion. The gross medlars have

finally given way to a more refined concoction.


lais’s Pantagruel (New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press, 1991); Peter Gilman and Abraham C. Keller,

“The ‘Grosses Mesles’,” ER 29 (1993); Raymond C.

La Charite, “Closure and the Reign of the ‘grosses

mesles’ in Rabelais’s Pantagruel,” Parcours et ren-

contres. Melanges de langue, d’histoire et de littera-

ture francaises offerts a Enea Balmas, vol. 1, ed. Pa-

olo Carile et al. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1993); Marcel

Tetel, “Genese d’une œuvre: Le premier chapitre du

Pantagruel,” Stanford French Review 3 (1979): 41–

52.

Bernd Renner

GROTESQUE REALISM In Mikhail Bakh-

tin the grotesque realism of medieval and Ren-

aissance popular culture is intimately linked to

the representation of the body. According to this

aesthetic, the body, through a topographical dis-

placement from high to low in which the organs

of reproduction and excretion take precedence

over other anatomical parts such as the head, is

constantly represented in its materiality and its

biological functions: birth, alimentation, diges-

tion, defecation, micturition, childbirth, decom-

position, and so on. This insistence on the lower

bodily strata tends to create a fragmented and

incomplete image of the body, highlighting the

openings and protuberances that constitute en-

tries into and exits from this grotesque anatomi-

cal form, which is undifferentiated rather than

individualized. In this so-called collective body,

according to the popular cyclical scheme of time

based on agriculture, putrefaction is synonymous

with the new life to come, for matter is called

upon to recycle itself indefinitely. According to

Bakhtin, scatology and sauciness in Rabelais’s

work are manifestations of grotesque realism re-

flecting the author’s implicit support for a certain

kind of materialism. Thus the emblem of the an-

drogyne given to Gargantua at his birth (G 8)

evokes bicorporality, since the two parts of the

original being constitute a type of “beast with

two backs.” Further, Panurge’s Praise of Cod-

pieces (3BK 8) is really a tribute to the material

immortality of the grotesque body, the celebra-

tion of the “vivid sensation each person has of

belonging to the immortal ‘people,’ creators of

history.”

Quite perceptively, Bakhtin emphasizes the

term grotesque or crotesque, which appears to

have been coined—but with a different mean-

ing—in the Renaissance. The word even appears

in Rabelais’s work (3BK 26 and 5BK 40). In

Grotesque Realism 105

fact, the adjective first appeared in Italian to des-

ignate the rich and fanciful wall decoration of the

Domus Aurea of Nero, rediscovered during the

archaeological excavations of the fifteenth cen-

tury. The term derives from the substantive

grotto, because the famous House of Gold, be-

fore being completely unearthed, was first taken

for a kind of cave. According to the Tresor de

la langue francaise, the first appearance of the

term dates from 1532, which constitutes an ex-

traordinary coincidence: for the first famous

work of Rabelais, the Pantagruel, dates from ex-

actly the same year.

Nonetheless, this grotesque realism rests upon

a postulate that is at the base of Bakhtin’s inter-

pretation. According to Bakhtin, Rabelais is both

an atheist and the partisan of a materialist con-

ception of the world that is closely related to the

rationalism of Padua, a hypothesis that Lucien

Febvre’s work formally refuted. Moreover, it is

impossible to disregard the platonic background

in the emblem of the androgyne, which evokes

the union of the body and soul. Similarly, in the

case of the Praise of Codpieces, it is difficult to

ignore the reaction of Pantagruel, who contends

that the encomium sets forth a “very paradoxical

doctrine” (“doctrine moult paradoxe”), as well as

the fact that for the doctors of the era, including

Rabelais, spermatogenesis in the testicles was

considered an error of Galen, because the sper-

matozoids were believed to be produced in the

heart and only stored in the scrotum.

In reality, the representation of the grotesque

body in Rabelais may be explained by the reha-

bilitation of the body in the Renaissance, which,

even as its dignity was restored, remains subor-

dinate to the mind and soul. Furthermore, gro-

tesque elements in the Gallic physician’s text

doubtless relate to the fact that Rabelais, accord-

ing to the Fifth Book prologue, views himself as

a “riparographe,” that is to say, as a painter of

vile and earthy things. This aesthetic of the ri-

parographe approaches the negative theology of

Dionysius the Pseudo-Aeropagite, according to

which man, unable to know God, must settle for

evoking what he is not. Given the reorientation

of the discourse from God toward man that is

effected by humanism, however, Rabelais’s aes-

thetic of riparography does not represent a neg-

ative theology, but rather a negative “homology”

in the sense of a discourse on man. And because

man, as defined by Pico della Mirandola in his

Oration on the Dignity of Man (Oratio de hom-

inis dignitate), is pure potential, one cannot say

what he is, but only what he is not. Thus, even

if man is a material body who eats, digests, def-

ecates, and copulates, this is only a part of who

and what he is. His ontological truth is elsewhere

and elusive, but grotesque realism suggests it by

default.

Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, L’œuvre de Francois

Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Age et sous

la Renaissance, trans. Andree Robel (1970; Paris: Gal-

limard, coll. “Tel,” 1994); Jean Ceard, “Le fantastique

d’en deca,” Magazine litteraire 319 (1994): 49–51;

Claude La Charite, “Panurge est-il ‘thalamite’ ou the-

lemite? Le style de petit ‘riparographe’: l’apologue

sans morale de l’ane et du roussin,” Actes du colloque

international de Rome: Rabelais le Cinquiesme livre,

ed. Franco Giacone, ER 40 (Geneva: Droz, 2001):

455–66.

Claude La Charite

H

HAUGHTY PARISIAN LADY (HAULTE

DAME DE PARIS) (P 21–22) In an infamous

chapter in the Pantagruel, Rabelais stages the

humiliation of a Parisian noblewoman at the

hands of the hero Pantagruel’s newly acquired

best friend, Panurge (P 21–22, TLF 13–14).

This episode has been the subject of much mod-

ern debate over the question of Rabelais’s atti-

tudes toward women: was the writer a misogy-

nist, or does this episode belong to the

Bakhtinian spirit of Carnival in the undoing of

traditional medieval hierarchies of caste? Might

it instead be a reflection on the character of Pan-

urge, the decidedly antiheroic alter ego of the

near perfect princely giant Pantagruel? As in all

of Rabelais’s work, the difficulty lies in part in

a reader’s ability to situate the position of the

author and determine the reliability of the nar-

rator in this dialogic, polyvocal text. Panurge, a

lover of practical jokes, finds himself locally fa-

mous in Paris for having defeated an English-

man in a debate by signs (P 20). This success

goes to his head, and he endeavors to “venir au

dessus” (to conquer, but literally to come on top

of, or to top) a Parisian noblewoman. She spurns

him, whereupon he resorts to flattery, obscene

wordplay, bribery, and force—all to no avail.

That night, on the eve of a holy feast day when

all the ladies dress splendidly for church, Pan-

urge finds a bitch in heat, kills her, takes an un-

specified part of her, chops it up, and makes of

it a kind of drug, which he then finds occasion,

the next day, to sprinkle on the lady. This causes

all the dogs of Paris (the text specifies more than

six hundred) to be drawn to her and to piss on

her. Panurge invites Pantagruel to observe the

spectacle, which he does with admiration and en-

joyment.

As Wayne Booth famously observed (“Free-

dom of Interpretation”), this episode was tradi-

tionally read as funny, a practical joke played on

a woman to humiliate her for her haughtiness in

spurning the lower-class suitor. However, with

the advent of feminist literary criticism, Booth

goes on to say, the episode gives us pause, for

whereas a class analysis makes of this reversal

of fortune an occasion for triumphant laughter,

an analysis that takes the gendered relation be-

tween the parties into account turns the event into

a kind of sexual assault by proxy. Indeed, the

very beginning of the chapter, in conjunction

with what the reader already knows about the

character of Panurge, suggests that it is the will

to dominate, rather than to seduce, that is at issue

for Panurge. As in the encounter between the

Englishman Thaumaste and Panurge, this

exchange takes the form of a lively repartee—

verbal rather than nonverbal—between the suitor

and the lady who is the object of his affections.

And the lady, remarkably, holds her own, al-

though the third-person narrator of the scene

insinuates from time to time that her stated re-

solve is not as firm as it may seem.

Thus, in a combination parody of two genres,

courtly love and the medieval pastourelle (a de-

bate cum sexual assault often taking place be-

tween a knight and a humble shepherdess), Ra-

belais both critiques and restages the double bind

of early modern sexual politics. On the one hand,

if the lady refuses—which she must also abso-

lutely do—she is haughty and hypocritical; on

the other, if the knight woos, he must absolutely

win, or risk the dignity of his position. That Pan-

urge enacts his revenge on the lady through the

agency of dogs—and commits the murder of a

bitch in heat to do so—demystifies the motives

of seduction, revealing the barely concealed vi-

olence beneath the rhetoric of courtliness. The

substitution of dogs for his person further sug-

gests a failure at the heart of Panurge’s mascu-

Hebrew Language and Culture, References to 107

linity, a failure that must, inevitably, result in vis-

iting humiliation on the object of failed conquest.

Is the episode of the haughty lady of Paris

funny? As is always the case, the answer is, it

depends. As a parodic tour de force intellectually

unveiling the motives of courtly love, on the one

hand, and with equal verve, colloquially invok-

ing the comparison between men and dogs on the

other, yes, the episode is funny. As a familiar

portrait of sexual assault by proxy and the hom-

osocial bonding produced at the expense of

women, no, it is not. But the marvel in this in-

stance is that, between laughter and horror, the

episode’s complexity gives us pause, for we are

able to read both messages—misogynist and

feminist—in the intricacy of Rabelais’s text.

Readings: Wayne Booth, “Freedom of Interpreta-

tion: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criti-

cism,” Critical Inquiry 9 (1982): 45–76; Carla Frec-


‘Haulte dame de Paris’ (Pantagruel, 14),” JMRS 15

(1985): 57–67; Carla Freccero, “The ‘Instance’ of the

Letter: Woman in the Text of Rabelais,” Rabelais’s

Incomparable Book: Essays on His Art, ed. Raymond

C. La Charite (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986).

Carla Freccero

HEBREW LANGUAGE AND CULTURE,

REFERENCES TO The many Hebrew and

Judaic elements to be found in Rabelais’s books

reflect the recent linguistic and metaphysic inter-

est for the study of Hebrew prevalent among hu-

manists in Europe in the sixteenth century. This

novel infatuation with Hebrew is best understood

when the theological climate of the time is kept

in mind. It was a time of spiritual and intellectual

renewal. In this period of definition that was to

lead to the Reformation of the Catholic Church,

dogmas were reexamined, thanks to the labor of

printing and translating done by humanists such

as Erasmus or Lefevre d’Etaples. Christian He-

braists translated and studied the texts of the

kabbala, and by giving these mystical Jewish

texts a Neoplatonic twist, found perspectives that

corroborated some of the Christian dogmas. In

that period of openness and optimism of the early

part of the sixteenth century, Francis I commis-

sioned Jean Thenaud’s Traite de Cabale and

established the College de Lecteurs Royaux,

where Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, the three noble

languages, were taught.

Besides the fascination for the kabbala, there

was great interest in the Hebrew language itself,

which was thought to be a purer, pre-babelian

language, more sacred and ancient than Greek

and Latin. It was a language inspired by God.

Whoever knew Hebrew could understand the

world and the correspondences that ruled crea-

tion.

In this spirit, the letter written by Gargantua

to Pantagruel (P 8) exhorts the young prince,

not once but three times, to study Hebrew and

Chaldean, and to read the Talmudist and kabbal-

ist texts. This eloquent admonishment is even-

tually concretized in the Hebraic Library of The-

leme.

Rabelais’s own lifelong interest in Hebrew is

apparent in the borrowings from Hebrew to be

found in each of his epic stories. The books are

rich in Hebrew terms and in allusions to the Mas-

soretic work, the lexicon and grammar side of

the Jewish sacred texts. True Hebrew words, of

biblical origin, enrich the text. Such is the tirade

of Panurge begging for a loaf of bread: “Adoni

scholom lecha: im ischar harob hal habdeca, be-

meherah thithen li kikar lehem, cham cathub:

laah al Adonai chonen ral” (P 9). This word-for-

word translation informs the reader of Rabelais’s

proficiency in Hebrew. Other examples of Ra-

belais’s playfulness with Hebrew are interspersed

here and there. Among other things, eight islands

have a name that is either Hebrew or Hebraici-

zed: Ennasin, Cheli, Tohu, Bohu, Farouche,

Ruach, Chaneph, and Ganabin. The name of-

fers generally a linguistic picture of the island:

thus, Ruach, island of the wind, Ganabin, island

of the thieves, and so on. A few, such as Cheli,

Ruach, Tohu, Bohu, and Belima, are instances of

kabbalistic keys with double meaning. Ruach, for

example, is both “wind” and “spirit,” and lends

itself to esoteric interpretation. Testimony to its

author’s predilection for Hebraic sonority, the

text also boasts creations that are only an echo

of true Hebrew words and pure phonic formu-

lations: such are Chalbroth, Sarabroth, Fari-

broth, the litany of giants in Gargantua’s gene-

alogy. This ending in-oth imitates the Hebrew

mark of feminine plural. On that pattern, Rabe-

lais created many words that have a Hebraic fla-

108 Hell, Depiction of

vor: falbroth, enthoth, broth, dechoth, endoth,

moth, voldemoth, diavoloth, doth. Yet others

have a masculine resonance: barildim, elmim, en-

souim, alkatim, nim, mnarbothim. A form like

Ennasin, coined on the pattern of the island of

Ganabin, is actually a hybrid form of the French

(en)naz, grafted on an Hebraic suffix. The form

P.N.T.G.R.L. is a counterfeit of Hebraic writing

in its consonantal form; that is, it is not vocalized

by the Massoretic system. Finally, let’s note that

Hebrew is a good cover for a few malicious ob-

scenities: Thacor are hemorrhoids; Farouche, a

corruption of Pheresh, is the island of excrement.

The eighty some words that are, or sound as

if they are, Hebrew, convince the reader of the

author’s affinity for the mother tongue. Many of

the words point to the character of Moses, who

is in turn in Rabelais’s fiction a solemn and

proud figure, a valiant captain (4BK ded.), an

inspiring political leader (4BK 37), a mystical

master (4BK 56), a philosopher and writer (3BK

8; 4BK 33), or a rigorous legislator (3BK 7, 16;

4BK 49).

Readings: Katia Campbell, “Notes sur l’hebreu de

Rabelais: La rencontre avec Panurge (Pantagruel,

chap. 9),” ER 25 (1991): 95–105; Marie Holban, “Au-

tour de Jean Thenaud et de Frere Jean des Enton-

neurs,” ER 9 (1971): 49–65; David Morris, “The Place

of Jewish Law and Tradition in the Work of Francois

Rabelais,” ER 15 (1963); Francois Secret, Les Kab-

balistes chretiens a la Renaissance (Paris: Dunod,

1964).

Katia Campbell

HELL, DEPICTION OF In chapter 30 of

Pantagruel, in the course of a battle between

Pantagruel’s army and the forces of the evil

Loup Garou, Pantagruel’s companion Episte-

mon dies after having his throat cut. Panurge per-

forms alchemy-cum-surgery after finding Epis-

temon lying with his bloody head in his arms.

Thus resurrected, Epistemon describes his stay

“en enfer” and in the “Champs Elisees” (OC 322).

Below the ground, Epistemon encounters a

mix of historical and legendary figures from clas-

sical, Christian, and specifically French cultures,

including Alexander the Great, Themistocles,

Aeneas, Odysseus, Octavian, Huon de Bordeaux,

Lancelot du Lac, Pierre Pathelin, and several

mostly Renaissance popes. As Mireille Huchon

points out, the inhabitants of Rabelais’s under-

world vary considerably in different editions of

Pantagruel. Although most of these modifica-

tions involve additions of figures from Greco-

Roman antiquity, by 1534, “Rabelais suppressed

everything that might directly touch the French

Crown” by removing Charlemagne, Pharamond,

Pepin, and the twelve peers of France from the

scene (OC 1328). Medieval chivalric heroes with

a less sacred place in French mythology remain,

however, such as “Ogier le Dannoys,” “Jan de

Paris,” and “les quatre filz Aymon” (324).

Epistemon’s descent is not represented as part

of some larger epic design, as are Odysseus’s and

Aeneas’s trips to the underworld. Epistemon is

not the hero of Pantagruel, and his experience

here does nothing to move the main narrative

toward its climax in Pantagruel’s final victory

over Loup Garou’s forces. Moreover, unlike

Odysseus or Aeneas, Epistemon’s passage into

the underworld leaves his body behind. Episte-

mon himself summarizes the conditions in the

world below in terms that evoke the Christian

afterlife: the last (here, the philosophers) are

made first, and the mighty are made meek.

This postmortem reversal of earthly fortunes

has a well-known classical precedent in Lucian’s

Menippus, and Epistemon’s vision ultimately

bears little resemblance to medieval Christian de-

pictions of Hell. However undesirable it may

seem to spend one’s afterlife as, say, a ratcatcher,

as Pope Alexander VI is consigned to do here,

nobody suffers the harrowing torments of

Dante’s Inferno in Rabelais’s underworld. Nor,

moreover, is there any sense that the labors of

those obliged to do menial tasks in the afterlife

purge or purify the soul. Rather, the upside-down

world that Epistemon encounters appears to be

remarkable primarily for its entertainment value:

Epistemon says he is a bit sorry that Panurge

brought him back from among the damned so

quickly, “for it was singularly entertaining to see

them” (“car je prenois (dist il) un singulier pas-

setemps a les veoir” [322]).

In his groundbreaking work on religious belief

in sixteenth-century France, Lucien Febvre in-

sisted that Rabelais’s novel should not be taken

as blasphemous and that this episode in particular

should rather be read as a parody of popular texts

like the Quatre fils Aymon and the Calendrier des

Henry II 109

bergers. More recently, Edwin Duval has devel-

oped a sustained, systematic analysis of Rabe-

lais’s work that attributes a thoroughly Christian

framework to the Pantagruel series. Thus, Epis-

temon’s focus on the sheer pleasure to be had

from observing specific figures from history and

mythology in ridiculous situations exists along-

side Pantagruel’s concern with the more abstract

question of the wages of mortal sin. “Keep these

fine stories for another time,” Pantagruel inter-

rupts his companion’s report; “Just tell us how

the usurers are treated” (326). It would, of

course, be a mistake to separate completely Ep-

istemon’s and Pantagruel’s respective approaches

to a hermeneutics of Hell; chez Rabelais, moral

reflection and good storytelling are inextricably

intertwined.



1991); Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the

Sixteenth Century. The Religion of Rabelais, trans. Be-

atrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1982); Mireille Huchan, Oeuvres completes

(Paris: Gallimard, 1994, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade se-

ries).

Andrea Frisch

HENRY II (1519–59) The second son of

Francis I and king of France from 1547 until his

death from a jousting wound in 1559. Although

little is known with certainty about Rabelais’s

dealings with the second Valois king, whose

reign began during the Gallic physician’s exile

in Metz and just prior to the publication of the

embattled 1548 edition of the Fourth Book,

there is no doubt that he actively sought the mon-

arch’s favor to offset the Sorbonne’s efforts at

censorship. In 1549, while in Italy under the

protection of Jean du Bellay, Rabelais penned La

Sciomachie in honor of the birth of Henry’s

short-lived son, Louis of Orleans; and in the ded-

ication to Odet de Coligny, cardinal of Chatillon,

that begins the 1552 edition of the Fourth Book,

the author reminds readers that the king himself,

described as virtuous and “blessed by heaven,”

has approved his writings by granting the cardi-

nal a ten-year royal privilege for their publica-

tion.

Whether Henry, better known for his athletic

prowess than his scholarly pursuits, had read the

chronicles is uncertain. Clearly, however, Rabe-

lais was fortunate to have well-connected friends

willing to petition the monarch on his behalf, for

the king was by no means a partisan of intellec-

tual freedom, at least in his own country. Build-

ing upon his father’s growing opposition to the

Reform following the Affair of the Placards,

Henry launched his own crackdown on heretics

in 1547 by instituting the Chambre Ardente

(“Burning Chamber”) as a separate chamber of

Parlement. True, the French king both supported

and enlisted the aid of infidels and heretics

abroad, forming alliances with Germany’s Lu-

theran princes, English Protestants, and Turks in

opposition to fellow Catholics such as Charles

V. Apparently, Henry “had even given hope to

the German Lutherans in 1546 that he would

support the Reform” (Baumgartner 1988: 127);

and by the same token, his defiance of the papacy

over control of the French Church is not without

parallels to the English Reformation.

Henry’s willingness to join forces with non-

Catholics abroad, while jockeying for power in

Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries, no doubt

results from a variety of factors, including his

particular hatred for Charles V, the old nemesis

of his father and a key player in Henry’s own

four-year imprisonment in Spain as a child; and

his opportunistic, secular approach to military

strategy and state building reminiscent of Mach-

iavelli’s prince. On the other hand, his excep-

tionally hard-line attitude toward French Reform-

ers, which seems to clash with his policies

abroad, may have stemmed in part from a sense

of guilt over his dealings with infidels and

heretics elsewhere, from the influence of conser-

vative Catholics in France including his mistress

Diane de Poitiers, his adviser Montmorency, and

the powerful Guises, or even from the formulaic

promise to stamp out heresy that figured in his

coronation oath. Most importantly, Henry viewed

religious dissent in political terms, as a threat to

the state, the crown, and his own role as head of

the Gallican Church. Far from unifying France,

strengthening the monarchy, or promoting do-

mestic tranquility in the long term, however, the

policy of repression Henry bequeathed to his son

Henry III and his wife Catherine de Medici, who

became regent upon the succession of Charles

IX, set the stage for his country’s longest and

110 Her Trippa

bloodiest civil conflict—the Wars of Religion

that effectively put an end to the brilliant French

Renaissance.

Readings: Frederic J. Baumgartner, Henry II. King

of France 1547–1559 (Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 1988); Robert J. Knecht, French Renaissance

Monarchy. Francis I and Henry II, 2nd ed. (London:

Longman, 1996); Ian D. McFarlane, ed., The Entry of

Henry II into Paris 16 June 1549 (Binghamton, NY:

Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1982).


HER TRIPPA An astrologer and occultist,

one of the authorities that Panurge consults in

the Third Book (25), most often identified as a

combination of Trithemius (Steganographia) and

Cornelius Agrippa (De occulta philosophia and

De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarium et ar-

tium). It is Epistemon who suggests this consul-

tation, which seems significant as Her Trippa’s

questionable methods of divination are of the

type that Pantagruel, the usual instigator of the

text’s consultations, would appear to condemn.

The astrologer presents in fact an encyclopedia

of magic erudition that completes and concludes

the series of consultations relying on divination.

We are confronted with the type of elaborate

intellectual farce that has come to represent the

text’s ironic design while evacuating (or at least

discrediting) the physical farce of the first two

books. Her Trippa is the only authority who has

already experienced what Panurge is so fright-

ened of, namely to be cuckolded, as we learn

from the trickster himself at the beginning of

the chapter. The astrologer’s ignorance of this

personal mishap casts an instant doubt on his

abilities as a soothsayer. His verdict, however,

corresponds to all the other verdicts, confirming

that Panurge will indeed be cuckolded, beaten,

and robbed by his future wife. What is more, it

is the most unequivocal verdict, leaving Panurge

without the option of reinterpreting it in his favor

as he is wont to do. In his rage the trickster un-

masks Her Trippa, first insulting him rather vi-

olently and then drawing on a number of prov-

erbs from Erasmus’s Adages, reproaching him

for his lack of self-knowledge. The criticism cul-

minates in what Panurge calls the “first charac-

teristic of philosophy,” the phrase “KNOW

THYSELF,” forming, in capital letters, the center

of the chapter and repeating, essentially, the ad-

vice that could be considered the leitmotif of all

fourteen consultations beginning with Panta-

gruel’s “Ricochet song” (3BK 9). The trickster—

combining biblical and classical sources (the par-

able from the Sermon on the Mount, which is

part of the aforementioned sequence of Adagia

as well as Plutarch’s polypragmon)—essentially

reproaches the occultist for his ability to see the

mote in others’ eyes but not the beam in his own.

Although Panurge seems correct in his quali-

fications of the prognosticator, who, blissfully ig-

norant of his own wife’s adulterous actions, is

nonetheless convinced to be able to predict an-

other man’s marital future, the irony consists in

the fact that the trickster implicitly unmasks him-

self in his ranting, as he and Her Trippa turn out

to be mirror images as models of philautia, un-

able to detect in themselves what they so easily

recognize in others. Furthermore, both of them

adhere to the illusion that univocal solutions can

be provided to inherently ambivalent problems.

In this way the trickster’s severe criticism of the

occultist proves to be a dismantling of blind ad-

herence to univocal models of thought expressed

through Panurge’s subtle unconscious self-

satirization, a technique that illustrates the Third

Book’s new brand of elaborate satire.

Readings: Jean Ceard, La nature et les prodiges

(Geneva: Droz, 1977); Edwin M. Duval, The Design

of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz,

1997); Michael A. Screech, “Girolamo Cardano’s De

Sapientia and the Tiers Livre de Pantagruel,” BHR 25

(1963): 97–110.

Bernd Renner

HERESY Rabelais could easily have been

burned at the stake for his writings. All four

books were considered heretical—that is, dam-

aging to the central teachings of the Catholic

Church—and condemned by the religious au-

thorities in France immediately after they

appeared in print. The Pantagruel was reportedly

censured or at least denounced, in 1533, less than

a year after its publication in Lyon; a re-edition

of Pantagruel and Gargantua, in 1543; the

Third Book, in 1546; and the Fourth Book, in

1552, this time by both religious and civil au-

thorities—the Sorbonne and the Parlement. In

Catholic theology, no crime was more serious

Heresy 111

than heresy, deemed tantamount to murder but

infinitely worse. A murderer ends a mortal life

before its time; a heretic, it was argued, snuffs

out the immortal life of souls by depriving them

of salvation. Spreading errors of faith and false

beliefs, the heretic kills for all eternity. Heretics

were burned at the stake not only to punish evil,

but also to purify and protect the community by

eliminating all traces of an infectious and deadly

pollution.

The modern reader of Rabelais is unlikely to

have such thoughts in mind. Rabelais, however,

was keenly aware of what was at stake in attack-

ing the Church. Not just a few but hundreds of

reform-minded Catholics in France were burned

at the stake between 1523 and 1560 (El Kenz

1997). This practice is alluded to early in Pan-

tagruel, implicitly in the famous “jusques au feu

exclusive” in the prologue (“This I maintain fully

and firmly to any point, short of the stake”), and

explicitly in chapter 5 when Pantagruel on his

tour of French universities stopped at Toulouse

“but did not stay there long when he saw that

they had their professors burnt alive like red-

herrings, [and went away] saying ‘God forbid I

should die such a death.’ ” The professor in ques-

tion, Jean de Cahors, had just been sentenced

(January 1532) to death for having made

heretical statements at a dinner. He was burned

alive on the place Saint-Etienne in Toulouse in

June, four months before Rabelais published

Pantagruel. From 1533 to his death in 1553, Ra-

belais, always on the lookout for safe havens and

protective patrons, was constantly prepared to

flee and did so (Poitou, Chambery, Metz, Rome)

each time one of his books was condemned.

When the Sorbonne condemned the Third Book

immediately after publication in 1546, he left

France for the imperial city of Metz; in the same

year, his sometime colleague and editor in Lyon,

Etienne Dolet, convicted of heresy for having

published portions of the Bible in French, was

hanged and burned in Paris on the Place Maub-

ert. Over the next three years, from 1547 to 1550,

the Paris Parlement issued more than five hun-

dred convictions of heresy, sixty of which carried

the death penalty.

In the sixteenth century, what exactly was

meant by the term heresy? Everyone knew it

meant religious views not sanctioned by the

Church; heresy was the opposite of orthodoxy.

But what was orthodoxy, at a time when so much

had changed and the Church itself spoke of re-

form? In 1543 Francis I issued a royal ordinance

enjoining “inquisitors of the faith to pursue Lu-

therans and heretics as seditious, disruptors of the

public peace, and conspirators against the secu-

rity of the State” (Isambert 818–21). But how

would an inquisitor know who was a “Lutheran,”

and what exactly was a “heretic”?

The Sorbonne provided a precise response to

these questions, included with the Ordinance of

1543. Registered in the Parlement on July 3 and

published in the streets of Paris the following

day, it contains a list of twenty-five Articles of

faith set forth by the dean and doctors of theol-

ogy of the University of Paris assembled at the

demand of the king, “in order briefly to set forth,

in written form, what faithful preachers and doc-

tors of theology must preach and read, and what

other faithful Christians must believe with the

Catholic church” (Isambert in Back 1986: 821).

The list defines orthodoxy concisely (ce qui est

a croire) as understood by the Sorbonne in 1543,

and thus defines heresy as well, by contrast and

implication in some cases, though in others,

heretical doctrines are specified explicitly. Many

of the articles are stated in the form of opposing

imperatives (it is necessary to believe X and not

Y). The Ordinance of 1543 with its Sorbonne ad-

dendum (“What is to be believed, and preached,

concerning the points which have lately fallen

into controversy concerning our Holy Faith and

Religion” [52]) carries, as a royal decree, the

highest judicial authority, and the pronounce-

ments of the Sorbonne doctors carry the highest

doctrinal authority in France. All in all, it would

be hard for the nonspecialist reader of Rabelais

to find a better introduction (or the specialist a

better summary) regarding the question of “her-

esy in the time of Rabelais.”

What is to be believed, and preached, concerning

the points which have lately fallen into controversy

concerning our Holy Faith and Religion (52).

1. It is necessary to believe, with certain and firm

Faith, that Baptism is necessary for everyone

for their Salvation, even for small children, and

that by Baptism is conferred the Grace of the

Holy Spirit.

112 Heresy

2. By like constancy and firmness of Faith, it is

to be believed that man has his unfettered and

Free Will, by which he may do Good or Evil;

and by which, even if he be in Mortal Sin, he

may, with the help of God, be restored to

Grace.

3. And it is no less certain that to those who are

of age and capable of Reason, after having

committed Mortal Sin, Penitence is necessary,

which consists in Contrition, Confession that

must be made as a Sacrament verbally to a

Priest, and in the same way Satisfaction.

4. Further, it is to be believed the sinner is in no

way justified by Faith alone, but also by his

Good Works, which are of such necessity that

without them, a man who is capable of Reason

can not obtain Eternal Life.

5. Each and every Christian is required to believe

firmly that in the act of Consecration at the

Altar, the bread and the wine are converted to

the true body and blood of Jesus Christ, and

that after the aforementioned Consecration

there remains only the form of the said bread

and wine under which is truly contained the

real Body of Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin

Mary and who suffered on the rood of the

Cross.

6. The Sacrifice of the Mass is of the institution

of Jesus Christ and is useful and profitable for

the living and the dead.

7. The Communion of the Eucharist under the

two signs of bread and wine is not necessary

for the Laity, whence properly and for certain

and just reasons it has long been ordained by

the Church that the aforementioned Lay public

receive Communion only under the form of

bread.

8. And further, the power to consecrate the true

Body of Jesus Christ was given by Him only

to Priests ordained and consecrated according

to the custom and observance of the Church,

and likewise the power to absolve sins in the

sacrament of Penitence.

9. And as well, these Priests truly do consecrate,

even bad Priests or Priests in mortal sin, the

true Body of Jesus Christ, provided it is their

intention to do so.

10. Confirmation and Extreme Unction are two

Sacraments instituted by Jesus Christ, by

which is conferred the Grace of the Holy

Spirit.

11. And it must not be doubted that the Saints, as

much in this mortal life as those in Paradise,

do miracles.

12. It is a holy thing and most pleasing to God, to

pray to the blessed mother of God the Virgin

Mary, and to the Saints in heaven, that they be

advocates and intercessors for us toward God.

13. And for this reason we must not only imitate

and follow these Saints who reign with Jesus

Christ, but honor and pray to them.

14. And for this reason, those who out of devotion

visit churches and other places dedicated to

these Saints, perform holy and religious ac-

tions.

15. If perchance someone, inside or outside of

Church, begins praying directly to the glorious

Virgin Mary, or to some Saint before praying

to God, this is in no way a sin.

16. Nor must there be any doubt that it is indeed

a Good Work to kneel before an image, either

of the crucifix or the Virgin Mary or the other

Saints, to pray to our Lord Jesus Christ and to

the Saints.

17. Further, it is necessary to believe firmly and in

no way to doubt, that there is a Purgatory, in

which the souls there detained are aided by

prayers, fasting, alms, and other Good Works,

so that they be the more speedily delivered

from their pains.

18. Each and every Christian is required to believe

firmly that there is on Earth one universal vis-

ible Church, which cannot err in matters of

Faith and Morals, and which all Christians

must obey in matters of Faith and Morals.

19. And that if anything in the Holy Scriptures

came into controversy or doubt, that it belongs

to this Church to define and determine these

matters.

20. It is equally certain that one must believe many

things that are not expressly and specifically

contained in the Holy Scriptures, things which

must nonetheless be accepted by the tradition

of the Church.

21. By the same certainty of Truth it is necessary

to believe that the power of Excommunication

is by divine right granted without mediation by

Jesus Christ to the Church, and that for this

reason ecclesiastic censures are greatly to be

feared.

22. It is equally certain that a General Council con-

voked in due and legitimate fashion and rep-

resenting the universal Church, cannot err in

Hero 113

determining matters pertaining to Faith and

Morals.

23. And it is no less certain that by divine right

there is a Pope, who is chief Sovereign in the

militant church of Jesus Christ, and that all

Christians must obey him, who has the power

as well to confer Indulgences.

24. The Constitutions of the Church, such as fast-

ing, avoidance of meat, abstinence of the flesh,

among several other things, do truly oblige the

Conscience, in particular to eschew all scandal.

25. Vows and especially monastic and religious

ones, like perpetual abstinence, poverty, and

obedience, are obligations of Conscience.

From two basic principles that were generally ac-

cepted, divine grace and salvation, flowed a se-

ries of bitterly contested issues: free will and pre-

destination, justification (by faith alone or by

faith and good works), the sacraments (their role,

how they were to be observed, but first of all

their number and definition—one of the thorniest

questions being that of the real presence of the

body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist). These

are followed at more remote levels of eschato-

logical and ecclesiological controversy by “con-

stitutions,” observances, doctrines, and dogmas—

the mass, Purgatory, cult of the Virgin and

Saints, status of images, fasting, religious orders,

ultimate and infallible authority of (and in) the

Church, authority of the Pope vis-a-vis the coun-

cils (including the power of the Pope to dispense

indulgences, added seemingly almost as an af-

terthought in no. 23). All these issues were in-

terrelated, complex, fiercely disputed, and in var-

ying degrees mocked or occasionally defended

by Rabelais.

The list covers most of the litigious points

contested by Reformers of the various confes-

sional leanings hinted at behind the scenes of Ra-

belais’s comedy and satire—evangelisme, Lu-

theranism, Calvinism, and others—confronting

the corrupt traditionalism and militant ignorance

that dominated the Church and resisted all at-

tempts at eliminating abuses. It was against the

Church that Rabelais directed his most powerful

and riskiest attacks.

Readings: David El Kenz, Les buchers du roi. La

culture protestante des martyrs 1523–1572 (Seyssel:

Champ Vallon, 1997); Francois Isambert, Recueil ge-

neral des anciennes lois francaises, vol. 12 (Paris:

Plon, 1822–33) in Jonathan Beck, Theatre et propa-

gande aux debuts de la Reforme. Six pieces pole-

miques du recueil La Valliere (Paris/Geneva: Slatkine,

1986).

Jonathan Beck

HERO Rabelais’s first two books are clearly

structured as parodies of the epic poems and leg-

ends of antiquity and of the medieval chansons

de geste and chivalric romances. Allusions to

legendary figures of the past appear throughout

the narrative, and nearly all pagan, biblical, and

medieval heroes (and villains) are either lumped

together in an incongruous genealogy (P 1), con-

demned to a degrading common fate aux Enfers

(P 30), or relegated to the Island of the Ma-

craeons (4BK 25–28). Very few contemporary

readers would question the use of the term mock-

heroic epic as an accurate description of Panta-

gruel and Gargantua, since nearly all of the ma-

jor characteristics of the original models are

present: the hero inherits a prestigious genealogy;

precocious displays of courage, strength, or

intelligence are observed during childhood; his

education or apprenticeship is exceptionally

rapid and foretells future greatness; faithful com-

panions are attracted by his obvious valor and

worth; various initiatory trials test his fitness for

the supreme challenges of warfare and single

combat; and if he is victorious, legitimate polit-

ical order is restored, or a new order is founded,

preparing the way for the future growth of a great

dynasty, city, or empire. Even death in battle

leads to apotheosis and legendary status.

Although the last two books are not structured

according to this model, they do contain epic-

heroic elements. The first chapter of the Third

Book describes how a truly heroic victor should

govern a newly conquered territory, while the

next four chapters expose the demented reason-

ing of the increasingly tyrannical antihero, Pan-

urge. Both the consultations of the Third Book

and the “odyssey” of the Fourth Book recall the

extraordinary voyages and encounters of classi-

cal and medieval adventurers.

Rabelais’s depiction of the hero, however, sys-

tematically calls into question the definition and

value of the concept, as many references are ir-

reverent and disrespectful. Panurge tells Panta-

114 Heroet, Antoine

gruel that he has “more force in [his] teeth and

more brains in [his]ass than Hercules ever had in

his whole body and soul” (P 29; GP 219); vir-

tually all classical and medieval heroes are hu-

miliated in the underworld by “philosophers and

those who had been indigent in this world” (P

30); kings are disparaged as “coquins” and

“veaulx”; Gargantua’s ideal torche-cul or arse-

wipe generates pleasure greater than “the bliss of

all the heroes and demigods, out there on the

Elysian Fields” (G 13).

But many other examples paint a darker pic-

ture. According to Pantagruel (3BK 1), those

consecrated by history as “heroes” had all too

often been insatiable “Demovores” (“devourers

of people”). Although Alexander and Hercules

are praised as examples of wisdom and restraint

after their victories, they are also found in

Grandgousier’s pantheon of antiquated models

whose example Picrochole, Anarche, and many

others have, unfortunately, chosen to follow: “To

imitate the ancients in that way—Hercules, Al-

exander, Hannibal, Scipio, and the Caesars and

all the others—is directly contrary to what the

Bible teaches us. We are each of us ordered to

protect and save and rule and administer our

lands, not angrily to invade the others” (G 46;

GP 105). Fortunately, however, Gargantua and

Pantagruel incarnate a new type of hero, the uto-

pian philosopher king guided by the principles of

Erasmian humanism.

Readings: Elizabeth Chesney, The Countervoyage

of Rabelais and Ariosto: A Comparative Reading of

Two Renaissance Mock Epics (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 1982); Diane Desrosiers-Bonin, Ra-

belais et l’humanisme civil, ER 27 (Geneva: Droz,

1992); Walter Stephens, Giants in Those Days: Folk-

lore, Ancient History, and Nationalism (Lincoln:

University of Nebraska Press, 1989); Marcel Tetel,

“Mock Epic in Rabelais,” Neophilologus, 59 (1975):

157–64.

William H. Huseman

HEROET, ANTOINE (1492?–1568?) Poet

and Neoplatonist, also known as La Maison

Neuve. Little is known of Heroet’s life before

1524 when he became a pensioner of Margue-

rite de Navarre. The queen must have been

pleased with the young poet for he is enrolled as

a “pensionnaire extraordinaire” from 1529 until

1539, just after his appointment in 1538 to four

benefices. One of these was his nomination as

abbot of Cercanceaux. Heroet seems to have

taken his ecclesiastical duties seriously and was

named to three additional offices between 1544

and 1552, including the bishopric of Digne. Such

signs of royal favor would imply an active life

at court, but no records indicate that Heroet took

any part in the religious or political questions of

the day.

When Heroet started writing is uncertain. In

1531 he wrote an Epitaph for Louise de Savoy

in which he expresses ideas about immortality

that M. A. Screech believes are echoed by Ra-

belais the next year in Gargantua’s letter to

Pantagruel. Five years later, Heroet presented

Francis with the Androgyne de Platon, a French

interpretation of Marsilis Ficino’s commentary

on Plato’s Symposium. Heroet is primarily re-

membered, however, for his immensely popular,

poetic exposition of the Platonic doctrine of love

in La parfaicte amye published in 1542. Al-

though Heroet’s renown as a poet is underscored

by praise from Clement Marot, Gaucher de

Sainte-Marthe, Thomas Sebillet, Pierre de Ron-

sard, Joachim du Bellay, and Jacques Peletier du

Mans among others, he wrote nothing more after

1542.

The great success of La parfaicte amye was

due in part to the role it played in the Querelle

des Femmes as an answer to La Borderie’s mi-

sogynistic Amye de court which appeared earlier

the same year. Panurge’s marriage question in

the Third and Fourth Books seems, at least in

part, to be Rabelais’s response to the debate.

Rabelais lists Drouet (or Heroet) among the

model authors cited in the prologue to the Fifth

Book.

Readings: Jules Arnoux, Un precurseur de Ron-

sard: Antoine Heroet, neo-platonicien et poete (Digne:

Chaspoul, 1912); Antoine Heroet, La parfaicte amye,

ed. crit. Christine Hill ( Exeter: University of Exeter,

1981); Michael A. Screech, The Rabelaisian Marriage

(London: Arnold, 1958); Raphael Valery, “Qui etait

Antoine Heroet?” Bulletin d’art et d’histoire de la val-

lee du Loing, 5 (2002): 147–58.

Megan Conway

HIEROGLYPHS Shortly after Gargamelle

gives birth to her son, Grandgousier, her portly

Hieroglyphs 115

husband, and the baby’s father, names the infant

Gargantua. He then orders artisans to bejewel

and dress the child sumptuously in blue and

white, the colors of his own livery. In the ninth

chapter of Gargantua, the chronicler Alcofrybas

explains why blue and white were chosen. Thus

begins a complex reflection on the tension be-

tween the “arbitrary” or “motivated” nature of

language that recalls Plato’s Cratylus and antic-

ipates Ferdinand de Saussure’s pronouncements

on the “nature of the linguistic sign.” Why is it

that blue is “naturally” given to color celestial

things and white to signify “joy, pleasure, de-

lights, and rejoicing?” (G 9). Alcofrybas invokes

a work titled the Blazon of Colors to venture an

answer, but wonders if he ought admire either its

presumption or its stupidity: presumption, for de-

siring to impose one meaning upon each and

every color, “a habit of tyrants, who prefer their

will to take the place of reason, and not wise or

learned people, who please their readers with

their reasons” (G 9); stupidity, for estimating that

for want of valid arguments “the world would

regulate its devices” (G 9) (or mottoes) by im-

posing silly allegations that turn them into re-

buses.

Unlike the “vainglorious” blazoners of his

own era, says Alcofrybas, the wise Egyptians of

Antiquity “wrote letters that they called hiero-

glyphs.” Informed readers could discern “the vir-

tue, property, and nature of the things that were

figured by [the symbols]” (G 9). The Egyptian

magus Horapollo (4th century a.d.), whose work

was translated into Greek in 1505, wrote exten-

sively about the properties of hieroglyphs, the

narrator adds, as did “Poliphile, in his Dream of

Love” (Francesco Colonna’s Dream of Polyphi-

lus). Recently published in Italy (1499) and cel-

ebrated in France for reason of its exquisite

woodcuts in sumptuous typography, Colonna’s

work binds enigma, aura, and erotic delight in a

spiritual journey of self-discovery.

For Rabelais the hieroglyph would be an ide-

ogram, a piece of writing understood through

both its referent (via the indexical function of

itself as sign) and its own form (via its own fig-

ural design). It would aim at an abstraction, a

reflection of higher essence than its own material

substance. It would be of divine language be-

cause it gives way to greater secrets concerning

the nature of the world. It would be a writing

that signifies new forms as much as it transcribes

a meaning.

Yet in the paragraph above the rebus, what

Rabelais has just castigated cannot be detached

entirely from the hieroglyph. The narrator takes

pleasure in enumerating the devices he loathes.

“Homonyms” that cause images to speak silently

or be an embodiment of their name are foolishly

motivated signs. When a sphere (sphere) is an

icon for hope (espoir); bird feathers (peines) sig-

nify hardships (peines); a broken bench (un banc

rompu) bankruptcy (banque roupte); “no” and an

iron corselet (a chain of mail) for non durhabit

(“not a hard garment,” with the bonus of a Latin

pun on “[he] does not have a hard member”); a

bed without a baldachin (lit sans ciel) a licensed

person (licencie), and so forth: Alcofrybas de-

lights in calling the devices “so inept, so taste-

less, so rustic and barbaric” that a “foxtail ought

to be tied to the collar and a mask of cow ma-

nure” molded to the faces of those “who

hereafter want to use them in France after the

restitution of good letters” (21). He proceeds to

list six racier samples.

Where the hieroglyph is an arcane and sacred

writing signifying a higher meaning of abstrac-

tion and reason, the rebus (or device) pulls lan-

guage earthward, into its own materiality and

comic obscenity. In either case printed writing is

shown to be not merely what transcribes speech.

It is not, as Jacques Derrida would argue, prone

to “logocentrism.” The shape and form of writing

require the reader to see and to decipher meaning

along two autonomous tracks: voice, on the one

hand, that the signs approximate, and that cannot

avoid homonymy; visual figures, on the other,

that may or may not be related to what is being

indicated by the writing.

Whence the narrator’s critique of the Blason

des couleurs: it discourages creative work on the

part of readers who can read in different ways

and who can detect or even invent secrets in

printed language through creative scrutiny. Such

is the reader of hieroglyphs, a reader who aspires

to an art of language that is also the hieroglyph

of Gargantua. The chapter on colors and livery

becomes a dialogic poetics: its conflicted relation

with the device and hieroglyph shows how Ra-

belais’s work can be treated in its multivalent and

116 Hippocrates

creative potential (or pot-en-ciel). The exposition

is a skeleton key to Rabelais’s writing. It shows,

too, that the restitution of the language of the

gods is equivalent to procreation and generation

of new forms.

Readings: Jean Ceard and Jean-Claude Margolin,

Rebus de la Renaissance: Des images qui parlent, 2

vols. (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1984); Francois

Rigolot, “Cratylism and Pantagruelism,” Le texte de la

Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1982).

Tom Conley

HIPPOCRATES (c. 460–c. 377 B.C.) Widely

considered the father of medicine, Hippocrates

received training as a member of the guild known

as the Asclepiadae (fifth century b.c.) and wrote

prolifically. Rabelais meditated on numerous

Hippocratic texts in his own course of study and

later published translated editions of three others:

Les aphorismes, La nature de l’homme, and Le

regime des maladies aigues. As a medical stu-

dent and subsequently a practicing doctor in

Lyon, Rabelais relied heavily on Hippocratic in-

ventions, such as the theory of humors and the

notion that maintenance of balance within the hu-

man body was the best means of remaining in

good health. As an author, our doctor pays direct

homage to Hippocrates in the form of twelve ci-

tations in the first four books, but the Greek doc-

tor’s importance to Rabelaisian literary invention

goes much deeper still. Hippocratic thought is at

the very root of the fantastic allegories. With the

pen Rabelais pursues and enhances his medical

practice according to a main Hippocratic tenet

which posits that the effectiveness of a doctor

and his practice of medicine depends on the de-

gree to which he is able to relate to his patient,

to cajole, to reassure, and most importantly, to

entertain him, thereby assuring the presence of a

positive state of mind—a prerequisite to any

cure, if not a powerful cure itself. It is thus that

the verolez et goutteux (syphilitics and gouty) to

whom Alcofrybas addresses his prologues are

promised improvement of their condition if they

partake of his texts—through the powerful pill

of laughter.




1988).

Lesa Randall

HIPPOTHADEE (3BK 30) A theologian con-

sulted by Panurge in the Third Book. Panurge

wishes to marry, but because he is aging and has

himself seduced many other men’s wives, he

fears cuckoldry in his turn. Alternately moved

by wish and fear, he cannot decide for himself,

and much of the book concerns attempts to re-

solve his perplexity. After several failed attempts

to divine what Panurge’s matrimonial fate will in

fact be, Pantagruel arranges for him to take ad-

vice from experts, the theologian Hippothadee, a

doctor, and a philosopher. Hippothadee’s dia-

logue with Panurge is interesting partly for his

views on marriage and partly for Panurge’s re-

actions.

The Third Book is sometimes very hostile to

theologians. The prologue reviles them generally

as evil, hair-splitting pedants. However, Panta-

gruel calls Hippothadee a good theologian, seek-

ing to uphold the true faith by his actions and

teachings (29), and thus accords considerable au-

thority to his advice. The outlook he reveals may

be called broadly “evangelique,” that is, it im-

plies a form of Christianity centered on the Bible

and the individual’s conscience. Although the

evangeliques or evangelicals tended therefore to

attach reduced importance to the priesthood and

the traditions of the Church, they remained Ro-

man Catholics. Unlike the Protestants, they

sought simply to reform the Church moderately

from within. The personal portrait of Hippo-

thadee is appealing. He speaks modestly, and

when Panurge rejects his advice, he does not take

offense but instead explains his meaning at

length and in conciliatory terms (30). Experts

have identified him with various historical fig-

ures, most plausibly the liberal Lutheran, Philipp

Melanchthon (Schwarzerd). If correct, this iden-

tification suggests a considerable degree of per-

sonal respect for Melanchthon. (It appears that

Melanchthon, though a follower of the schis-

matic Martin Luther, was generally esteemed

by French evangeliques.)

Panurge puts his doubts to Hippothadee in two

stages (30). First he asks, “Should I marry?” In-

itially, Hippothadee advises him to seek the an-

Homenaz 117

swer within himself, as it is a matter of self-

knowledge; Panurge has received and discounted

such advice several times already. Hippothadee’s

second answer is to advocate marriage in pref-

erence to unmarried lust, “for it is far better to

marry than to burn in the fire of lust.” The ex-

pression “far better” implies quite a positive view

of marriage, compared with the grudging ap-

proval current among contemporary theologians,

Protestant as well as Catholic. (Hippothadee

does, however, warn against uxoriousness. He

cites approvingly the advice of Saint Paul: “Let

those who are married be as though not mar-

ried.”)

Happy with the advice to marry, Panurge puts

his other question to the theologian: “Shall I be

cuckolded?” Hippothadee replies that he will not,

“God willing.” This latter clause is in fact central

to his outlook. For him, the formula conveys that

without God man has no being, worth, or power.

And it expresses the point, directly relevant to

Panurge’s question, that the success of every hu-

man undertaking depends on God’s will: “All

that we propose [depends] on the dispositions of

His holy will.” For Panurge, this response con-

demns him anew to the uncertainty he has been

seeking to escape: he feels that only if he could

discover the “privy counsel of God,” that is, scru-

tinize the unfathomable secrets of Providence,

could he be reassured. But Hippothadee main-

tains that God, through Scripture, does reveal his

will in these matters, and proceeds to offer Pan-

urge the benefit of biblical precept. His wife will

be virtuous if she is, among other things, a God-

fearing woman who will not readily infringe

God’s commandment against adultery. Similarly,

Hippothadee tells Panurge that he must encour-

age her by living as chastely himself as he ex-

pects her to do. These are obviously general pre-

cepts, and whether or not they work in the

particular case of Panurge and his hypothetical

spouse remains subject to the proviso, “God will-

ing.” Panurge rejects this advice, ostensibly on

the grounds that female virtue, as envisaged by

Hippothadee, no longer exists. The reader may

suspect also that Panurge is not attracted by the

emphasis on his own responsibility to behave vir-

tuously and set a good example.

Panurge’s rejection of his advice presumably

counts as a failure for Hippothadee. The failure

is not, of course, very remarkable in that Panurge

rejects almost all advice in the Third Book. More

importantly, Hippothadee’s failure and his gra-

cious acceptance of it may also be taken to reflect

his own guiding principle, “God willing.”



Michael A. Screech, The Rabelaisian Marriage (Lon-

don: Arnold, 1958).

Ian R. Morrison

HOMENAZ (4BK 49–54) When Pantagruel

and his friends stop off at the Island of the Pap-

imaniacs (L’Isle des Papimanes), they are met

first by the Papimaniacs themselves, whose def-

inition of the Pope, “He who is” (“Celluy qui

est”), parallels the traditional definition of God.

Homenaz, their bishop, encourages the idolatry

of the Pope, “God on Earth” (“Dieu en Terre”),

whom Pantagruel asserts is not visible to human

beings: “We certainly never saw him, and he is

not visible to corporal eyes” (“Oncques, certes

ne le veismes, et n’est visible a oilz corporelz”

[4BK 49]). The bishop of Papimania represents

all that is criticized by the evangelical reform of

the early sixteenth century. Astride his mule,

decked out in green, Homenaz comes equipped

with all the material trappings of the Church:

“croix, banieres, confalons, baldachins, torches,

benoistiers” (49).

Rabelais satirizes the Church’s overemphasis

on objects of ritual through the debasement of

ritual brought about by sexual or scatological

wordplay. In response to Homenaz’s suggestion

that they confess and fast for three days before

contemplating the real, authentic copy of the De-

cretals, Panurge responds with an obscene pun:

“De cons fesser, respondit Panurge, tres bien,

nous consentons” (“To cuntfess, replied Panurge,

very well, we agree” [4BK 49]).

Having attended mass, Homenaz unveils the

portrait of the Pope and asks Pantagruel to iden-

tify him. Pantagruel does so by calling attention

to the rich exterior symbols of the Pope, not to

the serenity of his gaze and the humility of his

posture: “I recognize him by his tiara, his robe,

the ratchet, and his slippers” (50). According to

Christian evangelism as set forth by Erasmus,

Rome adorns its cardinals and pope at the ex-

pense of the faithful flock. Homenaz and the Pap-

118 Homer

imaniacs await the Pope, as Christians await the

second coming of Christ: “This is the image of

that God of goodness on earth, whose coming

we devoutly await and whom we hope one day

to see in this country” (50). Homenaz’s reverence

for even the painted image of the Pope, and his

marvel that members of Pantagruel’s group have

actually seen the Pope, lead to a discussion of

the Church’s bellicose actions against all who

rebel against the papal abuse of power, “against

them alone making cruel and treacherous war”

(“eulx seulz guerre faire felonne et tres cruelle”).

By his respect for the Pope’s abuse of power

in fighting heretics, rebels, and Protestants, as

well as princes who support them, Homenaz and

the Church represent the spirit of anticaritas—

those forces that try to bend the spirit of Chris-

tians through fear and force, symbolized in the

articles of canon law detailed in the Decretals

rather than through acts of faith, hope, and char-

ity (Duval 73–74) (see Decretals; Eulogy, Sa-

tirical).

Reading: Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s

Quart Livre de Pantagruel, ER 36 (Geneva: Droz,

1998).


HOMER Simply as a linguistic entity, the

Rabelaisian chronicles are, of course, epic, and

in more ways than one. They are epic in terms

of their sheer size, semantic richness, and nar-

rative scope: Rabelais’s prolixity, the triumph, in

his work, rhetorically speaking, of amplificatio,

digressio, and copia, make him a truly epic au-

thor in the Homeric sense. The tendency toward

verbal superabundance in the Chroniques, and

the importance above all of the list (for example,

the catalog of Saint-Victor, the fatras des plai-

doyers, or nonsensical arguments of Baisecul

and Humevesne, the Iliadic catalogue of ships,

etc.) as the distinctive feature of Rabelaisian

prose, arguably make this work the most Ho-

meric of early modern artifacts in France—com-

pared to, say, Pierre de Ronsard’s ill-conceived

and ill-fated Franciade. (The Bible, it goes

without saying, has a more immediate bearing on

Rabelaisian style, but in this sense the Bible can

be considered an epic work.)

To the extent that Rabelais’s Chroniques rep-

resent an attack on the Faculty of Arts and me-

dieval scholasticism and seek to promote the

new humanism, we are authorized to investigate

Rabelais’s debt, more specifically, to the Greco-

Roman epic: above all to Homer and Virgil. It

should be stated at the outset that other classical

authors are more influential: Plato, Cicero, Plu-

tarch, Lucian, and Horace first and foremost

come to mind. Rabelais knew these authors (or,

more precisely, knew what others knew about

them) better than he knew Homer. What role,

then, do Homer and Homeric epic play in the

Chroniques?

Consider, first, Gargantua’s oft-cited letter to

Pantagruel (P 8), the topos par excellence of

Rabelais’s humanistic message. The first tenet of

this new studia humanitatis is the learning of

Greek and Latin. The primacy of classical liter-

ature advocated in this letter represents, in itself,

a significant departure, it has been pointed out,

from the medieval orbis doctrinarum that Rabe-

lais is contesting. But note that Homer himself is

nowhere explicitly referred to in this document.

The omission is significant. There are countless

references to Homer in the Chroniques, but these

references may be as much signs of what Rabe-

lais knows as what he does not know; indices of

cultural distance as of proximity. Are these ref-

erences allusions, echoes, arguments? The ques-

tion is one that Rabelais himself anticipates, and

it goes to the very question of Rabelais’s seman-

tic and semiotic instability—the difficulty read-

ers have had, over the centuries, in pinning him

down.

Thus, the most significant reference to Homer

in the Chroniques is precisely the one that ex-

plicitly alerts us to the dangers of ascribing to

that reference any particular significance. The

Homeric allusion occurs in the preface to Gar-

gantua, the “Prologe de l’Auteur,” where Rabe-

lais promises his readers, in the narrative upon

which they are about to embark, a miraculous

and therapeutic truth—a kind of truth precisely

parallel to that offered by Homer in his epic

proemia, a truth in Homer guaranteed by the con-

nection between the poet and the Muse (and thus,

by extension, Zeus himself, author of all plots).

But a moment later Rabelais warns us against

squeezing too much message out of this text’s

“substantificque moelle” or marrow, comparing

us to Homer’s overzealous allegorizers, those

Homer 119

critics who read outlandish and extraneous mes-

sages in the work of the epic poet. In other

words, to read Rabelais as a Homericist has its

dangers. There is no question that Rabelais com-

pares himself to Homer here—but how seriously

and how far should we take that comparison?

Rabelais does not tell us.

What Rabelais does point to in this passage,

however, is his identity as a pasticheur. Static

reverence (or reference) to any one particular au-

thor is precisely the kind of scholastic learning

Rabelais is attempting to combat. Where, we

might ask, is Rabelais getting his Homer from?

Mostly from second- and third-hand sources,

such as Plutarch and Erasmus’s Adages. Anyone

insisting on the link between Homer and Rabe-

lais must take into account cautionary passages

such as the one found in chapter 24 of the Third

Book. Epistemon has lost patience with Pan-

urge who, we know, has vowed not to marry

until his doubts regarding fidelity are resolved.

Epistemon compares Panurge’s vow to one made

by a Spanish knight and recorded in a fifteenth-

century chronicle on the Hundred Years’ War by

one Enguerrard de Monstrelet. The reference al-

lows Rabelais, in one of his typical digressions,

to compare his work implicitly to Monstrelet’s,

a work that thereby becomes a kind of image of

the very work we are reading, the Third Book.

Rabelais’s reading of Enguerrard (and by exten-

sion Epistemon’s reading of Panurge’s vow) re-

lies on a line from Horace, taken from Erasmus,

parturiunt montes (“mountains giving birth” . . .

ultimately to mere mice), on epic ambitions giv-

ing rise to less than epic results. The scene is

significant for our purposes here because the Ho-

ratian passage to which Rabelais alludes here ex-

plicitly refers to Homer as the ultimate epic

model, in which ambition is matched by creation.

Two important and contradictory messages

seem to be delivered in this scene. First, Rabelais

is once again comparing himself to Homer. But

it is just as clear that Rabelais, by way of Horace,

Erasmus, and Enguerrard, is mocking that very

comparison. Rabelais appears to be announcing

that he is writing precisely the kind of epic Hor-

ace tells us not to write—and that he knows this.

One must remember then that what might be im-

portant in a discussion of Rabelais as Homericist

is as much his departure from Homeric motifs

and techniques as his adherence to them.

Far too many Homeric commonplaces occur

for us to address them in even a cursory fashion.

Let us skip over Rabelais’s manipulation of Il-

iadic war scenes, Paris as Homeric polis, the fo-

cus on the role of the journey as perhaps the most

significant Homeric topos in the Chroniques.

This is obvious in the last three of the Chro-

niques, which constitute a maritime epic, like

Homer’s Odyssey. Elsewhere, of course, Rabe-

lais’s narrative is everywhere crisscrossed by

journeys—such as the journey, in Pantagruel,

into Pantagruel’s mouth. But it is just as obvious

that these are also anti-Homeric journeys. Con-

sider the fact, for example, that the Third Book

ends—rather than begins—with Panurge’s mar-

itime quest: a most un-Homeric poetic structure.

Consider, too, that Panurge’s journey is

prompted by a skeptical inquiry into the nature

of marriage and the possibility of fidelity, while

Odysseus’s journey is, in simple terms, a journey

back to the arms of a faithful wife! The Third

Book, along with the Fourth Book and the Fifth

Book, is therefore more precisely an anti-

Odyssey than an Odyssey.

Panurge, it should be clear by now, is in many

ways the most Odyssean of Rabelaisian figures.

Panurge, like Odysseus, is a trickster and a trav-

eler, a pragmatist and a polyglot. This is shown

in our very first encounter with him in Panta-

gruel 9, where Panurge’s linguistic tour de force,

his request for food in several different lan-

guages, in fact defers the completion of that re-

quest. As this last scene suggests, Panurge, like

Odysseus, is a very human proponent of the pri-

macy of hunger, of the appetitive force.

Note that in chapter 13 of the Third Book, Pan-

urge’s dreams as a potential guide for his journey

are compared to Homer’s gates of ivory and horn

through which true and false dreams pass (Od-

yssey 19.563; see also Aeneid 6.893, although

Rabelais’s reference, we are not surprised, is

taken from Macrobius). The passage, like its Ho-

meric and Virgilian precedents, is one that leaves

us—and Panurge—more, not less, uncertain

about how to go about seeking truth and how to

go about guaranteeing that truth. Panurge’s jour-

ney, we know, is motivated by a desire to find

that truth, to arrive at a stable and fixed propo-

120 Hotel-Dieu de Lyon

sition. But surely it is the ultimate aim of Ra-

belais’s entire epic project to undermine the pos-

sibility of such a journey and such a destination.

The Dive Bouteille, with which Panurge’s quest

ends in the Fifth Book, does not give us an an-

swer; rather, it tells us to keep searching for one

and to delight in that very process. And thus we

conclude with that most enigmatic and seductive

of seascapes in the Rabelaisian odyssey, the ep-

isode of the Frozen Words in the Fourth Book

55–56. The scene points simultaneously to the

possibility of language as something stable,

while reminding us that, ultimately the semiotic

world must remain, as fluid and as treacherous

as the ocean. In the Fourth Book 55, Panurge

remembers that Aristotle “claims that Homer’s

words flutter and fly, alive and moving” (“main-

tient les parolles de Homere estre voligeantes,

volantes, moventes, et par consequent animees”).

Perhaps that is precisely how we should regard

Rabelais’s words.

Readings: Terence Cave, “Panurge and Odysseus,”

Myth and Legend in French Literature, ed. Keith As-

pley, David Bellos, Peter Sharratt (London: Modern

Humanities Research Association, 1982) 47–50; Ger-

ard Defaux, “Le curieux, le glorieux et la sagesse du

monde dans la premiere moitie du XVIe siecle,”

French Forum Monographs 34 (Lexington, KY:

French Forum, 1982); Gerard Defaux, “Une recontre

homerique: Panurge noble, peregrin et curieux,” FF

6.2 (1981): 109–122.

Matthew Gumpert

HOTEL-DIEU DE LYON Public hospital

known formally as the “grand hostel Dieu de No-

tre Dame de Pitie du Pont-du-Rhone” where Ra-

belais served as main physician from 1532 to

1534. Evolving from its status as a hospice

whose primary function was to provide suste-

nance and lodging for the sick and destitute, the

Hotel-Dieu had in years prior to Rabelais’s arri-

val obtained municipal funds, thus expanding its

services to include medical treatment, pharma-

ceutical services, and resources for cases of fam-

ine. The main hospital operated under conditions

hardly imaginable today: one vast room was di-

vided in two parts by pillars and contained six

rows of beds, each bed providing space for two

to three patients at a time. A maternity ward was

located in another building, and one other room

was reserved for those suffering from contagious

diseases. For his extremely modest salary of 40

livres per year, Rabelais accepted heavy respon-

sibilities that carried serious risks to his own

health. Among his duties, the most rigorous in-

cluded daily visits to each of the hospital’s 150

to 220 patients, accompanied by a barber-

surgeon to whom he prescribed procedures to be

performed under his supervision. A meager sal-

ary combined with the serious limitations of the

therapeutic and psychological resources available

to cure patients undoubtedly led Rabelais to seek

other means of income as well as other means of

expressing his healing art. Both environment and

patients at the Hotel-Dieu provided ample fodder

for the development of the allegories, not to men-

tion an audience; here was the population of

gouty syphilitics the dear Alcofrybas wished to

heal.




1988).

Lesa Randall

HUMANISM The new learning that began to

emerge in Italy in the mid-fourteenth century

and grew to shape the culture of the Renaissance

for the next 250 years. It was called humanism

because it was based on the studia humanitatis,

or “humanities”—classical languages, rhetoric,

literature, and history, as opposed to the medie-

val disciplines of logic and theology. Whereas

medieval learning tended to focus on abstract and

atemporal truths in a divinely ordered world, hu-

manism was more concerned with the cultural

context, literary form, and historical meaning of

individual texts and works.

The most characteristic aspect of humanism

was its deep-rooted conviction that classical an-

tiquity marked the high point of Western civili-

zation, that this golden age of arts and letters

came to a tragic end with the barbaric invasions

and the fall of Rome, and that the centuries fol-

lowing this calamity were no more than a long

night of barbarism and ignorance—or at best a

continuous process of degeneration during which

the splendors of Greece and Rome were gradu-

ally corrupted beyond recognition. The “gothic”

culture of the “Middle Ages” was thus to be re-

Humanism 121

jected, to make way for a new golden age of arts

and letters modeled on antiquity. The impulse to

return to the pure sources of Western culture (ad

fontes) gave rise to many new disciplines (pale-

ography, textual criticism, archaeology, numis-

matics, historical linguistics), to the rediscovery

of many lost authors and works (e.g., Lucretius

and Cicero’s familiar letters), to the recovery of

the Greek language and the entire extant corpus

of Greek literature which had been utterly lost to

the West since the time of Constantine, and ul-

timately to a new intellectual, artistic, and civic

culture in Europe.

As humanism moved northward, its methods

came to be applied to Judeo-Christian as well as

Greco-Roman antiquity. Christian humanists like

Erasmus turned their attention to the original

Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible, as well as

to the Christian religion as it was originally prac-

ticed by the first Christians of the “Primitive

Church.” This literary, historicizing approach to

Christianity led to the view that the Bible is the

only legitimate authority in matters of religion

and that the “Middle Ages” had brought about

the same corruption in theology and ecclesiology

that it had in arts and letters—views that in turn

gave rise to the Protestant Reformation.

Both forms of humanism found fertile ground

in sixteenth-century France, despite strenuous

opposition from the University of Paris and its

reactionary Faculty of Theology. King Francis I

encouraged the spread of humanism in France by

naming “lecteurs du Roi” to teach the new dis-

ciplines—most notably the “three languages”:

classical Latin, Greek, and Hebrew—without in-

terference from a hostile Sorbonne. Rabelais in

particular was profoundly influenced by this new

learning and was a respectable humanist in his

own right, as is evident from his letters written

in elegant Latin and Greek to figures like Eras-

mus and the great French Hellenist and legal

scholar Guillaume Bude, and from his earliest

publications: editions of Hippocrates and Galen,

of Marliani’s topography of ancient Rome, of a

legal document that Rabelais took to be an an-

cient Roman will. Rabelais’s fictional works in

the vernacular are no less informed by the ide-

ology of humanism, despite their obvious popu-

lar aspects. Gargantua’s famous letter to Pan-

tagruel (P 8) expresses the typical humanist

view of the Middle Ages as a thousand-year pe-

riod of gothic darkness and the Renaissance as a

luminous moment in which ancient disciplines,

languages, and texts have been restored, and the

traditional professional disciplines (law, medi-

cine, and theology) completely reformed. More

revealing is the fact that the humanist education

spelled out in this letter allows Pantagruel to per-

form miracles of justice, to restore the Church to

its original evangelical purity, and to establish a

new Golden Age of peace and harmony in Uto-

pia.

The sequels to Pantagruel are increasingly hu-

manistic in their allusions to history, literature,

and legal, medical, and biblical scholarship, but

at the same time they express a growing skepti-

cism about the regenerative value of pure learn-

ing. In Gargantua, the hero’s education is essen-

tially irrelevant to his later exploits and plays no

role in the defeat of Picrochole or in the aboli-

tion of monasticism in the utopian Abbey of

Theleme. Moreover, the comical narrator of

Gargantua frequently appears to be a learned

fool, as when he argues for the legitimacy of

children of doubtful paternity on the basis of os-

tentatious humanistic medical and legal learning.

The Third Book, by far the most densely erudite

of all Rabelais’s books, goes even further to sug-

gest that no necessary connection exists between

learning and understanding, between knowledge

and wisdom. The examples of Panurge, Epis-

temon, and Bridoye would in fact suggest that

knowledge and wisdom are mutually exclusive,

if the counterexample of Pantagruel did not show

that true wisdom can result only when learning

is tempered by skepticism, irony, and love. This

idea, already expressed in a well-known phrase

in Gargantua’s letter to Pantagruel (“knowledge

without conscience is ruinous to the soul” [“sci-

ence sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’ame”]

P 8), leads ultimately to the conclusion that Ra-

belais, like so many of his contemporaries, came

to view humanism as an effective arm against

ignorance but powerless to cure stupidity or vice.

Readings: Richard Cooper, Rabelais et l’Italie, ER

24, THR, 245 (Geneva: Droz, 1991); Gilbert Gadoffre,

La revolution culturelle dans la France des human-

istes: Guillaume Bude et Francois Ier, Titre courant 8

(Geneva: Droz, 1997); Margaret Mann Phillips, Eras-

mus and the Northern Renaissance, rev. ed. (Wood-

122 Humor

bridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, and Totowa, NJ:

Rowman and Littlefield, 1981); Roberto Weiss, The

Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, 2nd ed.

(Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1988).

Edwin M. Duval

HUMOR Rabelais has frequently been named

as the world’s greatest comic genius. At the very

least he provides abundant fieldwork for the anal-

ysis of humor. His erudite satire, often prose-

cuted under Erasmus’s aegis, promotes the ad-

vancement of humanist learning, the evangelical

reform of the Church, the need for humanity and

brotherhood in politics, and so on, and appeals

most to those privileging the modern and critical

ideas we are encouraged to appreciate, ahead of

the grotesque and vulgar comic sequences we are

invited to enjoy. Those, like Mikhail Bakhtin,

who respond more to the comic episodes, require

a different apparatus. Accordingly, they stress

Rabelais’s identification with the people in terms

of folk rituals whereby the giant-heroes embody

solar or chthonian qualities rather than Christian

ones, connecting less with spiritual and intellec-

tual improvement than with the turning of the

seasons, the defeat of oldtime, and the enjoyment

of material abundance. Both strategies are pos-

sible, nor are they mutually opposed, and behind

the one narratee who delights in the learned fes-

tivitas and the other responding to the bawdy

jokes, there stands a reader who discerns how,

why, and in what measure Rabelais produces his

different comic stimuli. For even the world’s

greatest comic genius can do no more than this.

Humor is not humor until it has generated a re-

sponse, and given the central importance Rabe-

lais accords to freedom, he less than most will

demand to be read in one way only and enjoyed

on but one specific agenda.

The humorous agendas are basically four,

which again may simplify the subject, although

hopefully without coercing a response. The first

agenda concerns the said campaigns in which

Rabelais engaged, using laughter to enhance his

principles in the spirit of Guillaume Bude and

other Renaissance mentors. He derides medieval

scholarship both in its methods and its represen-

tatives, the Sorbonne, for instance. He mocks

ritual prayer, the traffic in indulgences, monas-

ticism, pilgrimage, Roman rather than universal

Catholicism, and its converse, dogmatic Protes-

tantism. He lampoons the emperor Charles V,

implying that his policies are tyrannical, and si-

multaneously he warns his own monarchs against

the crimes that often accompany territorial ex-

pansion.

These satires depend on a set of value systems

that the reader must appreciate and the narratee

must share. For example, unless one knows the

rudiments of the Tridentine controversy, then

many passages of the Fourth Book will be im-

penetrable and their humor dormant. The incon-

gruity fundamental to this value-based satire in-

volves a failure on the part of the target figure,

always to some degree a fool, to satisfy a norm

inherent in the particular system: Homenaz is a

case in point. Such norms might be constructive

learning, responsible government, or the lessons

of the Sermon on the Mount. The effect of the

humor is either to reinforce the value system

within those already accepting it (much of Rab-

elaisian satire is too radical to be seriously in-

tended to convert opponents), or to stress its im-

portance to those initially indifferent to his

campaigns but attracted by the comical way in

which they are prosecuted.

Were Rabelaisian humor reducible to this sin-

gle mechanism, then it would be very staid and

predictable, certainly an unfair criticism even of

his satire. That value-based satire is in fact dou-

bled by a second, equally aggressive pattern, but

it depends on shared loyalties rather than on

shared standards. This mode may be termed clan-

based satire, and it operates first in simple op-

positions like the rivalry between villagers (as at

the start of the Picrocholine War), Rabelais’s nar-

ratorial hostility to the Parisians (as they are

scorned on the arrival of both giants at the city),

or the very battle of the sexes where the same

narrator is unrestrainedly, even depressingly,

prejudiced. Witness the death of Gargamelle to

which he expresses total indifference. Second, it

can ape value-based satire in using for stimulus

the same basic incongruities (for instance, the

stupidity of Thubal Holoferne and Jobelin Bride),

but the emotional charge securing its response is

different. The clan-based satirist is not essentially

a campaigner; hence Rabelais can get away with

attacking those scholastics for a program that

was in fact no longer in use by his time of writ-

Humor 123

ing. Instead he seeks to reinforce a clan-identity,

however trivially determined. Many comic

means can be exercised in this regard, ranging

from such blatant yah-booing as the Parisians’

insulting of Gargantua after Notre Dame to the

fertile and perplexing exchanges at that scholarly

symposium focal within the Third Book.

To counter this approach, as some have, by

saying that Rabelais’s clans are determined by

values is to beg the question of Panurge, a per-

manent clan member of the Pantagruelistes but

one far from embodying their ethics. Moreover,

those who read Rabelais’s latter books as a

chronicle of Panurge’s degeneration are missing

a great opportunity—namely, his lionization as

comic hero, notable in the sheep-trader sequence

of the Fourth Book (see Dindenault). Were it not

possible to convert Panurge into a triumphant

clown, then again Rabelais would be at best a

first-rate moralist but not a comic genius. Of

course, one may target Panurge for his abysmal

failures and join in the self-congratulating com-

pany that scapegoats him, say, at the closing of

the Fourth Book with its practical joke of the

cannonade plus unfortunate aftermath. Con-

versely, one may admire him for deliberately

flouting the values of normal living, be it in his

criminality (robbing the Church), his sexuality

(deflowering the Parisian maidens), his self-

obsession (worrying endlessly over a marriage

surely destined for catastrophe were it ever to

happen), nay his very self-respect (rolling in his

own filth during the storm but never ashamed

for having done so).

Comic antiheroes of this type, Reynard to name

but one, have a deep, even cultic significance that

survives in the court jesters of the Renaissance but

is more striking in the trickster gods of antiquity

and folklore. For want of a better term we may

call their mode knavish parody, and its appeal is

based on the release which their humor grants

from the demands of propriety and responsible

living. We exploit them in a vicarious rebellion

against codes to which we consciously adhere;

meanwhile what takes place in our subconscious

is another matter. Set against them, moreover, is a

second type of parodic figure, also apparent in Ra-

belais, nay even Panurge as his most significant

character, and that is the naıf.

Rather than defying the value systems of

honor, respectability, and so on, the naıve figure

is simply unaware of them, as Gargantua in his

infancy ignores grown-up propriety in eating

from the same bowl as his dogs, and investigat-

ing, with puerile ingenuity, the ideal arse-wipe.

The humor thus created is like that attendant on

a child’s stumbling over a chair or indeed over

a sentence, its appeal being based not on effront-

ery but on simplicity. Our response, say, to

scenes of peasants’ festivals (e.g., G 5) or of chil-

dren’s playtime (e.g., G 11) combines nostalgia

for our own lost innocence with wistfulness at

the inevitable loss of theirs. However, in fiction,

especially Rabelais’s, inevitability is not so de-

termined—hence the success of a simple peasant

against the devil, the incongruous charm of the

ugly Ennasins or the bumbling Andouilles, and

the triumph of the youthful Frere Jean which

eclipses his lack of scholarship or vocational

awareness.

Intellectual approaches can again do little to

vindicate these figures. The reaction they generate

against civilized standards is primarily emotional,

being totemized in the wild man or the noble sav-

age, and perceptible in the clown, the drunk, the

idiot, or the ingenu. In terms of this mode, the

narrator himself may be seen as harmlessly and

endearingly delighted with the preposterous word

lists and other lexical nonsense his author has so

carefully assembled for him.

In Rabelais as in all sophisticated humorists,

these comic modes, along with others detectable

within other approaches (for instance, the mad-

man’s pathological laughter or the ecstatic’s rap-

turous joy), combine and interpenetrate to a de-

gree of complexity, defying reliable predictions

and conclusions. Not to mention their later ad-

ventures, who can insist on the precise modal

balance operating in the very first meeting of

Pantagruel with Panurge? Thus far, the giant

himself has embodied more than one humorous

style: he is still not fully initiated into adult living

(naıve parody once more), yet he is well capable

of enforcing a value-based satire such as that vis-

ited on the Ecolier Limousin. Meanwhile, Pan-

urge combines the comic allure of the naıve out-

sider with the deliberate craziness of the knave

and is arguably scapegoated by the clan he is on

the very point of joining. Surely it is more than

obvious what his needs are, yet they refuse (in

124 Humor

sly mockery of his appearance and manner?) to

look beyond his weird and eccentric words.

Here, as ever in the best comic scenes and sce-

narios, considerable initiative is handed over to

the reader, who will choose which pattern to em-

phasize at a particular juncture and how to en-

hance it: “le rire est le propre de l’homme” in

this sense also. The huge disagreements that Ra-

belais scholarship has endured merely bear tes-

tament to the comic resourcefulness he enjoyed.

Meanwhile, the reader’s joy in exploiting those

resources springs from the execution of a prerog-

ative the author respects in full degree.

Readings: Barbara C. Bowen, Enter Rabelais


1998); Floyd Gray, Rabelais et le comique du discon-

tinu (Paris: Champion, 1994); Daniel Menager, La

Renaissance et le rire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de

France, 1995); Colette Quesnel, Mourir de rire

d’apres et avec Rabelais (Paris: Vrin, 1991); Michael

A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (Lon-

don: Allen Lane, 1997); Marcel Tetel, Etude sur le

comique de Rabelais (Florence: Olschki, 1964); Flor-

ence M. Weinberg, Rabelais et les lecons du rire (Or-

leans: Paradigme, 2000).

John Parkin

I

IDLENESS Rabelais’s works encompass with

an almost encyclopedic breadth the diverse forms

of idleness ranging from contemplation to tennis.

It first emerges in the form of recreation in the

prologue to Pantagruel where Alcofrybas prom-

ises to increase the reader’s “pastimes” by pro-

viding a delightfully entertaining and very useful

sequel to the popular Gargantuan Chronicles (P

prol.). Reading is figured here as a “hobby”—a

conception quickly gaining ground during the

Renaissance, even though the word “loisirs”

would not assume the precise meaning of

“hobby” until the eighteenth century.

When idleness resurfaces in Gargantua, it is

with a clearly humanist meaning. The prologue

recalls Plato’s Symposium while establishing a

context of feasting and conversation that consti-

tute a common backdrop in Gargantua. The pro-

logue and other scenes of conversation around a

table with friends (G 4, 37–39) represent scenes

of leisure in the tradition of sermo convivialis.

At the same time, Rabelaisian banquets often

correspond to religious holidays such as Mardi

Gras (G 4) or may recall the Eucharistic sacrifice

(4BK 1). These scenes point to the close prox-

imity of leisure to the sacred insofar as the Sab-

bath, feasts, and holidays all offer a means for

humanity to participate in the sacred through lei-

sure.

In contrast, if Frere Jean’s contempt for otia

monastica (otia-idleness) is any indication, Ra-

belais seems to put little stock in monastic con-

templation—the highest order of leisure through-

out the Middle Ages but in clear decline during

the Renaissance. Idle monks (“ces ocieux moy-

nes”) suffer in comparison to hard-working peas-

ants, warriors, evangelical preachers, doctors,

and even merchants (G 38). A perpetually busy,

hard-working Benedictine who is also a “bon

compagnon,” Frere Jean is presented as a bur-

lesque alternative to the cloistered contemplative.

“I am never idle” (G 38) serves as the motto of

this proudly anticontemplative monk. Finally,

leisured aristocrats replace cloistered monks as

the privileged inhabitants of the utopian Abbey

of Theleme with which Gargantua concludes.

Rabelais has provided for every aristocratic pas-

time imaginable from the jardin de plaisance and

tennis courts to three-level baths. Most of all,

however, the Thelemites appear to be devoted to

the hunt, long the quintessential aristocratic pas-

time (G 53).

At the heart of the prologue to the Third Book

is the age-old debate pitting the vita activa

against the vita contemplativa. Rabelais bor-

rowed the Diogenes anecdote from Guillaume

Bude and Lucian, but the problem is indeed a

familiar one commonly included in Renaissance

books of sententiae, which consisted of maxims,

aphorisms, and commentaries on life and daily

living. As his compatriots engage in fervent prep-

arations for an impending attack, Diogenes—a

figure for the author but also for the intellectual

in general—first contemplates their actions and

then decides to take part. For he did not wish to

be the only one to appear idle: “pour . . . n’estre

veu seul cessateur et ocieux” (3BK pro.). Some

scholars see in this anecdote a defense of the in-

tellectual’s commitment to the res publica in

keeping with Rabelaisian praise of active virtue.

Other critics instead emphasize a latent irony: the

cynic’s overstated willingness to participate is

belied by the actual merit of his contribution

(his famous tub-rolling does not advance the

Corinthians’ cause in any manifest way), just as

his compatriots’ actions possess an element of

absurdity. (The war they are preparing for is de-

scribed as “ceste insigne fable et tragicque co-

medie.”) In either case, the choice between the

active life and the speculative life is recast as

126 Illustrations

the choice between being an actor in a tragic

farce rather than a spectator—a properly Di-

ogenic decentering of a familiar debate in keep-

ing with the ethos of the Greek cynic.

Readings: Diane Desrosiers-Bonin, Rabelais et

l’humanisme civil (Geneva: Droz, 1992); Marc Fu-

maroli, “Otium, convivium, sermo: La Conversation

comme ‘lieu commun’ des lettres,” Le loisir lettre a

l’age classique, ed. Marc Fumaroli, Philippe-Joseph

Salazar, and Emmanuel Bury (Geneva: Droz, 1996);

Virginia Krause, Idle Pursuits: Literature and ‘Oisiv-

ete’ in the French Renaissance (Newark: Delaware

University Press, 2003); Les loisirs et l’heritage de la

culture classique, ed. J.-M. Andre, J. Dangel, and P.

Demont (Brussels: Latomus, 1996).

Virginia Krause

ILLUSTRATIONS Rabelais’s Pantagrueline

oeuvre has been associated with illustrations

since its initial sixteenth-century publication. Ge-

neric as well as custom woodcuts appear in the

frontispieces of original editions of Rabelais’s

four narratives. It is widely believed that the

famed French Renaissance architect of chateaux,

Philibert de Lorme, sketched the famous Abbey

of Theleme described by Rabelais at the end of

Gargantua. The 1565 Songes drolatiques de

Pantagruel, a collection of 120 engravings de-

picting monstrous, yet whimsical, figures, is at-

tributed to Rabelais himself. Although Rabelais

almost certainly knew nothing of this work pub-

lished thirteen years after his death, its appear-

ance reveals his readers’ interest and indeed

yearning to see depictions of his fanciful stories.

All of Rabelais’s mock epics offer convoluted

narratives, improbable characters, and colorful

vocabulary. As such, they lend themselves to il-

lustration. Illustrators of Rabelais have by and

large relied on the same episodes for their illus-

trations, even though their interpretations may

vary markedly. The eighteenth and early

nineteenth-century illustrators appear to have

been less concerned, or perhaps simply less

taken, with the massive stature of the giants

Gargantua and Pantagruel than they were with

attempting to represent their actions. In a 1741

edition illustrated by Picart, Pantagruel appears

oversized rather than gigantic. Picart is seem-

ingly inconsistent: in the same edition he has cre-

ated a Gargantua twice as tall as in a previous

illustration. Curiously, this inconsistency reflects

Rabelais’s own narrative discrepancies. At times

his episodes emphasize the gigantic, and at others

they downplay it.

The nineteenth century not only repopularized

Rabelais’s work in general but also took interest

in depictions of the giants, their cohorts, and their

environs. Widespread attention among readers

began with the 1854 Bry edition of Rabelais’s

complete works. An edition of fairly low qual-

ity—cheap paper and small type—it was none-

theless very popular due to its illustrations by

Gustave Dore. Dore went on to illustrate the

1873 Garnier edition of Rabelais, expanding the

number of illustrations and, most significantly,

providing a more detailed and reflective style that

both ennobled the giants and made memorable

key episodes. The Dore illustrations now typify

Rabelais’s characters, and it is these which are

most often found in modern-day editions.

Early twentieth-century illustrations vary

greatly. The pen and ink drawings of the 1922

Clouzot edition are in some ways the most ef-

fective in presenting the giants’ presence: by

showing only parts of the giant, the viewer is left

to develop the scale. Hueuenin’s 1937 edition of

Gargantua offers bold expressionist lithographs

of episodes previously neglected by illustrators.

Rabelais’s oeuvre has been a popular choice for

livres-d’artiste editions. Artists such as Clave

and Derain have produced lithographs and wood

engravings for limited editions of Pantagruel

and Gargantua.

Readings: Gustave Dore, illus., Les oeuvres de

Francois Rabelais (Paris: J. Bry aıne, 1854); Gustave

Dore, illus., Les oeuvres de Francois Rabelais, 2 vols.

(Paris: Freres Garnier, 1873); W. J. Strachan, The Art-

ist and the Book in France: The 20th Century Livre

d’artiste (New York: George Wittenborn, 1969).

Margaret Harp

IMITATION AND PARODY The deliberate

recollection of features from ancient or contem-

porary textual models. When attempted for

comic purposes, the imitation is known as “par-

ody.” Imitation was an essential process in all

writings of the Renaissance, itself an imitative

phenomenon as it attempted to reproduce the aes-

thetic and ethical values of antiquity. It was

thought to be the chief means through which as-

Interpretations 127

piring writers could achieve the greatness at-

tained by the classics, such as the epics of Virgil

or Homer, the letters of Cicero, or even more

modern works such as the lyric poetry of Pe-

trarch. Several Renaissance scholars (including

Erasmus, Bembo, and Joachim du Bellay) de-

bated the preferred methods of imitation, and in

so doing they imitated classical theorists such as

Cicero and Quintilian. Whereas some Renais-

sance scholars focused on the imitation of partic-

ular stylistic features, others urged the cultivation

of classical genres as a whole. The most perva-

sive debate on imitation in the Renaissance was

the “Ciceronian quarrel,” which questioned

whether new writers should base their style only

on the single perfect model of Cicero or on a

wider variety of good models. While imitators

hoped to gain glory by echoing the manner of

great writers, those who engaged in parody often

exaggerated the style or otherwise caricatured

their sources in the hopes of generating laughter

among readers who recognized the disparity be-

tween the sublimity of the model and the base-

ness of the imitation. Imitation abounds in the

works of Rabelais. Indeed, Rabelais presents his

first book, Pantagruel, as an explicit imitation or

continuation of a popular contemporary text, the

Grandes Chroniques de Gargantua. Rabelais’s

imitations most often take the form of parodies.

The Pantagruel, Gargantua, and Fourth Book

have been seen as mock epics because their

structure, characters, and events recall the works

of Homer and Virgil.

Other models for Rabelais include medieval

chivalric romances and their Renaissance Italian

continuations. Imitation and parody, particularly

of a stylistic nature, also figure into several in-

dividual episodes. These include P 7 (where the

titles of books found in the Library of Saint-

Victor lampoon those of genuine scholarship on

law, medicine, and religion); P 10–13, P 18, and

G 19 (where the language of scholastic disputa-

tion is spoofed); P 3 (which caricatures the genre

of the deploration funebre); P 8, G 29 and 31,

3BK 48, and 4BK 4 (which mimic the lofty style

of Cicero); P 21–22 (which mock the language

of courtly love and Petrarchism); and 3BK 3–4,

which parody the classical encomium by praising

debt). In addition, several incidents appear to

constitute biblical parodies, including P 2 (on the

“nativity” of Pantagruel), P 30 (on the “resur-

rection” of Epistemon), and P 21–24 (which

may include several parodic references to

Christ’s passion). Finally, even contemporary art

may have provided Rabelais with fodder for im-

itation and parody, as the “torchecul” or arsewipe

episode (G 12) has been seen as a parody of Mi-

chelangelo’s Leda and the Swan.



ford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Raymond Lebegue, “Ra-

belais et la parodie,” BHR 14 (1952): 193–204; Fran-

cois Rigolot, “Leda and the Swan: Rabelais’s Parody

of Michelangelo,” RQ 38 (1985): 688–700; Francois

Rigolot, “Rabelais, Misogyny, and Christian Charity:

Biblical Intertextuality and the Renaissance Crisis of

Exemplarity,” PMLA 109 (1994): 225–37; Marcel Te-

tel, Etude sur le comique de Rabelais (Florence: Ol-

schki, 1964).

JoAnn DellaNeva

INTERPRETATIONS The problematics of

interpretation lie at the very heart of Rabelais’s

narrative fiction. From the outset, the reader is

struck by the number of episodes devoted to an

assortment of enigmatic signs leading to spirited

discussions of their possible meanings. The

whole of Book 3 can be viewed as a set of var-

iations on this same thematic pattern. But it is of

course the celebrated prologue to Gargantua that

raises the issue of interpretation as it applies spe-

cifically to the ensuing narrative, and by exten-

sion to the entire series of Rabelais’s novels. The

fictional narrator of the preceding Pantagruel

had introduced his story as nothing more than an

escapist entertainment whose sole objective was

to provoke laughter. Gargantua, on the other

hand, lays claim (though not without ambiguity)

to an altogether higher purpose. Through a series

of analogies culminating with the memorably ir-

reverent assimilation of the reader with a dog

gnawing on a bone in frenzied search of its sus-

tantificque mouelle or marrow, we are invited to

seek, beyond the work’s frivolous exterior, a

higher, hidden meaning that only a symbolic

reading can hope to uncover. The invitation to

interpret the book a plus hault sens is withdrawn

almost as soon as it is offered, and the prefatory

pages of Gargantua turn out to be as mystifying

as the ensuing pages they are meant to explain.

128 Interpretations

But the seed has been planted, and for the next

four and a half centuries the course of Rabelais

criticism will be marked, to a large extent, by the

attempts of successive generations of readers to

come to terms, in the light of whatever ideology

prevailed at the time, with the political, religious,

and moral truths allegedly embedded in Rabe-

lais’s fictional text.

Not all of Rabelais’s contemporaries were

equally quick to rise to the challenge of the read-

ing strategy outlined in the prologue. The success

of Rabelais’s books upon their publication sug-

gests that the general public was content to take

them at face value and enjoy them first and fore-

most for their verbal exuberance and their comic

invention. Even Montaigne, so perspicacious a

reader on other occasions, ignores in Rabelais the

thinker in favor of the comic writer when he lists

him, somewhat dismissively, among those au-

thors whom he finds to be merely entertaining

(“simplement plaisants”). Only the participants in

the religious struggles ensuing from the spread

of evangelism and the hardening of their respec-

tive positions in the aftermath of the notorious

Affaire des Placards turn their attention to what

they believe to be Rabelais’s religious message.

Reducing the latter to the satire of religious au-

thority and the parody of biblical texts admittedly

pervading the novels, both the upholders of or-

thodoxy and those who call for reforms unex-

pectedly join forces in their vehement denunci-

ation of Rabelais’s religious leanings as

dangerously heretical or downright atheistic.

In the seventeenth century, the religious de-

bates subside in favor of a more literary ap-

proach. When La Bruyere declares much of Ra-

belais’s humor as fit only for the amusement of

the rabble (“la canaille”), he clearly has in mind

the recently defined norms of acceptable behav-

ior and good taste known to his contemporaries

as les bienseances. Above all, when he deplores

the “monstrous assemblage (“monstrueux assem-

blage”) of high seriousness and vulgarity within

the confines of one and the same work and de-

nounces such a juxtaposition of opposites as un-

acceptable to reason, he obviously does so in the

name of the Cartesian rationalism and classical

aesthetics that define the literary sensibility of his

generation. “Extravagant and unintelligible”

(“Extravagant et inintelligible”): Voltaire’s sim-

ilarly negative attitude bears witness to the per-

sistence of an essentially aesthetic reaction to Ra-

belais even in the Age of Enlightenment. Only

in the last years of the century will his work be

admired at last for the audacity of its religious

and political undertones by the French revolu-

tionaries who recognize in Rabelais an illustrious

predecessor in their own struggle for freedom,

equality, and justice.

The critical tide begins to turn. Yet not until

the following generation will Rabelais reach the

full stature of a writer of genius, emerging in the

Romantic imagination—alongside Dante and

Shakespeare—as one of the prophetic figures

guiding humanity at the dawn of the modern era.

Chateaubriand considers him the true founder of

French literature. Michelet finds in his work scin-

tillating glimmers of ultimate truth. Victor Hugo

is awed by the mysterious profundity of his

laughter and the epic grandeur of his vision.

Flaubert rereads him more often than any other

writer. Endowing him with a measure of their

own sensibility, Romantic readers are struck

above all, beyond the laughter and the echoes of

humanistic ideology, by the mythic dimension

and cosmic resonance of his fictional world.

Characteristically intuitive rather than analyti-

cal, the Romantic reaction to Rabelais was fol-

lowed, at the turn of the twentieth century, by

the first scholarly investigation of his work at the

hands of Abel Lefranc. In an early study, Lefranc

had noted that the various stages of the Picro-

choline War at the heart of Gargantua could be

followed, their mock-heroic treatment notwith-

standing, on any sixteenth-century map of the re-

gion surrounding Chinon. Similarly, he believed

he had traced the genesis of the entire episode to

nothing more momentous than a simple quarrel

between Rabelais’s father and one of his father’s

neighbors. Such discoveries reinforced Lefranc’s

conviction that Gargantua–Pantagruel belonged

essentially, despite its stylistic distortions, to the

tradition of realist fiction, as a document rooted

in the social and intellectual life of Rabelais’s

time and providing, in such allegedly serious and

humanistically inspired episodes as those de-

voted to education or to life at Theleme, direct

access to the author’s thought.

Throughout the first half of the century, Ra-

belais’s work continued to be studied from this

Interpretations 129

double perspective of historicity and realism.

This was the case even for Marxist critics for

whom Rabelais’s message was of course populist

rather than humanistic, but whose belief in his-

torical determinism encouraged a similar empha-

sis on meaning rather than form. When textual

analysis at long last found its place in Rabelais

criticism in the early 1960s, the change was

largely due to the influence of the German phi-

lologist Leo Spitzer, who in a virulent article on

“Rabelais et les ‘rabelaisants’ ” had denounced

the Rabelaisants for endlessly dwelling on the

documentary significance of Rabelais’s work at

the expense of its artistic value and stifling the

text under the weight of misplaced erudition.

The immediate effect of Spitzer’s article was

to shift the focus of Rabelais criticism from in-

terpretation to formal analysis. Thus, some of the

most representative studies published in the

1960s, in England and the United States if not

yet in France, deal with such formal aspects as

narrative technique, comic devices, creative

imagination, the particular characteristics of Ra-

belais’s ecriture, and the possibility of detecting

elements of structural unity in what looks at first

glance like a fragmented, unstructured series of

loosely connected episodes. The emphasis on

rhetoric and style in turn leads critics to question

the objectivity of the hitherto accepted distinction

between what is serious in Rabelais’s books and

what is merely playful. Even such pages as Gar-

gantua’s letter to Pantagruel celebrating the

dawn of a new spirit of inquiry after centuries of

intellectual stagnation are shown to bear the

stamp of Rabelais’s fantasy and comic exagger-

ation.

This new awareness of the essential ambiguity

of Rabelais’s text did not prevent more tradi-

tional scholars from pursuing their quest of what

V.-L. Saulnier was to call “the design of Rabe-

lais” (“le dessein de Rabelais”). Saulnier himself

did much to impose the symbolic interpretation

of Rabelais’s first two books as a fictional rep-

resentation of the humanist ideal, and of the

Third and Fourth Books as an allegorical ac-

count of the obstacles in the path of its realiza-

tion. In a series of studies remarkable for the

breadth of their erudition, Michael Screech sees

Rabelais’s adherence to the evangelical move-

ment as a key to various aspects of his thought.

From the same historicist perspective, other

scholars evaluate Rabelais’s debt to Plato and the

Platonic-Hermetic tradition. Still others, outside

the mainstream of academic criticism, investigate

connections between what they take to be Ra-

belais’s secret thought and various forms of es-

oteric initiation.

The publication in 1968 of Mikhail Bakhtin’s

Rabelais and His World in English translation

marks another significant turning point in Rabe-

lais criticism and sets it on a new course in two

somewhat incompatible directions. By insisting

on what Rabelais’s fiction owes to popular cul-

ture and folkloric tradition and by underscoring

the subversive nature of the carnivalesque spirit

permeating the text, Bakhtin’s book encouraged

a second wave of Marxist interpretations in terms

of class struggle and Rabelais’s alleged opposi-

tion to the rise of capitalistic individualism. On

the other hand, Bakhtin’s effort to minimize the

importance of Rabelais’s humanistic message, to-

gether with his view of Rabelais’s novel as a pol-

yphonic text resonating with a concert of voices

from which the author’s own voice was conspic-

uously absent, led such disciples as Michel Beau-

jour to bring out in Le jeu de Rabelais the con-

sequences of Bakhtin’s approach and to question

the legitimacy of seeing in Rabelais’s references

to the political, religious, and other cultural con-

cerns the expression of the author’s ideological

intentions of any kind whatever, rather than

viewing them as elements of a rhetorical game

in the framework of a text whose very essence

lies in its playfulness and its refusal to signify.

This conception of Rabelais’s fiction as a

purely ludic enterprise, however strongly rein-

forced by poststructuralist notions of textuality

and of the self-referential nature of literature, did

not prevent such staunch traditionalists as Mi-

chael Screech and his followers from persisting

in their conviction that a historical and scholarly

approach was the one and only path to valid in-

terpretation. More moderate scholars, such as

Gerard Defaux, continued (and continue) to de-

fend the rights of historical criticism, were it only

as an indispensable precaution against anachro-

nistic misreadings and adventurous claims. Com-

bining thematic and stylistic concerns, language

took center stage in the two following decades,

in the wake of Francois Rigolot’s seminal work,

130 Irony

Les langages de Rabelais. Studies of such as-

pects of the problematique du langage as the re-

lationship between words and things, the relative

status of linguistic signs in the act of communi-

cation, and their alleged inability to signify with-

out ambivalence and ambiguity have stressed Ra-

belais’s uncanny propensity to anticipate many

of the contemporary issues debated within the

context of semiotics and linguistic structuralism.

Articles on the recurring motif of thirst, on the

function of food, on the status of women, and

on the origin of Rabelais’s giants have reexam-

ined these traditional themes from new, often in-

terdisciplinary perspectives. A number of inter-

textual readings have rethought the old questions

of source and influence with a greater awareness

of their subtle complexity. As for the notion of

meaning itself, it too has continued to serve as

an object of critical reflection, though no longer

as the expression of the author’s thought, but

rather, in the light of structuralism and reception

theory, as a subjective and “plural” product of

the act of reading.

Differences in tone rather than substance char-

acterize Rabelais criticism in the most recent

phase of its evolution. The cast of players in the

ongoing debate remains essentially the same, as

does their basic critical stance. Rabelais contin-

ues to be read in historical context by traditional

scholars, and from an increasingly interdiscipli-

nary perspective by critics favoring a more mod-

ern approach informed by new critical method-

ologies. But the near-hostility that had marked

previous polemical confrontations between tra-

ditionalists and innovators seems to have given

way to a new spirit of synthesis and conciliation,

a welcome willingness to moderate the reduc-

tionist intransigence of their earlier positions and

to acknowledge the validity of contrasting points

of view. Critics of postmodernist persuasion now

seem more ready to admit that Rabelais’s text is

not exclusively self-referential but that it is also,

at least to some extent, a representation of the

author’s world. Distrust of authorial intention

and the recent emphasis on ambiguity and poly-

valence of meaning are no longer seen as nec-

essarily justifying the rejection of all attempts at

interpretation. Even the possibility of a sustan-

tificque mouelle or marrow at the core of Rabe-

lais’s work is no longer rejected out of hand, al-

though there is a growing suspicion, among

traditionalists and innovators alike, that it may

not lie in the revelation of any momentous truths

illuminating the mysteries of human existence,

but rather in the Pantagruelistic spirit of toler-

ance, hope, and good-will with which Panurge

and Pantagruel set out on their voyage to the

Oracle of the Divine Bottle, and the ideal reader

on his quest for the moral message of Rabelais’s

book.



Press, 1968); Michel Beaujour, Le jeu de Rabelais:

Essai sur Rabelais (Paris: Editions de l’Herne, 1969);

Francois Rigolot, Les langages de Rabelais, ER 10

(Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1972); Michael Andrew

Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press, 1979); Leo Spitzer, “Rabelais et les ‘rabelais-

ants,’ ” SF 4.12 (September–December): 401–23.

Bruno Braunrot

IRONY Mikhail Bakhtin’s study of the Rab-

elaisian carnivalesque, though limited by its

Marxist perspective, offered a theoretical frame-

work for the study of ironic structures in Rabe-

lais’s works that was not dependent on a reader’s

subjective assessment of authorial intention.

Rather, the text’s own interdiscursive structures

of discourse and counterdiscourse constitute the

paradigm in play in his work of disjunction and

dissociation between elements that reciprocally

undermine or subvert one another. The study of

ironic structures affords an important supplement

to historical scholarship, which, though indispen-

sable, can err in the interpretative process when

it infers meaning from the mere spotting of a

source without reference to how it is functioning

in the text.

Let us look first at some examples of “ironic

structures” and how they function to produce

meaning through the juxtaposition or interaction

between an ideological discourse at the text’s

surface and a counterdiscourse that undercuts it.

At times the reader hears multiple, sometimes

contradictory, voices speaking in Rabelais’s text.

The first and obvious example of an ironic struc-

ture is Rabelais’s use of a fictive narrating per-

sona in the first three books—Alcofrybas Na-

sier—who declares the presence of a new kind

of literary voice addressing a fictive reader. This

Irony 131

voice is dialogic and inaugurates a new role for

the empirical reader of Rabelais’s books. Read-

ing Rabelais is henceforth a dialogic experience,

giving rise to reading as an active and interactive

process. Alcofrybas is an ambiguous persona

who is and is not Rabelais the author, part char-

latan, part fairgrounds mountebank out to gull

the drunk and poxy fictive reader, from whom

real readers dissociate themselves in the process

of teasing out the text’s meanings. Thus, in the

prologue to Gargantua, Alcofrybas sets up am-

bivalent relations between the text and its read-

ers, subjecting them to ironic praise and blame

(“Beuveurs tres illustres, Verolez tres precieux—

Most noble boozers and you my very esteemed

and poxy friends”), proceeding to invite them to

interpret his book in a higher sense, then putting

in question the venerable tradition of allegorical

systems of reading and interpretation. Rabelais

ironizes the tradition of allegorical interpretation,

mocking it, problematizing it, and placing the

reader in the position of having to come to terms

with a text that mocks the reader, mocks itself,

and yet manages to intrigue the reader to figure

out the seriousness that subsists in the shadows

behind the comedy. Indeed, that delicate balance

between earnestness and jest is not the least in-

appropriate definition of irony.

Gargantua, chapter 8, contains a description

of Gargantua’s device or impresa, which is a

perfect example of an ironic image hovering in-

definably between seriousness and jest. Rabelais

describes the “Platonic” Androgyne but modifies

it so that the heads are not Janus-faced but are

turned toward one another—“the beast with two

backs”—and juxtaposes it to the Pauline text

“Charity Seeketh Not Its Own.” The possible in-

tertexts include not only Plato and Saint Paul

but also Ficinian Neoplatonism. The figure and

the Pauline sentence constitute a polysemous

conjunction of incompatible elements, a figure of

Rabelaisian irony itself. Image and text recipro-

cally subvert one another and rather than resolve

into a univocal message, inscribe an ironic image

en abyme of endless unanswered questions and

ambiguities.

Gargantua’s letter on education (P 8) has been

a focus of critical argument with respect to irony.

Long considered as Rabelais’s serious program

for humanistic study, some critics (e.g., Brault,

Defaux, Rigolot) have attempted to read it iron-

ically as a parody of humanist discourse. On the

other hand, the letter is not ironic because it is

not overtly marked as ironic discourse, nor does

it contain semiotic markers referring elsewhere

inside Rabelais’s text. What is ironic is that the

letter in its high seriousness is juxtaposed to its

antithesis, the arrival of Panurge and his meeting

with Pantagruel in chapter 9. This is indeed an

ironic structure, built on oppositions that under-

cut one another. Although the letter inscribes ex-

tratextual associations (e.g., humanist learning,

Latinate diction) and ideological traces (hierar-

chy, legitimate marriage and paternity, estab-

lished religious values, and the obedience of sons

to fathers), the meeting with Panurge is a fic-

tional challenge to the official ideology repre-

sented by the letter. Panurge’s essential role in

Pantagruel is to be the trickster, the carnival-

esque reverser of hierarchies, and, in sum, the

instrument of Rabelais’s challenge to dominant

ideologies, established hierarchies and authori-

ties, the subversive counterdiscourse of the lower

body that is a necessary component of Rabelais’s

comic vision in Pantagruel.

This paradigm of subversion of ideological

discourse is present to a greater or lesser degree

in all four canonical books. In the Third Book,

the prologue, the Praise of Debts, the consulta-

tions with the diviners, and the legal, medical,

and religious authorities, are polyvalent texts sus-

ceptible of being plurally read. For example, the

Praise of Debts must be obliquely read as a sa-

tirical eulogy of a vice it only appears to praise.

In this sense, to condemn Panurge for his vice is

also to condemn contemporary monarchs and no-

blemen for their conspicuous consumption on

credit. At the same time, Panurge’s flights of

rhetoric propose a fantastic vision of universal

exchange and fecundity. The entire episode is

fundamentally ambiguous in that it holds several

contradictory discourses in balance. Pantagruel’s

condemnation of Panurge on the ethical level

does not at all detract from the validity of Pan-

urge’s vision of the cosmic harmony of a world

of borrowing and lending. This duplicitous text

contains what Bakhtin has termed “double-

voiced discourse,” which serves the character

who is speaking and the refracted intention of the

author.

132 Italy

Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, L’oeuvre de Francois

Rabelais et la culture populaire au moyen age et sous

la Renaissance, trans. Andree Robel (Paris: Gallimard,

1970); M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination:

Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Em-

erson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of

Texas Press, 1981); Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s Car-

nival: Text, Context, Metatext (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1990); Jerome Schwartz, Irony and

Ideology: Structures of Subversion in Rabelais (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Jerome Schwartz

ITALY Before his first visit in 1534, Rabelais

was well acquainted with Italy. By 1524 he had

sent the Pope his first request for regularization

of his monastic situation. Much of the legal and

medical erudition he was acquiring was the work

of Italian humanists, disseminated by Italian

printers. Two of his earliest scholarly publi-

cations (1532), the editions of Manardi and Cus-

pidius, draw on this erudition: the Roman legal

texts reproduce earlier Italian editions; the med-

ical text reveals how much he revered the letters

of this Ferrarese doctor; and later editions of his

Hippocrates include material from Manardi’s

pupil Brasavola. Rabelais had also read widely

in Italian vernacular literature, as shown in his

first comic publication of 1532, which shows

knowledge not only of Teofilo Folengo’s mac-

aronic epic but also of novellisti like Masuccio

and probably Boccaccio. His language in Pan-

tagruel already includes numerous Italianisms.

The same book also reveals early evidence of

anti-italianism: he sides with the mos gallicus of

Guillaume Bude and Andre Tiraqueau against

Italian legal commentators; he places several me-

dieval Italian popes in Hell; and the catalogue of

Saint-Victor makes much mockery of Italy and

Rome, her poiltronismus (laziness), her fanfares,

her petarrades (flatulence).

The first short visit of three months in early

1534 gave Rabelais the privileged opportunity to

discover Italy in a diplomatic entourage. He wit-

nessed the unsuccessful attempts of his patron,

Jean du Bellay, to prevent the excommunication

of Henry VIII by the College of Cardinals, and

praised du Bellay’s eloquence in his preface to

Marliani. He participated with du Bellay in ex-

cavating and collecting antiquities, and in meas-

uring the topography of ancient Rome, on which

he planned to write a book. On his return to

Lyon, passing through Florence, Rabelais aban-

doned his own project and instead published an

edition of Marliani’s new Topographia, with cor-

rections based on his own notes and with a na-

tionalistic dedication to du Bellay, in which he

minimizes the novelty of what Italy has revealed

to him.

The elevation of du Bellay to the purple the

following year gave Rabelais the opportunity for

another longer visit to Italy, from July 1535 until

Easter 1536, traveling outwards via Ferrara

(where he probably met Manardi and later Bra-

savola) and by sea to Pesaro. Rabelais and his

patron renewed contact with academic circles in

Rome, notably Paolo Giovio and a group of neo-

Latin poets. Rome proved an ideal observatory

of European politics for Rabelais, news of which

he sent in many letters (of which three survive)

to his religious superior, Geoffroy d’Estissac,

with details about the rivalries of Italian families,

preparations for the visit of Charles V, news

from England and even from the Near East. His

sources are published newsletters and no doubt

the gossip of the embassy, but he does not pass

on any privileged information, and some of his

facts are wrong. He makes much, however, of

any reverses suffered by the imperial camp and

reveals his patriotic leanings. One of his major

concerns is his request for papal absolution from

the crime of apostasy, but he tells d’Estissac

nothing of his tactical errors in this undertaking,

nor of his moves to transfer his religious alle-

giance to du Bellay. Although his patron left

Rome secretly in late February, Rabelais proba-

bly stayed on with the household until mid-April

and was witness to the emperor’s entry to the

city.

Rabelais made a brief visit to Italy in 1538

when he attended the summit meeting in Nice

between the king, Pope, and emperor, before

making a prolonged stay in Piedmont in 1540–

42, in the household of the cardinal’s brother

Guillaume du Bellay, seigneur de Langey.

While it is not known that he had acted as doctor

to Jean in Rome, it is almost certain that he did

so for Guillaume and his wife in Turin. He was

there by the summer of 1540 and stayed until the

winter of 1542, when he accompanied his seri-

Italy 133

ously ill patient to Lyon and witnessed his death

in January 1543, famously described in chapter

21 of the Third Book and chapter 27 of the

Fourth Book. In Turin he had witnessed Lan-

gey’s attempts to make the new province secure

and to relieve famine. This example probably in-

fluenced the account of the fortification of Cor-

inth and of the good government of Dipsodie in

the prologue to the Third Book and chapter 1.

His account of Langey’s military achievements,

Les Stratagemes, was published in Lyon in Latin

and French, although no copy has been traced.

In Turin, Rabelais was in contact with the French

ambassador in Venice, Guillaume Pellicier, with

whom he had been to Rome, and who consulted

him about rare plants and about a difficult legal,

medical, and diplomatic question involving the

minimum duration of pregnancy. He was in con-

tact with the neo-Latin poet and magistrate in

Chambery, Jean de Boyssonne, who wrote po-

ems on the early death of Rabelais’s natural in-

fant son, Theodule, and on the death in Turin of

Langey’s wife (and Rabelais’s patient) Anne de

Crequi. He also attended the degree ceremony in

medicine of his friend Guillaume Bigot at the

University of Turin reopened by Langey.

Rabelais made his final visit to Italy in 1547–

49, once again in the company of Jean du Bellay

and explicitly as his doctor. He participated in

the archeological activities of his patron and as-

sisted him in preparing a festival to celebrate the

birth of Henry II’s second son, Louis, in March

1549. His account of this festival, La Scioma-

chie, was published in Lyon, drawing on the re-

cent royal entry to Lyon and on a contemporary

Florentine newsletter. This important piece of

writing highlights du Bellay’s successful pro-

motion of the French cause in Rome, as well as

Rabelais’s interest in costume, military science,

and banquets. Rabelais returned to France with

his ailing patient in September 1549 but probably

did not return to Rome with him in November

for the conclave. He continued to follow Italian

politics, especially the Gallican crisis of 1551

arising from the Parma wars, as well as growing

French hostility to the Council of Trent. The

Papimanie episode in the Fourth Book reflects

the nationalist mood in France during this crisis,

and the Ringing Island (Isle Sonante) episode

in the Fifth Book reveals a greater hostility to

the Roman Church than in his earlier writings:

some critics have interpreted each episode as ev-

idence of Rabelais’s role as royal propagandist.

Rabelais’s five books and minor works reveal

the breadth of his reading of Italian fiction (es-

pecially Francesco Colonna, whom he translates

in the Fifth Book), short stories, mock epics and

humanist polygraphs, and Platonists. The in-

creasing number of Italianisms in his vocabulary

also reflect his knowledge of the language, and,

if the 1550 royal privilege for his works is to be

believed, he had published in “Thuscan.” During

his career, he had had to seek permission from

Vatican tribunals to change religious order, to

study at university, to practice medicine, to ac-

quire benefices, and to be absolved from apos-

tasy, besides requests from his own natural chil-

dren for legitimization. Despite his occasional

mockery of Italy in his writing, he was greatly

indebted to Italian scholarship and fascinated by

Roman antiquities and festivals. However, there

is no evidence of an interest in Italian Renais-

sance art (see the comic views of Bernard Lar-

don in 4BK 11).

Readings: Victor Louis Bourrilly, Guillaume Du

Bellay, Seigneur de Langey, 1491–1543 (Paris, 1905);

V.-L. Bourrilly ed., Rabelais, Lettres ecrites d’Italie

(Paris, 1910); R. A. Cooper, Rabelais et l’Italie (Ge-

neva: Droz, 1991); R. A. Cooper, Litterœ in tempore

belli (Geneva: Droz, 1997); R. A. Cooper, “Rabelais,

Jean Du Bellay, et la crise gallicane,” Rabelais pour

le XXIe siecle, special number, ER 33 (1998): 299–

325; R. A. Cooper, “Les lectures italiennes de Rabe-

lais: une mise au point,” ER 37 (1999): 25–49; Robert

Marichal, “Le dernier sejour de Rabelais a Rome,”

Congres de Tours et Poitiers de l’Association Guil-

laume Bude (Paris, 1954); Arthur Heulhard, Rabelais,

ses voyages en Italie, son exil a Metz (Paris, 1891).

Richard Cooper

J

JANOTUS DE BRAGMARDO Episodic

character in Gargantua (17–19), whose plea for

the return of the bells of Notre Dame, which the

giant has stolen to put on his mare’s neck, is one

of Rabelais’s finest comic monologues. Later

editions censored Rabelais’s first version of this

episode, in which Janotus is a Sorbonne theo-

logian, replacing theologien by sophiste and thus

losing the main polemical point.

The stealing of the bells, an incident in the

Grandes croniques (OC 161–62), is the pretext

for comprehensive and devastating satire, first of

the people of Paris (“tant sot, tant badault, et tant

inepte . . . ,” 17) and then of Sorbonne theologi-

ans in general. Rabelais ensures that Janotus’s

speech in chapter 19 will be pointless by having

Gargantua return the bells beforehand (18). Jan-

otus is lazy, interested only in his material com-

forts, ignorant even of the Latin he uses every

day, stupid, and a totally inept orator. His nine

“arguments” for the return of the bells include:

we need the bells to preserve the vines from bad

weather (an old superstition; i.e., wine is the

most important thing in a theologian’s life); we

can offer you pardons (indulgences) if you return

the bells (i.e., pardons have more to do with

profit than with religion); our Faculte needs the

bells just as much as your mare does (i.e., the-

ologians are no smarter than Gargantua’s mare).

Janotus’s speech violates every rule of Cicer-

onian rhetoric which every schoolboy knew by

heart; it has neither invention (coherent subject

matter), disposition (arrangement), elocution

(style), memory (he seems quite proud of his

poor memory), or delivery (he punctuates it with

coughing and spitting). His style, in both French

and Latin, is a mishmash of correct (“Reddite

que sunt Cesaris Cesari”) and incorrect (“ego ha-

bet bon uino”), lofty (“une ville sans cloches est

comme un aveugle sans baston . . .”) and collo-

quial (“Ha, ha, ha. C’est parle cela”). Almost

every sentence contains a pun, a literary refer-

ence, or an in-joke that would have been quite

clear to Rabelais’s intended readers.

Gerard Defaux has tried to identify Janotus

with the Sorbonne syndic Noel Beda, already

lampooned in P 7, but the more important em-

phasis is on comedy. Janotus is not just despi-

cable and inept—he is hilariously funny, and at

the beginning of chapter 20 the heartiest laughter

anywhere in Rabelais is the reaction of Ponocra-

tes and Eudemon to his speech. Like many a

Moliere character, Janotus sometimes speaks the

truth unknowingly (“Reason? . . . We don’t use

that around here” [GP 48]) and is so blissfully

self-satisfied that we are compelled to laugh with

him as well as at him. He is at the same time a

lamentably incompetent orator and a consum-

mate farce actor, as several reminiscences of

Maistre Pierre Pathelin in the episode remind us.

If we remember the rough punishment of the

Ecolier Limousin in P 6, we may wonder at the

generous recompensing of a potential burner of

heretics. Perhaps Rabelais still thought, in 1533–

34, that laughter could be powerful enough to

counter the forces of repression threatening to

destroy evangelical humanism?

Readings: Barbara C. Bowen, “Janotus de Brag-

mardo in the Limelight (Gargantua, ch. 19),” FR 72

(1998): 229–37; Gerard Defaux, “Rabelais et les

cloches de Notre-Dame,” ER 9 (1971): 1–28.

Barbara C. Bowen

JEWS Rabelais’s novels display definite fa-

miliarity with the Jewish mores and culture of

his time. Besides numerous Hebrew puns and

allusions to the Bible and the Talmud, one finds

more esoteric notions revealing a certain degree

of acquaintance with Jewish mysticism and even

hermetic texts such as the Zohar. Rabelaisian

Judiciary 135

characters often mention Jewish law and kabbal-

ists, Massoretes, and Marranes. Gargantua’s hu-

manist program admonishes the study of He-

brew, also advising visits of Talmudists’ and

kabbalists’ works (P 8). The allusions to the Jew-

ish canon are so numerous and precise that one

can deduce Rabelais’s real involvement in the

study of Hebrew and Jewish gnosis. Yet most of

the time this knowledge is conveyed with irony.

He rewrites a jocular version of the origin of cir-

cumcision (3BK 18), jokes about the rules of ko-

sher food (4BK 40), or about oaths more judaico

(3BK 19).

The text refers a few times to Marranes, or

converted Jews, a result of the sixteenth-century

royal politic of expulsions. Indeed, Rabelais

mentions by name Antoine Saporta, a Marrane

friend from Montpellier (3BK 34). But the Jew-

ish groups named most often are the kabbalists

and the Massoretes.

The kabbala, an ancient oral tradition claim-

ing lineage as far back as Abraham and Moses,

is elaborated as a philosophical and metaphysical

system that bridges biblical and Neoplatonic

thought. Although Jewish mysticism had trickled

from Spain to the rest of Europe in the ninth and

twelfth centuries, there were few initiates. How-

ever, in the fourteenth century, the kabbala took

the Jewish communities by storm, and interest in

this new discipline spread throughout the Chris-

tian world in the sixteenth. When introducing

hermetic terms that belong to the speculative

kabbala, such as Belima, Ruach, and Cheli, Ra-

belais’s text echoes the respect found for this

mystical discipline in Reuchlin’s De arte Cabal-

istica, or Pico de la Mirandola’s Heptaplus. The

tone, however, is mocking for the practical kab-

bala, which dallied in magic and astrology, and

took advantage of credulous people. This dy-

namic between fascination and cautiousness is

consistent throughout the various books.

Similarly, respect tinged with amusement is

the treatment bestowed upon the other group of

Jewish “interpreters of the law,” the Massoretes.

The Massorah is an oral transmission of anything

that concerns the form of the words of the re-

vealed text, both the vocalic and consonantal

structure (diacritic signs, divisions into sections,

etc.). The grammarians who took care of codi-

fying this structure, particularly infralinear vo-

calic punctuation which appeared only in written

Hebrew around the seventh century, used all

imaginable measures to guarantee the exact

transmission of the text, even at the cost of im-

mense toil. Letters were counted, words were

counted, and all peculiarities were noted. The

Massoretes are the Jewish commentators who

have an intimate knowledge of symbol in the He-

brew language. His allusions to Rabbi Kimhi de

Narbonne and Rabbi Ibn Ezra show that Rabelais

was familiar with the work, or role, of these er-

udite commentators.

Readings: Michel Bastiaensen, “L’hebreu chez Ra-

belais,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire (1968);

David Morris, “The Place of Jewish Law and Tradition

in the Work of Francois Rabelais,” ER 15 (1963); Ger-

shom Scholem, Les grands courants de la mystique

juive (Paris: Payot, 1983); Ilana Zinguer, ed., L’hebreu

au temps de la Renaissance (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992).

Katia Campbell

JUDICIARY Rabelais launched a caustic cri-

tique of the judicial practices of his time. Since

Rabelais’s public was largely composed of the

newly emerging bourgeois class whose members

aspired to public office (especially in the judicial

sphere), it is not surprising that his novels re-

peatedly refer to legal occupations such as

judges, lawyers, or other judiciary occupations.

From Judge Bridoye (3BK 39–43), who ren-

dered justice by rolling the dice to the Chicanous

bailiffs (4BK 12–16) in the land of Procuration,

all the legal episodes in Rabelais’s works tend to

be critical. Often this critique of legal practices

is linked to monetary profit. The “Chats fourrez”

(5BK 11–15) incident alludes to the notorious

abuses of the period’s legal bureaucracy and the

pervasiveness of a system of bribery that sold

justice to the highest bidder. Furthermore, eco-

nomic and judicial aspects often overlap owing

to the new social reality that the sale of offices

respresented during the Renaissance. It was

common practice for the king to sell judicial of-

fices to the new “robin” class in order to replen-

ish his coffers. For this reason, the judiciary bu-

reaucracy grew rapidly during the first half of the

sixteenth century. For example, in 1546, a Ve-

netian ambassador in Paris wrote that “judicial

offices are unlimited and augment everyday: law-

136 Judiciary

yers of the court in even the smallest village, tax

receivers, treasurers, counselors, presidents of

courts of justice, ‘maıtres des requetes’ . . . of

which half of them would suffice.” Corruption

among the diverse professions of justice became

so prevalent in the sixteenth century that Rabe-

lais found in them an easy target.

From the Pantagruel (1532) to the Fifth Book

(1564), we see a progressive increase in the por-

trayal of the justice system and its administrators.

The best known example is undoubtedly the ep-

isode of Judge Bridoye. The judge finds himself

on trial for rolling dice to reach his verdicts. In

charge of his own defense, Bridoye invokes a

pure linguistic understanding and application of

the legal texts. He plays on words and attempts

to exonerate himself by demonstrating that he

simply applied the letter of the law as contained

in the Latin locution alea judiciorum (the chance

of judgments), a popular legal metaphor. We

know that the French translation of this Latin ex-

pression (“the dice of judgments”) was a well-

known pun at the time Rabelais wrote his Third

Book. As usual, Rabelais incorporates the soci-

olinguistic practices of his time into his novel.

Yet there is more than a simple wordplay in this

incident, for Rabelais extends his critique to at-

tack the foundation of the entire legal system in

sixteenth-century France. Indeed, the very notion

of bureaucratic and legal rationality bears the

brunt of his critiques in this episode where a

judge successfully renders justice for decades

armed with the most subjective tools that re-

quired no skill or legal training.

In a similar vein, the key chapters about the

Chats fourrez in the Fifth Book expand upon

many of the judicial issues already raised in the

Fourth Book. The “Grippeminaudiere” justice

(5BK 11–13) offers a troubling resemblance to

the “Rodilardicque” justice of the Fourth Book.

A look at the historical and social context of Ra-

belais’s mockery of the judicial system sheds

light on his observations. The venality of lawyers

had reached new heights, and complaints of cor-

ruption were louder than ever. To give an ex-

ample of such a contentious issue, the royal ad-

ministration created a new judiciary profession

in order to expedite judgments of common law.

These presidial judges instated by Henry II rep-

resented an attempt to address ethical issues in

local and regional courts. However, the king’s

decentralization of justice did just the opposite

and unwittingly encouraged corruption. The ex-

traordinary power given to the presidial judges—

convicted individuals had no recourse for ap-

peal—produced a new twist where “laws are like

a spider’s web”: “foolish flies and little butterflies

get caught in them, [but] big horseflies break

them . . . and go through” (5BK 12; GP 548).

The unchecked power given to these new

judges finds a parallel in the episode where Frere

Jean and Panurge find themselves in front of

Grippe-Minaud. The absence of Pantagruel in

this episode enables the presidial judge to con-

sider our two companions as vagabonds and

therefore subject to common law. They are in-

dicted on criminal charges, like the “brigands,”

poor vagabonds, and other “pieds pouldreux”

(5BK 11) responsible for all manner of real or

imagined infractions that the presidial judges re-

served the right to prosecute. As Grippe-Minaud

says: “We don’t go hunting big-time thieves and

tyrants. . . . They’re too hard to digest . . . and

they make us sick . . . but you others, you nice

little innocents . . . you’re perfectly harmless”

(5BK 12).

Perhaps echoing the legal training of his

younger years, Rabelais drew many of his judi-

cial references directly from compilations of ju-

diciary loci communes, especially the Communes

juris sententiae by Bellonus, the Lexicon by Al-

bericus, the Speculum judiciale by Durand, and

the De nobilitate by Tiraqueau. Judicial expres-

sions abound in the episode of Judge Bridoye,

but Rabelais invariably bends and twists them to

produce a comic effect. He aims to demonstrate

how easily subjective decisions can be dissimu-

lated behind adages, glosses, and other legal aph-

orisms. These linguistic deformations used by

judges, like the Latin used to render justice to an

uncomprehending defendant, give an ironic and

comic aspect to most of the incidents involving

the courts in Rabelais’s novels. All these mock-

ing references to the judicial process and the le-

gal profession constitute a strong satire of the

entire legal system of the time.

Readings: J. Duncan Derrett, “Rabelais’ Legal

Learning and the Trial of Bridoye,” BHR 25 (1963):

111–71; Edwin Duval, “The Judge Bridoye, Panta-

gruelism, and the Unity of Rabelais’ Tiers Livre,” ER

Juste, Francois 137

17 (1983): 37–60; Michael A Screech, “The Legal

Comedy of Rabelais in the Trial of Bridoye in the

Tiers Livre de Pantagruel,” ER 5 (1964): 175–95.

Philippe Desan

JUSTE, FRANCOIS (fl. 1524–47) Printer/

bookseller in Lyon who appears to have been

Rabelais’s printer of choice for Pantagruel and

Gargantua, 1535–42. Juste worked from 1543

with his son-in-law Pierre de Tours, who also

printed Rabelais.

Reading: Y. de la Perriere, Supplement provisoire

a la bibliographie lyonnaise du President Baudrier,

pt. 1, fols. 85–116 (Paris: Bibliotheque nationale,

1967).

Stephen Rawles

K

KABBALA (CABALA, QABBALAH) The

Hebrew word for Jewish mysticism; references

to it appear in several of the books. It means

tradition because Jewish adherents believed it

was handed down orally alongside the Torah

from Mount Sinai. In fact, kabbala was highly

influenced by Neoplatonism, and the two main

books available in Rabelais’s time, Sefer Yetzirah

(Book of Creation) and Zohar (Book of Splen-

dor), are both medieval. Kabbala is also a highly

literary form of mysticism, focusing on letters

and language. For example, the kabbalist prac-

tice of gematria consisted of adding the number

values of the letters of certain passages of the

Torah to predict the future. Or letters of words

could be rearranged to uncover some hidden

meaning. This focus on the letters and language,

as well as the Neoplatonic underpinnings, made

kabbala particularly attractive to Renaissance

humanists. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

studied kabbala and considered it necessary to a

humanist education; his development of a spe-

cifically Christian kabbala sparked an interest

that became increasingly widespread among the

humanists.

Like other forms of mysticism, kabbala’s ul-

timate aim is union with the divine; this union is

often described in terms of sexual union or

drunkenness, two subjects explored throughout

the five books. But Rabelais seems to have fol-

lowed Pico’s lead in focusing on kabbala. He in-

cluded its study as a necessary part of the hu-

manist education in Gargantua’s letter to

Pantagruel (P 8). He also showed familiarity

with specific kabbalistic ideas. The mystical

quest is often compared to a voyage in search of

wisdom, and Panurge in the Fourth Book sets

out on a voyage in search of wisdom. But Ra-

belais related Panurge’s voyage to kabbala in two

ways. First, the voyagers are seeking l’Oracle de

la Dive Bacbuc (the Oracle of the Holy Bacbuc);

baqbuq is Hebrew for bottle. But more impor-

tantly the celebration held before they set out in-

cludes the singing of Psalm 114, “When Israel

went out of Egypt” (4BK 1). Kabbalists believed

that historical events were constantly repeated in

the human soul, and the exodus from Egypt, per-

ceived as the fundamental event of Jewish his-

tory, was the ultimate symbol of their mystical

experience of the divine. On the voyage Panta-

gruel and Panurge stop at the Island of Ruach

(4BK 43–44). The Hebrew word ruahfi means

both “spirit” and “wind.” Rabelais identified it

with vent. On the other hand, kabbalists main-

tained that there were three levels of soul—ne-

fesh, the vital spirit in all humanity; ruahfi , the

spirit on a higher level; and neshamah, the pure

soul that is capable of union with the divine. As

the median level, the adherent had to pass

through ruahfi to make himself ready for the state

of neshamah, just as Panurge had to pass through

the different (but concretized) disciplines of hu-

man and humanist knowledge to prepare himself

for the oracle.



University of New York Press, 1969); Sheila J. Rabin,

“The Qabbalistic Spirit in Gargantua and Panta-

gruel,” Voices in Translation, ed. Deborah Sinnreich-

Levi and Gale Sigal (New York: AMS Press, 1992).

Sheila J. Rabin

KISSARSE See Baisecul and Humevesne

KNOWLEDGE Rabelais’s fictions explore in

an open-ended way various conceptions of

knowledge that were available at the time. Ra-

belais has no single term for “knowledge.”

Rather, he uses various terms that refer to dif-

ferent dimensions of cognition. His most general

Knowledge 139

term for knowledge and learning is le savoir. By

la science (Latin scientia) he and his contempo-

raries usually mean knowledge of a theoretical,

abstract kind, such as law or mathematics, as op-

posed to l’art (Latin ars), which is knowledge of

a more practical, applied kind, such as medicine,

military skills, agriculture, architecture, paint-

ing, or divination. La philosophie tends to be an

umbrella category for investigations of all human

and natural phenomena, while la doctrine is usu-

ally the teaching of a particular philosophical

school or sect, especially an ancient one.

Certain junctures in Rabelais’s diegesis ad-

dress the question of knowledge with particular

force: Gargantua’s letter urging his son Panta-

gruel to obtain education (P 8); Pantagruel’s

comic demonstrations of learning and wisdom (P

10–12, 17–18); the two educations received by

Gargantua (G 13–14, 20–22); Panurge’s re-

course to divination and other methods in order

to discover if he should marry (3BK); the en-

counters with unknown peoples on the voyage to

the oracle of the Bottle Goddess (4BK). But even

outside these episodes, the question of knowl-

edge is constantly evoked. For example, what do

blue and white mean (G 9)? Can a pregnancy last

eleven months (G 3)? (Women generally figure

as objects of knowledge but not as knowing sub-

jects.) No single concept or theory of knowledge

emerges unchallenged, though some are repre-

sented as particularly prestigious, such as the as-

sumption that “science” leads to wisdom and

scientia to sapientia: both Pantagruel and Gar-

gantua are presented—with some equivocation,

one might argue—as being made wise by the

knowledge they acquire through education. This

assumption, shared by many humanists but in-

creasingly questioned later in the century by the

likes of Michel de Montaigne and Pierre Char-

ron, had been given its most celebrated formu-

lation by Cicero: “wisdom [sapientia] is . . .

knowledge [scientia] of divine and human things,

and of the causes which control them” (On Duty,

2.2.5). On the other hand, Rabelais’s chronicles

are full of characters who are not made wise by

knowledge. Contemporary anxiety about this is

summarized in the scholastic axiom that Gargan-

tua quotes to Pantagruel: “knowledge [science]

without conscience is but ruin to the soul” (P 8).

In other words, it is dangerous to separate knowl-

edge from ethics: this belief was even more

deeply held in Rabelais’s time than in our own.

Rabelais’s fictions also explore problems of

epistemology. How do we acquire knowledge?

And how reliable is it? Numerous means of ac-

quiring knowledge are explored, in both comic

and serious registers, often in both simultane-

ously. The dominant means is through authority,

that is, through the authoritative texts of Greek

and Roman antiquity. These are constantly cited

for the knowledge or pseudoknowledge they con-

tain. Another way of acquiring knowledge is to

get back in touch with a spiritual or metaphysical

level of reality with which we tend to lose con-

tact in our everyday lives. This Platonic and Neo-

platonic route to knowledge is often described in

a way that lends it prestige and credibility, es-

pecially in the Third Book (e.g., 13, 21, 37) and

the Fourth Book (26–28). On the other hand,

many other episodes are implicitly underpinned

by the more down-to-earth Aristotelian sense of

epistemology that was common currency in Ra-

belais’s day: knowledge in the intellect arises

from experience, from data supplied by the

senses—how else can the infant Gargantua dis-

cover the best objects with which to wipe his

bottom (G 12)? Rather more unsettling is the un-

resolved skepticism, the doubt about the possi-

bility of knowledge, that is later introduced

through the Pyrrhonist philosopher Trouillogan

(3BK 35–36). Overall, the quest for knowledge

is represented as being fraught with trouble and

yet joyously irresistible: “What’s the harm in al-

ways knowing and always learning, whether

from a clot or a pot?” (3BK 16).

Readings: Terence Cave, Pre-Histoires: Textes

troubles au seuil de la modernite (Geneva: Droz,

1999); Alban J. Krailsheimer, Rabelais and the Fran-

ciscans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963); Jean Plat-

tard, L’oeuvre de Rabelais (sources, invention et

composition) (Paris: Champion, 1910); Michael A.

Screech, Rabelais (London: Duckworth, 1979); Andre

Tournon, ‘En sens agile’: Les acrobaties de l’esprit

selon Rabelais (Paris: Champion, 1995).

Neil Kenny

L

LANGUAGE Rabelais’s linguistic range puz-

zles and fascinates: it evokes “the sphinx or the

chimera, a monster with a hundred heads, a hun-

dred languages” (Michelet) as well as an “abyss

of knowledge” (P 8). His cornucopian lexicon

(Cave 1979) encompasses a rich variety of

sources from both high and low culture: daily

practices, popular stories, proverbs and common

sayings, sotties, farces (Pathelin), and mystery

plays; chivalric romances and other ancient and

modern literary works. Rabelais borrowed words

and phrases from numerous French authors, in-

cluding Jean de Meung, Jean Lemaire de Belges,

Francois Villon, and Clement Marot. He was

also greatly influenced by many classical authors

(especially Lucian, Plutarch, and Pliny the El-

der) and contemporary humanists (including

Erasmus and Guillaume Bude). On the model

of his own giants, Rabelais’s appetite for words

knows no limits. His vocabulary crosses all fields

of knowledge, including architecture, botany,

commerce and industry, history, medicine, mu-

sic, military science, navigation, and zoology,

and all kinds of cultural and social practices (Sai-

nean). His insatiable thirst for words has contrib-

uted to the romantic myth of the intoxicated gen-

ius. Although the poet’s “debauchery” took place

in his imagination, readers are still dazzled today

by the power of a language that seizes and con-

founds you, intoxicates and disgusts you (Sainte-

Beuve 1876).

As a writer, Rabelais paid a great deal of at-

tention to the formal aspects of his books. He

corrected the text of the various editions pub-

lished during his lifetime with meticulous care.

The deliberate changes he made in spelling and

grammar reflect his interest in phonology and his

commitment to move French closer to what he

thought was the language of origins. His urge to

remain faithful to ancient usage (the so-called

censure antique) resulted in a number of ety-

mological emendations. For instance, by spelling

“dipner” for “dinner” he meant to translate and

reconnect with the Greek verb deipnein. From

1534 onward, he became increasingly systematic

in his grammar and regularized plurals and verb

forms (Huchon 1981). He fully participated in

the Renaissance search for meaning through the

relentless examination of the origin of language.

He was himself greatly stimulated by the redis-

covery of Plato’s Cratylus (4BK 37). This does

not mean that the Church Fathers’ exegetic tra-

dition was forgotten. As the Renaissance taste

for linguistic ambiguity was rekindled by Plato’s

dialogue, medieval etymologies remained alive,

through a series of syncretic practices. As a hu-

manist and a poet, Rabelais tackled some of the

issues that Isidore of Seville had discussed in his

Etymologies. He translated and parodied this et-

ymological obsession in his exuberant linguistic

creations. Some key passages of Rabelais’s po-

lyglotist farcical fiction help us understand how

foreign tongues were conceptualized in his days.

French is given privileged status as a “natural

tongue,” replacing the lost language of origins.

Yet Rabelais recognizes other vernaculars as

well, worships Latin, and writes against Cicer-

onian propaganda. He gropes for a “cultural me-

diation” between high and low cultures, and he

exhibits a fascinating mixture of rival, poly-

phonic voices (Bakhtin 1968; Cave 2001).

Rabelais’s stunning mastery of linguistic func-

tions is exemplified in the surrealistic episode of

Baisecul and Humevesne, or Kissass and

Sniffshit (P 10–13). As the litigants argue their

cases, the referential function loses its grip, but

all the other functions remain operative: emotive

(the litigants lose their tempers and shout insults

at each other); conative (they never lose sight of

the judge’s motivations); phatic (they sustain the

Language 141

communication between themselves); metalin-

guistic (they point up the “logic” of their argu-

ments). Above all, through all sorts of echoes of

rhythms and sounds, they demonstrate their abil-

ity to manipulate the message. As in many other

passages, distortions of proverbs, spoonerisms,

deliberate slips of tongue, and various plays on

words contribute to the centrifugal effervescence

of language: a perfect illustration of Jakobson’s

poetic function (Rigolot 2000).

Rabelais uses a wealth of popular material for

literary purposes in order to recapture the living

forces connoted by the carnivalesque spirit and

make them the paradoxical vehicle of a new so-

cial order. The most antisocial, thoroughly

“other” pattern of life, based on death and deg-

radation, is prominently displayed in his work,

often in an offensive way. But it is there as a

powerful metaphor for social changes and for the

questioning through laughter of the most threat-

ening aspects of political and religious repres-

sion. Rabelais knew the virtue of what Latin rhet-

oricians called festivitas—a mirthful linguistic

humor that was powerfully used by Thomas

More and Erasmus, two humanists whom Ra-

belais greatly admired. In a similar spirit, Rabe-

lais creates his narrative persona, Master Alco-

frybas, a comic mask that is meant to signify a

kind of philosophical intoxication.

For Rabelais, as for Plato, dialogue is a key

necessity (Zaercher 2000). None of his positive

characters speaks alone. In the Renaissance hu-

manist culture, the paradigm of the banquet

brings mental and physical pleasure together

(Jeanneret 1991). The First Book begins with an

allusion to Plato’s Symposium, a “drinking-

together” in honor of Dionysus, the life-giving

god of nature whose worship centers around the

symbolic cycle of birth, death, and renewal (G

prol.). The reader is invited to partake in a com-

munion of minds engaged in linguistic convivi-

ality. “The convivium alone rebuilds limbs, re-

vives humors, restores spirit, delights senses,

fosters and awakens reason. It is rest from labors,

release from cares and nourishment of genius; it

is the demonstration of love and splendor, the

food of good will, the seasoning of friendship,

the leavening of grace and the solace of life” (Fi-

cino 51).

In one of the last episodes of the Fourth Book

(4BK 55–56), the voyagers reach the confines of

the glacial sea and witness an uncanny spectacle:

“Frozen Words” become suddenly visible and

produce barbaric sounds upon thawing out. Many

interpretations have been given of this episode

(Tornitore 1985), but it may also recapitulate Ra-

belais’s deep-seated interest in language theory

throughout his four books. After staging a lin-

guistic comedy in praise of “natural language” (P

6–13), critiquing unwarranted symbolic inter-

pretations (G 9–10), and exposing the arbitrar-

iness of signs (3BK 19), Rabelais finally presents

us with a disquisition on the mimetic power of

words. This may be our poet’s most astonishing

tour de force, the verbal alchemist’s most com-

pelling transmutation. Alcofrybas, alias Rabelais,

leads us festively, through his cornucopian med-

itation on language, to the problematic Word of

the Divine Bottle (5BK).


World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 1968); Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text:


ford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Terence Cave, Pre-

histoires II. Langues etrangeres et troubles econo-

miques au XVIe siecle (Geneva: Droz, 2001);

Marie-Luce Demonet, Les voix du signe. Nature et or-

igine du langage a la Renaissance (1480–1580) (Paris:

Champion, 1992); Marsilio Ficino, The Letters of

Marsilio Ficino, vol. 2 (London: Shepheard-Walwyn,

1978); Floyd Gray, Rabelais et l’ecriture (Paris: Nizet,

1974); Mireille Huchon, Rabelais grammairien. De

l’histoire du texte aux problemes d’authenticite, ER 16

(Geneva: Droz, 1981); Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics

and Poetics,” Selected Writings III: Poetry of Gram-

mar and Grammar of Poetry, ed. Stephen Rudy (The

Hague: Mouton, 1981); Michel Jeanneret, A Feast of

Words. Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Pierre

Mari, “Une politique humaniste de la parole.

L’interlocution rabelaisienne,” Etudes de lettres 2

(April–June 1984): 63–72; Francois Moreau, Les im-

ages dans l’œuvre de Rabelais, 3 vols. (Paris: SEDES,

1982); Francois Rigolot, Les langages de Rabelais

(Geneva: Droz, 1972, 1996); Francois Rigolot, “Cra-

tylisme et Pantagruelisme: Rabelais et le statut du

signe,” ER 13 (1976): 115–32; Francois Rigolot, “Se-

miotique de la sentence et du proverbe,” ER 14 (1978):

277–86; “Enigme et prophetie: les langages de

l’hermetisme chez Rabelais,” Œuvres et critiques 11.1

142 Lanternois

(1986): 37–47; Francois Rigolot, “The Highs and Lows

of Structuralist Readings: Rabelais, Pantagruel, chap-

ters 10–13,” Distant Voices Still Heard. Contemporary

Readings of French Renaissance Literature, ed. John

O’Brien and Malcolm Quainton (Liverpool: Liverpool

University Press, 2000); Lazare Sainean, La langue de

Rabelais, 2 vols. (Paris, 1922–23; Geneva: Slatkine,

1976); Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, “Rabelais,”

Causeries du lundi. Œuvres, ed. Maxime Leroy, vol.

3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1956); Charles-Augustin Sainte-

Beuve, Tableau historique et critique de la poesie

francaise et theatre francais au XVIe siecle, 2 vols.

(Paris: A. Lemerre, 1876); Paul J. Smith, Voyage et

ecriture: Etude sur le Quart livre de Rabelais, ER 19

(Geneva: Droz, 1987); Leo Spitzer, “Le pretendu real-

isme de Rabelais,” Modern Philology 37 (1940): 139–

50; Jean Starobinski, “Note sur Rabelais et le lan-

gage,” Tel Quel 15 (1963): 79–81; Tonino Tornitore,

Interpretazioni novecentesche dell’episodio delle par-

olles gelees,” ER 18 (1985): 170–204; Florence Wein-

berg, The Wine and the Will (Detroit: Wayne State

University Press, 1975); Veronique Zaercher, Le dia-

logue rabelaisien. Le Tiers livre exemplaire, ER 38

(Geneva: Droz, 2000).

Francois Rigolot

LANTERNOIS Inhabitants of an island fre-

quently referred to but ultimately not visited by

Pantagruel in the Fourth Book. The fictional

Lanternland did not originate with Rabelais. In-

spired by the aerial city of Lamptown in Lu-

cian’s True History, Rabelais first alludes to this

mythic land in Pantagruel when we learn that

the polyglot Panurge is fluent in lanternois (P

9). The Lanternland theme was further developed

in an anonymous pastiche of Rabelais’s work, Le

Disciple de Pantagruel ou la Navigation du

Compagnon . . . la bouteille of 1537. In chapters

5–8 of the Fourth Book, the Thalamege encoun-

ters during its voyage a ship of fellow French-

men. They are returning to Saintonge from a gen-

eral meeting at Lanterne, an allusion to the 1546

session of the Council of Trent. Lanterne evokes

the Third Church Lateran Council of 1179 during

which Pope Innocent III, like his successor at the

Council of Trent, was obliged to consider indi-

viduals who were choosing to interpret the Bible

for themselves without benefit of Church doc-

trine.

Linking lanterne to Lateran and hence to a

contemporary religious conflict is but one ex-

ample of Rabelais’s wordplay with the term. By

not actually depicting Lanternland Rabelais high-

lights the etymological significance of the name.

The word lanterne carried at least five different,

indeed opposing, connotations during the six-

teenth century. Lanterne might signify a type of

toy lantern that corresponds well to the Rabelai-

sian sense of play and distortion. A vain or un-

important matter also could be called a lanterne.

Lanterne has a secretive connotation by referring

to a platform from where one can see and hear

without being seen. There is, too, a slang con-

notation, meaning “copulation.” Lastly, a type of

fish with an iridescent head that purportedly

could guide sailors during storms at sea is called

une lanterne. The term appeared in several com-

mon expressions of the sixteenth century, includ-

ing radouber la lanterne, meaning to gossip. The

verb lanterner means to make foolish or silly re-

marks and, by extension, to waste one’s time or

to delay fulfilling an obligation. Most important

is the word’s reference to a source of light or to

a lamp, and hence the allusion to enlightenment

and learning. Rabelais may have been acknowl-

edging Erasmus: the Adages discuss the expres-

sion “the Lamp of Aristophanes and Cleanthes”

which refers to these men’s renowned diligence

in study and writing. The multiple connotations

that lanterne carries make the term an ideal ad-

dition to the Rabelaisian vocabulary. Such a ref-

erence in the narrative to intriguing yet ulti-

mately unseen lands emphasizes the vast quantity

of unfamiliar areas and peoples awaiting discov-

ery. On the textual level, these allusions under-

score the Fourth Book’s open-endedness and lack

of closure.

Readings: Mireille Huchon, “Archeologie du Veme

Livre,” ER 21 (1988): 19–28; Georges Matore, Le vo-

cabulaire et la societe du XVIeme siecle (Paris: Presses

Universitaires de France, 1988).

Margaret Harp

LAW In the sixteenth century, legal learning

was an everyday part of the culture of educated

Frenchmen: it was not the arcane and self-

enclosed body of knowledge open only to a pro-

fessional elite which it has since become. Rabe-

lais would have been able to assume that his

readership would understand and appreciate the

Law 143

legal learning (and the dependent comedy) de-

ployed in all his authentic Chronicles. Indeed,

Guillaume Bude (the greatest contemporary

legist and author of the immensely influential

Annotations on the Pandects [Annotationes in

aquattuor et viginti Pandectarum libros] of

1508) stressed that the mos Gallicus, the “French

way” of comprehending texts of Roman law,

needed sympathetic understanding of the philo-

sophical, scientific, linguistic, and moral basis of

the law, as opposed to the mos Italicus, which

for him meant a much cruder literal interpretation

of text. This cultural dependence explains why

Gargantua in his letter to his son esteems a

rounded education essential for real understand-

ing of the law (P 8). It is generally assumed that

at some time between 1510 and 1520 Rabelais

studied law, probably at Angers but possibly at

Orleans (in P 5, the giant visits the legal faculties

of several French universities, but it is from Or-

leans that he graduates with the title of Maıtre).

Even though he would be remembered above all

for his medical knowledge, it was the law that

appears to have marked his ways of thinking and

writing. Bude addressed him as juris studiosis-

simus; Andre Tiraqueau and Amaury Bou-

chard, both great legal humanists to whom Ra-

belais was to dedicate learned works, were part

of his early intellectual circle in the Franciscan

house of Puy-Saint-Martin at Fontenay-le-

Comte.

Although the law was a formative influence on

all his Chronicles, it is in Pantagruel and the

Third Book that legal learning and legal comedy

are woven most closely into the fabric of the text.

By using an ornamental frame that had been ex-

plicitly used for Guillaume le Rouille’s On Jus-

tice and Injustice (De Justicia et Injusticia

[1531]), Rabelais (through his printer Claude

Nourry) gives to Pantagruel the appearance of

a Lyonnais legal book and emphasizes the legal

character of its comedy. In a famously colorful

passage (P 5), Rabelais shows the humanist’s

concern to cast aside pedantic medieval accre-

tions and to restore the texts of Roman law to

their original purity. The comic legal trial be-

tween Baisecul and Humevesne (9, bis) is a

multifaceted episode that mocks the Italian jurid-

ical tradition of Bartolus of Sassofarrato (1314–

57) and Franciscus Accursius (1182–1260), and

the sterility of pro et contra debate seems to ex-

plore contemporary legal issues over the auton-

omy of the university versus ecclesiastical au-

thority. But above all the concern is with the

ways in which God-given language is able to

obfuscate as much as to communicate, to com-

plicate a problem as much as to clarify it. Rhe-

torical twisting of meaning (particularly by law-

yers) will later be described in the Third Book

(44) as one of the means by which the Devil

works in this world. Rabelais shares the humanist

conviction that law as a moral force should not

be used for private advantage or to force unmer-

ited acquittals. Both Baisecul and Humevesne al-

most say something sensible, and the giant com-

ically out-argues both. Three times logical

discourse is employed to say absolutely nothing,

and the giant is credited with the wisdom of Sol-

omon.

In the Third Book, legal learning and legal

comedy are placed on a much more profound

level, centered upon Judge Bridoye, one of the

characters invited to the Platonic banquet to re-

solve Panurge’s marriage dilemma. Bridoye is

unable to come to the banquet; he has been sum-

moned to account for his judgment in a recent

case. Given that Bridoye first appears immedi-

ately after the discussion of Pauline Folly, it

would be reasonable to expect a humble and

saintly man. What readers get is an apparently

senile judge who misuses even the Brocardia

Juris (an out-of-date compilation of legal com-

monplaces, whose comic and literal misapplica-

tion would have been appreciated by most cul-

tivated men of the time; Rabelais includes it in

the Library of Saint-Victor as the Bragueta

Juris). Bridoye’s use of dice to resolve casus

perplexi (cases in which the facts were clear but

the application of the law ambiguous) was per-

mitted in Roman law, but the judge has used dice

to resolve all his cases over the past forty years.

He has failed to give an equitable judgment at

this point only because his old eyes have misread

the dice. We should be surprised not that a hum-

ble judge who has been given a prophetic gift in

a divinely appointed universe has been a success,

but only that his success should have lasted so

long. The episode demonstrates the syncretic use

of legal learning in the service of evangelical hu-

manism.

144 Lefevre d’Etaples, Jacques

Readings: J. M. Derrett, “Rabelais’s Legal Learning

and the Trial of Bridoye,” BHR 25 (1963): 111–71;

Alban J. Krailsheimer, Rabelais and the Franciscans

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963); Michael A. Screech,

“The Legal Comedy of Rabelais in the Trial of Bri-

doye in the Tiers Livre de Pantagruel,” ER 5 (1964):

175–95; Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London:

Duckworth 1979).

John Lewis

LEFEVRE D’ETAPLES, JACQUES (1450?–

1537) Humanist and theologian, considered in

his day to be the equal of Erasmus. In 1492, he

traveled to Italy where he met Marsilio Ficino

and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. He was ac-

knowledged as the leading Aristotelian authority

of the day, and he urged his fellow scholars to

abandon the scholastic tradition in favor of the

study of original Greek texts. At the same time,

Lefevre was exploring the mystical side of the-

ology. He increasingly devoted himself to the

study of the Bible, and in 1509, inspired by Eras-

mus, he wrote a commentary on five different

Latin versions of the Psalms. In 1512, he pub-

lished a groundbreaking commentary on Saint

Paul’s Epistles that prefigured the theology of

the Reform. Lefevre moved to Meaux in 1521

at the invitation of his friend Guillaume Bricon-

net, the bishop. There Lefevre led the Circle of

Meaux, a group devoted to the evangelical study

and preaching of biblical texts. In 1523, he pub-

lished a French translation of the New Testament

which drew the fire of the Sorbonne until Fran-

cis I intervened. Unfortunately, the king’s im-

prisonment in Spain gave the Sorbonne the op-

portunity to demand the dispersion of the Meaux

Circle in 1525 on grounds of heresy. Threatened

with arrest, Lefevre fled to Strasbourg. When

Francis returned, Lefevre was appointed keeper

of the royal library at Blois and tutor to the

king’s youngest son, which allowed Lefevre to

continue his work on a French translation of the

Old Testament which appeared in 1530. That

same year, Lefevre went to live at the little court

of Marguerite at Nerac where he remained until

his death.

Rabelais was strongly influenced by Lefevre’s

(and others’) emphasis on studying biblical

sources and his rejection of medieval scholar-

ship. Pantagruel’s education includes Greek

and Hebrew in order that he might daily read and

study the Old and New Testaments in the origi-

nal. Both M. A. Screech and Donald Frame argue

convincingly for Rabelais as an evangelical.

The character of Hippothadee in the Third

Book is thought to refer to Lefevre.

Readings: Guy Bedouelle, Lefevre d’Etaples (Ge-

neva: Droz, 1976); Donald Frame, Francois Rabelais

(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977); Philip

Edgcumbe Hughes, Lefevre (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerd-

mans, 1984); Augustin Renaudet, Humanisme et Ren-

aissance: Dante, Petrarque, Standonck, Erasme, Le-

fevre d’Etaples, Marguerite de Navarre, Rabelais,

Guichardin, Giordano Bruno (Geneva: Droz, 1958);

Michael A. Screech, L’evangelisme de Rabelais: as-

pects de la satire religieuse au XVIe siecle (Geneva:

Droz, 1959).

Megan Conway

LENT, KING See Quaresmeprenant

LETTERS Rabelais is the author of seventeen

letters that have survived. Other of his epistolary

texts, known to us through sixteenth-century doc-

uments, are presumably lost. Among the extant

works are two letters in Latin sent to the human-

istic luminaries Guillaume Bude and Erasmus,

a letter in French addressed to Rabelais’s friend

Antoine Hullot, a verse epistle intended for the

rhetoriqueur Jean Bouchet, four dedicatory epis-

tles in Latin at the beginning of learned editions,

a dedication in French inserted at the beginning

of the Fourth Book, three letters composed in

Rome for the attention of Rabelais’s protector

Geoffroy d’Estissac, an indirect request for

money to his patron Jean du Bellay, and four

letters inserted in his fictional works.

Traditionally, critics have shown little interest

in Rabelais’s epistolary works, using them pri-

marily to confirm or disprove interpretations

bearing on his fiction. For example, scholars

have cited the Gallic doctor’s reference to the

dissipation of Cimmerian shadows, found in his

dedication to the second volume of Manardi’s

Lettres medicales to Andre Tiraqueau, to sup-

port both serious and parodic readings of Gar-

gantua’s famous programmatic letter to Panta-

gruel, where the son is exhorted to take

advantage of the dawn of humanism and become

a veritable “abyss of knowledge” (“abysme de

Lists 145

science”). This letter on education has long been

the target of critical attention, eliciting specula-

tion as to whether it indirectly attacks the naıvete

of “triumphant humanism,” or whether, on the

contrary, it serves as a vibrant defense of the

movement. In any case, this missive corresponds

exactly to Erasmus’s definition of the letter of

advice on study methods and curricular matters

(epistola monitaria de ratione studiis), both in

regard to persuasive strategies (including emu-

lation of the father by the son, also advocated in

Bude’s letters to his son Dreux) and the serious

style (gravis) that is used.

Rabelais’s nonfictional letters have elicited

few analyses, with the exception of a study by

Fritz Neubert drawing our attention to Rabelais’s

use of the Ciceronian style in the most common

and general sense of “persuasive strength resort-

ing to language adornments.” The decade be-

tween 1530 and 1540, during which most of Ra-

belais’s letters were written, witnesses a dispute

pertaining to the epistolary style between the fol-

lowers of Nosopon, an Erasmian caricature who

advocates word-for-word borrowing from Cic-

ero, and the Erasmians who seek to adapt clas-

sical rhetoric to the specific needs of their times.

Situated at the very crossroads of this debate, Ra-

belais exhibits a kind of linguistic schizophrenia,

since his epistolary practices vary according to

whether he is writing in Latin or French. His neo-

Latin correspondence, strongly epideictic, fea-

tures rhetoric that is more conventional, as we

see in his letter of thanks to Erasmus and in his

missive to win Bude’s favor. These epistles are

not exempt from syntagmas or expressions con-

sidered to be typically Ciceronian by his contem-

poraries, such as the conjunction “cum” at the

beginning of the letter, the locution “etiam atque

etiam,” or the measured “tum . . . tum.” The ded-

icatory epistles are also dominated by the de-

monstrative genre, involving praise of either the

work to follow or the dedicatee. If Rabelais will-

ingly adopts the Ciceronian style in his Latin let-

ters, however, in his French correspondence he

is much more sensitive to Erasmus’s definition

of the letter as a octopus, which takes on the

color of the place in which it finds itself, and thus

is capable of an infinite variety.

Rabelais’s Italian letters, which fall under the

heading of informational letters (epistola nuncia-

toria) or the “letter from Rome” according to

Fritz Neubert (Romsbrief), seem to be more

strictly factual and stylistically austere, empha-

sizing the eyewitness or earwitness testimony of

the writer. It is thanks to this economy of means,

however, that we discover the rhetorical impli-

cations of these missives: they are destined to

maintain the illusion of Rabelais’s importance in

Rome in the eyes of his patron, whom he re-

peatedly plies with requests for money since, as

Richard Cooper has shown, he often retranscri-

bes in these letters distorted rumors or news

taken from gli avvisi (notices). The missive to

Antoine Hullot, moreover, constitutes a veritable

anthology example of the humoristic letter (ep-

istola jocosa), a typically French genre according

to Erasmus. The epistle shares numerous affini-

ties with Rabelais’s fiction, notably its rerouting

of liturgical Latin and its critique of Lent, as well

as its deliberate and systematic transgression of

the epistolary code—for example, use of the su-

perlative in the address “baillif du baillif des bail-

lifz,” and the disparagement of the letter-writer

in the signature: “your humble festivities organ-

izer, servant, and friend” (“[v]ostre humble ar-

chitriclin, serviteur et amy”).

Readings: Charles Bene, “Rabelais et l’art episto-

laire dans le Pantagruel,” Recherches et travaux 26

(1984): 101–14; Richard Cooper, Rabelais et l’Italie,

ER 24 (Geneva: Droz, 1991); Richard Cooper, “Ra-

belais’s Neo-Latin Writings,” Neo-Latin and the Ver-

nacular in Renaissance France, ed. Grahame Castor

and Terence Cave (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984);

Claude La Charite, La rhetorique epistolaire de Ra-

belais (Quebec: Editions Nota bene, coll. “Littera-

ture(s),” 2003); Fritz Neubert, “Francois Rabelais’

Briefe,” Zeitschrift fur franzosische Sprache und Lit-

eratur 71 (1961): 154–85.

Claude La Charite

LIMOUSIN SCHOOLBOY See Ecolier Lim-

ousin

LISTS One of the most gratuitous and provoc-

ative comic devices in Rabelais’s repertoire. His

pages are crowded with obstinate enumerations

of the most varied and improbable items includ-

ing food, games, books, boats, hot springs,

snakes, ancestors, and epithets. Sometimes these

lists have a satiric function, as when the pain-

146 Loup Garou

staking inventory of 217 children’s games (G 22)

mimes the tedium of Gargantua’s first, pre-

humanist education. At other times, Rabelais’s

lists seem to have no other function than to assert

their material presence on the page. Occupying

vertical blocks of text, the list explores the spatial

dimension of writing and enhances the status of

the book as object, in keeping with Rabelais’s

aesthetic of visual prose.

One context in which to situate Rabelais’s lists

is the Renaissance fascination with copia, or lex-

ical proliferation. For some readers, Rabelais’s

verbal cascades recall the vertiginous variation

exercises in Erasmus’s rhetorical manual De co-

pia. From this perspective, the pointless luxuri-

ance of lists enacts the Renaissance conscious-

ness of the hollow abundance of language.

The itemizing, anatomizing style of the list

also offers a powerful critique of narrative co-

herence. This tendency can be seen in the de-

scription of Quaresmeprenant from the Fourth

Book. Xenomanes anatomizes the monster in a

series of lists enumerating his internal and exter-

nal features as well as his “contenences” or man-

nerisms. The consequence of such enumeration

is to dislocate the syntax or coordination of the

text, leaving only isolated, interchangeable im-

ages. It is as if we were to view a mosaic from

such close range that we could only admire the

pieces and never comprehend the whole design.

Another example, also from the Fourth Book, of

the substitution of enumeration for narration is

the alphabetical ordering of snakes and other

venomous animals that interrupts the episode of

Chaneph, which in turn interrupts or immobi-

lizes the voyage in a prolonged calm at sea. Hav-

ing satisfied his hunger and having thus neutral-

ized, according to Aristotle, the danger of his

saliva for venomous animals, Eusthenes lists

ninety-eight such animals in imperfect alphabet-

ical order in two parallel columns whose dispo-

sition varies from edition to edition according to

the size of print and page. Despite Frere Jean’s

irreverent inquiry as to where Panurge’s future

wife will fit in this “hierarchy” of poisonous

creatures, the list is certainly not hierarchical. In

fact, it defies any logical arrangement. In these

opposing columns whose alignment depends on

the printer, proximity is not a sign of relation-

ship, nor does contiguity imply causality. Lists

resist the artificial coherence of syntax and plot.

Precisely for this reason, the list provides Ra-

belais with an alternative model of narration

faithful to our aleatory experience of life. The

best example of a list of stories in Rabelais’s

work can be found among the prolific pockets of

Panurge’s cloak, whose contents are inventoried

in chapter 16 of Pantagruel. Here the narrator

recounts a few of Panurge’s typical pranks or

pastimes in no particular order, introducing each

anecdote with temporally imprecise adverbial

phrases such as “one time,” “another time,” or

“one day.” There is no effort of concatenation or

consecution. Since all these anecdotes involve

special props or accessories, the narrator also de-

scribes Panurge’s cloak or “saye,” which has

more than twenty-six pockets full of tricks. The

inventory of the pockets in turn yields a series

of brief anecdotes, each drawn from a different

pocket of Panurge’s cloak. Apparently, every

pocket contains a story, but the stories do not

form any coherent sequence. Rather, like the

pockets, they are items on a list whose order is

purely arbitrary and endlessly interchangeable.

Rabelais’s lists disrupt our habits of reading

and open up new prospects of narrative sequence.

In some ways, they bring the experience of read-

ing closer to the experience of life. The list can

be a mimesis of history when it is not simply a

deposit of verbal wealth or an experiment with

visible speech.

Readings: Michel Butor, “Le livre comme objet,”

Repertoire II (Paris: Minuit, 1964); Terence Cave, The

Cornucopian Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979);

Alfred Glauser, Rabelais createur (Paris: Nizet, 1966).

Eric MacPhail

LOUP GAROU “Werewolf,” a cruel and ar-

rogant giant, leader of three hundred giants in

the army of King Anarche, defeated by Panta-

gruel at the climactic moment of the war against

the Dipsodes (P 26, 29). Although Loup Garou

is armed with an enchanted mace that destroys

everything it touches and Pantagruel has only a

fragile mast and the hull of his ship filled with

salt, the hero prevails, killing not only Loup

Garou but all the other giants as well who have

treacherously joined the fray. This heroico-comic

showdown is modeled on the duels of epic poetry

Lucian 147

(Achilles vs. Hector, Aeneas vs. Turnus, etc.) and

on the confrontation between David and Goliath,

with Pantagruel in the role of the innocent David

and Loup Garou in the role of the Philistine

brute. Just before the battle, the hero utters a fa-

mous prayer in which he vows to spread the Gos-

pel and abolish all forms of popery wherever he

has dominion, if only God will grant him victory.

The vow is answered by a voice from heaven

saying: “Do this and victory will be yours” (P

29). The defeat of Loup Garou thus marks the

triumph of a chosen people and the beginning of

a new reign.

As both a giant and a “werewolf,” Loup Garou

is the perfect adversary in this archetypal battle

between good and evil. Wolves were known in

the Renaissance primarily for their rapacity and

violence toward humans, werewolves for their

anthropophagy, and giants for their cannibalism,

their cruelty, their impiety, their lawlessness and

their overweaning pride. All these qualities are

annihilated in the person of Loup Garou, to make

way for a new Golden Age of peace and broth-

erly love in Utopie.

Readings: Jean Ceard, “L’histoire ecoutee aux

portes de la legende: Rabelais, les fables de Turpin et

les exemples de Saint Nicolas,” Etudes seiziemistes of-

fertes a Monsieur le Professeur V.-L. Saulnier par plu-

sieurs de ses anciens doctorants, THR 177 (Geneva:

Droz, 1980); Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabe-


Press, 1991).

Edwin M. Duval

LUCIAN (second century a.d.) The Greek

Cynic Lucian of Samosata was, together with

Varro, the most prominent imitator of Menippus

(third century b.c.), the founder of Menippean

satire. Lucian’s popularity in the Renaissance is

documented by over 330 editions of his works

between 1470 and 1600, the most famous one

being Erasmus and Thomas More’s partial

Latin edition (Paris, 1506) that had a strong in-

fluence on Erasmus’s Praise of Folly and More’s

Utopia. Lucian’s presence in Rabelais is docu-

mented as early as in chapter 1 of Pantagruel,

where the narrator refers to the Cynic’s Icaro-

menippus to explain how the race of the giants

had survived the deluge.

In general, Lucian’s influence seems rather

weak in the first two books, the most remarkable

episodes being Epistemon’s descent into the un-

derworld, inspired by Lucian’s Menippus (P 30)

and the narrator’s entry into his master’s mouth,

incorporating elements from the True Story (P

32). Rabelais was very familiar with Lucian,

however. While a monk at the Benedictine mon-

astery at Maillezais (c. 1524), he may even have

translated some of his works. As the earlier

chronicles’ often delightfully farcical satire, with

its typically lucianesque mixture of fantasy and

reality, becomes more refined, subtle, and eru-

dite, the influence of the Greek Cynic becomes

more palpable. In the Third and Fourth Books,

Lucian’s satirical dialogues, tall tales, and mock

encomia help Rabelais to create a satire that goes

beyond its model. If we keep in mind the fun-

damental significance of Rabelais’s prologues for

the text as a whole, the strong presence of two

Lucianic dialogues in each of the prologues of

the latter two books—A Prometheus in Words

and How to Write History (3BK), as well as Ti-

mon and Icaromenippus (4BK)—seems to illus-

trate the Cynic’s prominent position as a major

inspiration of Rabelais’s move toward a satire

marked by erudition, paradox (see Panurge’s

Praise of Debts at the beginning of the Third

Book [3–5], and the gradual opening toward a

reader who is supposed to take an active part in

the task of interpretation.

This last point shows how Rabelais ended up

thoroughly “digesting” (in the sense of Joachim

du Bellay’s famous demand in his 1549 Defense

et illustration de la langue francaise) and sub-

sequently outdoing his model. Whereas the mes-

sage and targets of Lucian’s satire are usually

easily identifiable, Rabelais attempts to create a

true dialogue with his readers by failing to give

clear-cut answers, which he generally achieves

by providing an incredible amount of seemingly

contradictory, or simply opaque details and in-

formation (e.g., the case of Judge Bridoye [3BK

39–43] or the descriptions of monsters in the

4BK). This leads to his trademark Menippean

paradox that leaves the reader perplexed. This

unusual approach is meant to incite the reader to

interpret more carefully and finally to question

dogmas and received truths that are normally ac-

cepted blindly. Lucian can therefore be consid-

ered a milestone in the development of Rabela-

148 Luther, Martin

isian hermeneutics and his idea of “how to write

history.”



Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Li-

vre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1998); Christiane

Lauvergnat-Gagniere, Lucien de Samosate et le lu-

cianisme en France au XVIe siecle (Geneva: Droz,

1988); David Marsh, Lucian and the Latins. Humor

and Humanism in the Early Renaissance (Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 1998); Claude-Albert

Mayer, Lucien de Samosate et la Renaissance fran-

caise (Paris: Champion, 1984); Marcel Tetel, “Rabe-

lais et Lucien: de deux rhetoriques,” Rabelais’s Incom-

parable Book (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986).

Bernd Renner

LUTHER, MARTIN (1483–1546) A German

Church reformer whose ideas were much dis-

puted during Rabelais’s time. Martin Luther’s

writings began to circulate in France shortly after

their publication. Froben, a printer in Basel, even

sent a bundle to the Sorbonne for examination

in good and due form. These works, in Latin,

caused little more than a ripple as people only

began to grasp the magnitude of the Saxon

monk’s audacious propositions; at this early date

even the decision of the papacy was still pend-

ing. The Sorbonne previewed its intentions in a

determinatio in 1521, before condemning Lu-

ther’s works, past and future, later that year. The

fifteen months that it took to render judgment

gives rise to speculation. Although it is not sur-

prising that the Sorbonne exercised its Gallican

prerogative, it does seem that Paris theologians

were waiting for the other shoe to drop in Rome.

To crown the condemnations, Parlement for-

bade the preaching of “Lutheran” doctrines in

1526.

By insisting on biblical exegesis in Greek and

Hebrew, expressing a desire to return to a purer

Church, holding the Bible over Catholic tradi-

tion, and rejecting the idea that one can force a

man’s conscience in matters of faith, Luther

seemed (at least initially) to be saying no more

or less than Erasmus. But Luther’s doctrine of

salvation—sola scriptura (by Scripture alone)

and sola fide (by faith alone)—would prove to

be a major fault line of Christian belief.

Strangely enough, not even the showdown be-

tween Luther and Erasmus on free will (1524–

25) distinguished these two Renaissance titans

in the minds of the most conservative. Closer to

Erasmus, Rabelais gives us no indication that he

adhered to Lutheran sola fide. Nonetheless, the

new ideas were globally labeled “lutheriennes,”

particularly before the Council of Trent. Lu-

ther’s schismatic stance quickly became appar-

ent, and historians distinguish him from those

who remained committed to reforming the

Church from within, including Rabelais and the

evangelism movement. Not so the conservative

Sorbonne; curiously, among the mostly theolog-

ical titles they censored appeared a couple of lit-

erary works considered suspect. They were au-

thored by Marguerite de Navarre and Rabelais.

Readings: Robert Fife, The Revolt of Martin Luther

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1957); Eva

Kushner, “Was King Picrochole Free? Rabelais be-

tween Luther and Erasmus,” CLS 14.4 (December):

306–20; Will G. Moore, La reforme allemande et la

litterature francaise. Recherches sur la notoriete de

Luther en France (Strasbourg: Faculte de Lettres de

Strasbourg, 1930).

Amy C. Graves

LYON Located on two navigable rivers, the

Rhone and the Saone, near the cultural centers

of northern Italy, southern Germany, and Ge-

neva, at many crossroads, Lyon was a prosperous

financial and commercial city during Rabelais’s

time, with a population of about 60,000. Lyon

was a base for Francis I’s military incursions

into Italy and thus he frequently visited that area.

Four annual fairs, which brought books, cloth,

and other manufactured and raw goods into

France as well as exporting French products, as-

sured Lyon’s ties with the rest of Europe. None-

theless, the city experienced periods of scarcity,

one of the worst occurring in 1531, two years

after the serious grain riot known as La Grande

Rebeyne. A welfare program, l’Aumone general,

was founded in 1534 to prevent these volatile

situations. Lyon arguably surpassed Paris in the

importance of its printing industry, as censor-

ship was less to be feared here. In this period,

Lyon had neither a university nor a Parlement,

but rather groups of relatively independent hu-

manist scholars and authors who were extraor-

dinarily productive. Among them were Clement

Lyon 149

Marot, Maurice Sceve, Louise Labe, and

Etienne Dolet. Because of the numerous indus-

tries, silk and printing being the foremost, arti-

sans gathered to create carnivalesque organiza-

tions such as mock courts and abbeys of misrule.

Rabelais entered this lively atmosphere when he

became a doctor at the city’s Hotel-Dieu in

1532. He chose to publish most of his works first

in Lyon. Although his colleague Symphorien

Champier’s work figures in the Library of

Saint-Victor (P 7), only passing mention is

made of the city itself (G 33, P 4, for example).

Still, it is hard to imagine Rabelais writing his

works in the relatively repressive environments

of other French cities.

Readings: Francoise Bayard, Vivre a Lyon sous

l’Ancien Regime (Paris: Perrin, 1997); Natalie Zemon

Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France

(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965);

Philip Ford and Gillian Jondorf, eds., Intellectual Life

in Renaissance Lyon (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 1993), especially Richard Cooper, “Human-

ism and Politics in Lyon in 1533,” 1–32; Jean-Pierre

Gutton, Histoire de Lyon et du Lyonnais (Paris:

Presses Universitaires de France, 1998).

Kathleen Perry Long

M

MACHIAVELLI, NICCOLO (1469–1527) A

Florentine bureaucrat often credited with creating

political science as an autonomous discipline.

His Il principe or The Prince, written between

1513 and 1521 in an effort to persuade Lorenzo

de’ Medici’s son Piero to take him into his serv-

ice, and his more substantial Discourses on the

First Ten Books of Livy (Discorsi sopra la prima

deca di Tito Livio), circulated widely in manu-

script, though they were not published until five

years after his death. Along with On the Art of

War (Dell’arte della guerra [Florence, 1521]),

they made his ideas known to intellectuals across

Europe, but they had scant influence on Rabelais.

A possible exception is the twenty-fourth chapter

of Book 2 of the Discorsi, in which Machiavelli

reports an Athenian query on whether a visiting

Spartan did not find Athens’ walls impressive.

Yes, the Spartan was reported to have replied, if

the city were inhabited by women. Although Ra-

belais might have conceived the walls of Paris

chapter of Pantagruel (TLF 11; P 15) on reading

these lines, Verdun-L. Saulnier identified Plu-

tarch as the likely source and pointed out that the

exchange made it into the innumerable chap-

books of useful quotations.

Gargantua and the first two chapters of the

Third Book showed more interest in politics for

its own sake than either the first or last books; but

even these texts, often labeled “anti-

Machiavellian” for their advocacy of clemency

toward prisoners of war and the vanquished owed

more to Rabelais’s relations with his patrons and

protectors, the brothers Du Bellay, than to his

meditations on the Prince or the Discourses.

Readings: Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles:

War, Peace, and the Course of History (New York:

Knopf, 2002); Francesco Guicciardini, Antimachia-

velli, ed. Gian Franco Berardi (Rome: Edition Riuniti,

1984); Jonathan Haslam, No Virtue like Necessity: Re-

alist Thought in International Relations since Machi-

avelli (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002);

Machiavelli, Il principe, ed. Federico Chabod and

Luigi Firpo (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Tori-

nese, (Turin: 1961); Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la

prima deca di Tito Livio, ed. Gennaro Sasso and Gior-

gio Inglese (Milan: Rizollo, 1984); Verdun-Louis

Saulnier, ed. Pantagruel, TLF (Geneva: Droz, 1965).

Edward Benson

MACREONS “People who live a long time”

(“Gens qui vivent longuement”), according to the

Briefve Declaration. Their island is the setting

for chapters 25–28 of the Fourth Book. It is here

that Pantagruel and his entourage land to repair

the damages made to their vessels by the great

storm of chapters 18–22. The island is domi-

nated by a vast forest filled with temples, obel-

isques, pyramids, monuments, and sepulchres

and has become home to demons and the heroes

of legend. Their presence and that of inscriptions

and epitaphs in a variety of writing systems and

languages characterize the island of the Ma-

creons as a land of myth, legend, lessons, and

philosophy to be gleaned from antiquity. Yet the

long discussion that ensues between Pantagruel

and their guide, the “old Macrobius” (“vieil Ma-

crobe”), reveals that this land of ancient wisdom

is also the island of death. The heroes and de-

mons that live here have come here to die, and

the great monuments found in the forest are in

ruin. The characters speak at length of signs pro-

duced in nature at the deaths of great men, in-

cluding that of Guillaume du Bellay in 1543

(4BK 27). During this same discussion, Panta-

gruel relates the tale of the Egyptian pilot Tham-

ous and the death of Pan (4BK 28). As perhaps

the only unambiguously positive escale or port

of call in the Fourth Book, the island of the Ma-

creons highlights the value of classical wisdom.

Major, John 151

With its hieroglyphs and polyglot inscriptions,

the discussion regarding the significance of the

storm, and also Pantagruel’s analysis of the tale

of Thamous, the island of the Macreons also

evokes one of the frequently discussed themes in

Rabelais’s work: the problematic relationship be-

tween writing and reading and the interpreta-

tion of signs.



Press, 2000); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca,


Douglas L. Boudreau

MACROBE A fictional character in the

Fourth Book, old Macrobe welcomes Panta-

gruel and his companions to the island of the

Macreons after the storm at sea. The Brief Dec-

laration offers the following definition: “Ma-

crobe, the long-lived man,” and the narrator of

the Rabelaisian tale presents him as the “burgo-

master” of the Macreons. In chapters 25 to 28 of

the Fourth Book, devoted to the travelers’ stay

on the island, Pantagruel asks the old man about

the causes of the storm. The old man’s expla-

nation is that natural disasters occur at the mo-

ment that demons and heroes die. In French, Ma-

crobe’s name is a homonym of Macrobius, the

fifth century a.d. Latin writer. This magistrate

(vir consularis) was the author of the Saturnalia

and a commentator on the Dream of Scipio. His

commentary, famous throughout the Middle

Ages and the Renaissance, assured the transmis-

sion of fragments of Cicero’s De Republica. For

centuries, all that was known of Cicero’s treatise

was the sixth and last book with the comments

of Macrobius. Although P. M. Schedler and

W. H. Stahl have uncovered Macrobius’s influ-

ence on the Middle Ages, little work has yet been

done on the reputation Macrobius enjoyed during

the Renaissance. Nevertheless, the large number

of editions, translations, and commentaries pub-

lished in the sixteenth century testify to the broad

circulation of his works. Even in the fifteenth

century, Francois Villon cited Macrobius in his

Ballad of Parisian Women (Ballade des femmes

de Paris), and the author of the Saturnalia is the

writer from classic antiquity to whom Petrarch

referred most frequently. Like his contemporar-

ies, Rabelais was quite familiar with Macrobius,

whose Saturnalia he mentions at the end of chap-

ter 3 of Gargantua. The name Macrobius also

appears in chapter 42b (OC 1678) of the Fifth

Book.

Readings: Diane Desrosiers-Bonin, “Macrobe et les

ames heroıques (Rabelais, Quart Livre, chapters 25 to

28),” RAR 11.3 (1987): 211–21; Diane Desrosiers-

Bonin, “Le Songe de Scipion et le commentaire de

Macrobe a la Renaissance,” Le songe a la Renaissance

(Saint-Etienne; France: Institut d’etudes de la Renais-

sance et de l’Age classique, 1990); C. R. Ligota,

“L’influence de Macrobe pendant la Renaissance,” Le

soleil a la Renaissance. Sciences et mythes (Bruxelles/

Paris: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles/Presses

Universitaires de France, 1965); Macrobius, Commen-

tary on the Dream of Scipio, ed. William H. Stahl

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1952); P.

Matthaeus Schedler, Die Philosophie des Macrobius

und ihr Einfluss auf die Wissenschaft des christlichen

Mittelalters (Munster: Aschendorff, 1916).

Diane Desrosiers-Bonin

MAJOR (MAIORIS, MAIR), JOHN (1467–

1550) Scholastic logician and theologian. Ma-

jor was born in Gleghornie near Haddington,

Scotland, and died at Saint Andrews. After early

studies at Haddington and Cambridge, he took

the M.A. at the University of Paris in 1494 and

the doctorate in theology, at the Parisian colleges

of Montaigu and Navarre, in 1506. He was one

of the most popular teachers of Nominalist-

terminist logic at the College de Montaigu in

Paris (1496–1517 and 1526–31), spending the in-

tervening and later years at Glasgow and Saint

Andrews.

Major’s numerous editions of Aristotelian

physics, ethics, and especially terminist logic

were reprinted many times. As a theologian, he

wrote commentaries on the Gospels (1518, 1529)

and on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (1509,

1510, 1517, 1528), and he edited the Reporta-

tiones of Johannes Duns Scotus (1518). Rabelais

and other humanists were critical of his scholas-

tic methodology and style (P 7, where Major is

said to have authored De modo faciendi boudinos

[How to Make Sausages]). But his works mani-

fest creative, independent thinking on questions

of authority, economics, and morality. Although

a staunch critic of humanist-based curriculum, in

1529 he wrote to Noel Beda and Pierre Tem-

152 Mardigras

pete that scholastic theologians had too long ig-

nored the Bible. Active in the proceedings of the

Paris Faculty of Theology, he was a conciliarist

and critic of ecclesiastical abuses but abhorred

heretical movements. Francisco de Vitoria and

later Francisco Suarez were influenced by his

theological works. Some regard him today as

having contributed to the rise of modern science.

Readings: Alexander Broadie, The Circle of John

Mair: Logic and Logicians in pre-Reformation Scot-

land (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); John

Durkan and James Kirk, University of Glasgow (Glas-

gow: University of Glasgow Press, 1977); James K.

Farge, Biographical Register of Paris Doctors of The-

ology, 1500–1536, n. 329 (Toronto, Pontifical Institute

of Mediaeval Studies, 1980); Louis Vereecke, “Mari-

age et sexualite au declin du moyen-age,” Vie spiri-

tuelle, Supplement, 56.14 (1961): 199–225; F. Vos-

man, Giovanni Maior (1467–1550) et la sua morale

economica intorno al contratto di societa (Rome: Pon-

tificia Universitas Lateranensis, 1985).

James K. Farge

MARDIGRAS Protector and idol of the Chit-

terlings or Andouilles in their eternal war against

Quaresmeprenant; one in a long line of mon-

sters that people the Fourth Book. In the incar-

nation of a grotesquely described winged pig, at-

tributed to the fact that all sausages are made of

pork, Mardigras flies over the battlefield at the

height of the mock battle between Frere Jean’s

culinary army and the Andouilles (4BK 42),

dropping large quantities of mustard, which heal

the wounded and resuscitate the dead sausages.

Upon seeing their monstrous God, all sausage

warriors kneel down and join their hands as if in

silent prayer. Niphleseth describes the apparition

as the “archetype” (“idea” in the Platonic sense)

of “Mardigras,” founder of the race of Chitter-

lings, the sausages’ idolatry being thus directed

toward an image of the self. In contrast to its

ambivalent offspring, the monster seems to rep-

resent a more univocal incarnation of Carnival

on a literal level.

Despite the episode’s religious ambiguities

that see Pantagruel’s party caught between the

warring Catholic and Protestant factions without

endorsing either side, Mardigras’s impact lies

mainly in the realm of the satire of the Catholic

Church and its contemptible practices, which, in

more or less subtle ways (the episode of the pap-

imanes and papefigues would serve as an ex-

ample for the latter case) runs through the text.

The apparition of Mardigras aims at two main

targets: the Eucharist, which at least since the

Affaire des Placards (October 1534) had been

a main concern of Protestant and humanist re-

formers; and the definitive schism brought about

by the Council of Trent’s official condemnation

of Protestantism.

As for the Eucharist, Niphleseth’s definition of

the resuscitating mustard as the Chitterlings’

“sangreal and heavenly balm” alludes to contem-

porary ecclesiastical rites, in which the flesh—in

true Shrovetide fashion, as Carnival was known

as “Charnage” (“flesh”) in medieval French lit-

erature—triumphs over the spirit of the cere-

mony. The elevation of “mustard” to the position

of the Savior’s “real” and “royal blood” clearly

shows the contemptible reification of sacred cer-

emonies. Rabelais had already presented a model

for the Cena (4BK 1), in which the preparations

for the fleet’s departure are completed by a cer-

emony dominated by the Holy Scriptures, remi-

niscent of the early days of pure Christianity, the

opposite of Mardigras’s cult. Such pursuit of the

restoration of “primitive Christianity” was also

the basis of Erasmus’s criticism, which, like Ra-

belais’s, goes far beyond the relatively timid ref-

ormation attempts of the Protestant liturgy. The

Greek inscription around the pig’s neck (“A Pig

Teaching Minerva”) refers to an Erasmian adage

criticizing the ignorant who attempt to teach the

wise and satirizes the decadence of Lutheran and

Calvinist reformers as well as of the Catholic

Church. The Council of Trent had focused on

these issues in its seventh (the sacraments) and

thirteenth sessions (the Eucharist), respectively,

in 1547 and 1551–52. But instead of reconciling

the factions as its name (concilium) would sug-

gest, it had contributed to the division of Chris-

tianity. Rabelais exploits this play on words at

the beginning of the episode (4BK 35) and an-

nounces its biting religious satire, directed at

Catholics and Protestants alike and capped by

Mardigras’s timely appearance.

Readings: Edwin M. Duval, “La messe, la cene, et

le voyage sans fin du Quart Livre,” Rabelais en son

demi-millenaire, ed. J. Ceard, and J.-Cl. Margolin, ER

21 (Geneva: Droz, 1983); Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s

Marot, Clement 153

Carnival (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1990); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais, chapter 9 (Lon-

don: Duckworth, 1979).

Bernd Renner

MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE (1492–1549)

Scholars of the French Renaissance have won-

dered about the relationship between Rabelais

and Marguerite de Navarre, who was sister to the

king, Francis I, and patron of the author during

the early to mid-1540s. Rabelais had been named

“Master of the King’s Requests” in 1543, and

relations with the royal family appear to have

been good until he left Paris for Metz in 1546

(Zegura and Tetel 1993: 20).

It seems no accident that around this time Ra-

belais dedicated the Third Book to Marguerite,

inviting her to come down from her “manoir di-

vin,” in order to enjoy more stories about the

earthy Pantagruel (3BK ded.). Marguerite is

portrayed here as a patron of Rabelais and in fact

probably did help him obtain the privilege for

republication of Gargantua and Pantagruel as

well as for printing the Third Book in September

1545. She was to begin to assemble the tales for

the Heptameron the same year (1545–46), a key

time for the relationship between the two (Sal-

minen 111).

But did the relationship go beyond patronage?

Traditionally, many scholars have been surprised

by the dedication of the Third Book to Margue-

rite, since they see major differences and disa-

greements between the spiritual, feminist Mar-

guerite and the earthy, misogynist Rabelais. The

dedication has been viewed as gently ironic by

the majority of writers on the subject (Freccero

1991: 150; Lefranc, 1922) and only a few see

agreement as a motivation for it (Bauschatz

2003: 406; Tetel 1973: 106, 122).

Some similarities between the two writers in-

clude their sympathy with the Reform, and par-

ticularly with subjects discussed at the Council

of Trent, which convened in 1546, such as the

condemnation of clandestine marriage, a subject

raised by both Rabelais (3BK 48) and Marguerite

(Heptameron 21, 40). Both reject clandestine

marriage in favor of a more traditional marriage

arranged by parents (Screech 281–86).

Although Marguerite has been viewed as a

spiritual thinker and Rabelais as much more ori-

ented toward the physical, the topic of marriage,

with its union of the physical and the spiritual,

is emblematic of the need for both writers to

combine the two. The friendship between Ra-

belais and Marguerite, if friendship there was,

shows them to have been more like-minded than

was previously believed. For Rabelais scholars,

this possible friendship offers a needed corrective

to the popular stereotype of Rabelais as only a

misogynistic “bon vivant.”

Readings: Cathleen M. Bauschatz, “Rabelais and

Marguerite de Navarre on Sixteenth-Century Views of

Clandestine Marriage,” SCJ 34.2 (2003): 395–408;

Carla Freccero, Father Figures: Genealogy and Nar-

rative Structure in Rabelais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-

versity Press, 1991); Abel Lefranc, “Etude sur Rube-

lais,” Oeuvres, vol. 3 (Paris: Champion, 1922); Renja

Salminen, ed. Heptameron,TFL 516 (Geneva: Droz,

1999): Marcel Tetel, Marguerite de Navarre’s Hep-

tameron: Themes, Language and Structure (Durham,

NC: Duke University Press, 1973); Elizabeth Chesney

Zegura and Marcel Tetel, Rabelais Revisited (New

York: Twayne/Macmillan, 1993).


MAROT, CLEMENT (1496?–1544) French

poet of the early Renaissance whose embattled

relationship with the Sorbonne, evangelical lean-

ings, taste for Erasmus, and satiric verve invite

comparisons with his friend and fellow humanist

Rabelais. Praised by Boileau for his “elegant

badinage” (Art poetique 1.96), the poet seems on

one hand to build upon the legacy of his father

Jean Marot, a rhetoriqueur renowned for his ex-

aggerated wordplay. On the other hand, the

sharp-edged social, political, and religious com-

mentary lurking beneath many of Marot’s poems,

particularly his Epistres and Enfers, is cut from

the same fabric as his life. Imprisoned at least

three times and forced to seek refuge abroad, de-

spite the royal protection he enjoyed early in his

career as the king’s valet de chambre, Marot al-

most certainly crossed paths with Rabelais on a

number of occasions: at the court of Renee de

France in Ferrara, for example, a haven for Re-

formers where Marot sought exile during Rabe-

lais’s southward journey to Rome with Jean du

Bellay in 1535, and at a banquet of humanists

154 Marriage

held in 1537 to celebrate Etienne Dolet’s pardon

for accidentally killing a man (Frame 1977: 14–

15). Occasional Marotic echoes also find their

way into Rabelais’s work (Screech 1979: 149 n.

23, 359), particularly his Gargantua, while two

or three poems attributed to the Gallic physician

appear in the 1533 edition of Marot’s Adoles-

cence Clementine, suggesting a “close collabo-

ration” between the two authors (Defaux 1997:

404) (see also Evangelism).


rieur au prophete (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Gerard De-

faux, Rabelais, Marot, Montaigne: l’ecriture comme

presence (Paris: Champion-Slatkine, 1987); Donald

Frame, Rabelais. A Study (New York: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, 1977); Claude A. Mayer, Clement Marot

(Paris: Nizet, 1972); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais

(London: Duckworth, 1979); Pauline M. Smith, Cle-

ment Marot: Poet of the French Renaissance (London:

Athlone, 1970).


MARRIAGE Issues related to marriage were

widely discussed and debated during the French

Renaissance for a variety of cultural reasons. In

the wake of the Reformation, theologians such

as John Calvin and Martin Luther discussed

the topic and its relation to religion. Whether

women were suitable for marriage and whether

men should marry were questions debated within

the larger intellectual context of the querelle des

femmes, a recurring debate among male and fe-

male authors over the nature and status of

women. The necessity of marriage for men was

also a standard topic for rhetorical pro/contra ar-

gumentation practice. As a result, it is difficult to

determine to what extent writers’ positions on

marriage were influenced by rhetorical conven-

tions. In this cultural context, a number of French

and Latin tracts treating marriage were pub-

lished, including Erasmus’s In Praise of Mar-

riage (1518), Vives’s The Instruction of a Chris-

tian Woman (1523), and Agrippa’s The

Commendation of Matrimony (1526). As a writer

deeply engaged in the cultural and intellectual

debates of his period, Rabelais makes marriage

an important concern of his work, but his views

are less clear and more difficult to ascertain than

those of most contemporary writers on the sub-

ject.

Marriage makes appearances in Gargantua

and Pantagruel, often evoking rather traditional

beliefs related to the institution. In Gargantua’s

famous letter to Pantagruel (P 8), “lawful mar-

riage” is mentioned within the lengthier discus-

sion of the immortality acquired by having chil-

dren. Though marriage is generally taken for

granted in discussions of procreation, in his letter

Gargantua does not insist that his son marry, nor

does he enumerate the virtues of marriage. Gar-

gantua’s ambivalent reaction to the death of his

wife who dies in childbirth (P 2) suggests the

view that marriage could be purely functional

and not based on intimacy or affection. As one

element of Rabelais’s utopia, marriage appears

briefly in the description of the Abbey of The-

leme (G 57). Though living in an abbey, the The-

lemites can “be regularly married” if they so de-

sire, reflecting their motto “Do what you will”

and possibly a critique of the Catholic Church’s

rigidity in the area of marriage. Those who leave

the utopia of Theleme marry and live “in devo-

tion and friendship.” Marriage explicitly based

on intimacy and companionship is thus placed

outside the realm of the ideal world.

It is in the Third Book that Rabelais moves

marriage to the fore, as Panurge visits various

types of people to ask them whether he should

marry. Although his comic quest for knowledge

about marriage and women is ostensibly per-

sonal, the issue is also framed as a larger ques-

tion of whether men in general should marry.

Through the numerous and lengthy consultation

scenes (3BK 9–46), various reasons to marry are

juxtaposed with reasons not to marry in rhetori-

cal for/against fashion. Panurge’s desire for

companionship, in particular, is contrasted with

his fear of being cuckolded by a cruel wife, re-

flecting an anxiety about the masculine ability to

control female sexuality. Rabelais accepts the

widespread view that marriage exists for procre-

ation, but like Erasmus, he extends this limited

definition to include the possibility of compan-

ionship. As a result, marriage need not be con-

sidered an impediment to purity and a hindrance

to spirituality. If marriage can be for companion-

ship, women are also assumed to be more than

simple bearers of children for their husbands,

even as they are not necessarily considered equal

to men. Rabelais also implies that, as was a com-

Medamothi 155

mon assumption in marriage tracts, marriage can

moderate the excesses of male sexuality, al-

though Panurge appears to be incapable of mod-

erating his excesses.

Despite these implicit critiques of the institu-

tion of marriage the question of whether Panurge

should marry is never resolved, and no definite

judgment on marriage is ever presented. Rather,

like the texts that circulated in the Renaissance,

marriage is open to interpretation by the male

individual who has the freedom to make his own

choice about whether to marry. Panurge consults

numerous men and women (including a doctor,

lawyer, philosopher, and theologian) about his

dilemma, implying that his personal decision

about marriage should be a well-researched one

employing all the tools at his disposal. Marriage

is not inherently a good or bad way of life.

Rather, its nature should be determined on a

case-by-case basis. This individual, however,

would appear to be necessarily male in the Third

Book. Marriage is not discussed as a choice for

women, who are continually represented in re-

lation to men in the various discussions of mar-

riage. At the same time, Panurge’s comic exces-

ses, bordering on hysteria, imply a mockery of

masculine attitudes toward marriage.

Readings: Constance Jordan, Renaissance Femi-

nism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, 1990); Todd W. Reeser,

“Moderation and Masculinity in Renaissance Marriage

Discourse and in Rabelais’s Tiers livre,” RR 90.1

(2000): 1–25; M. A. Screech, The Rabelaisian Mar-

riage: Aspects of Rabelais’s Religion, Ethics and

Comic Philosophy (London: Edward Arnold, 1958).

Todd Reeser

MARROW OR MARROWBONE English

translations of “la sustantificque mouelle” and

“os medulaire,” respectively, terms introduced in

the prologue to Gargantua in the narrator’s dis-

cussion of allegory. Serving as metaphors of the

Rabelaisian text, the marrow and marrowbone

suggest that the chronicles have an “inside” as

well as an “outside,” and that the hidden meaning

underneath the work’s grotesque surface, akin to

the “fine drugs” contained within the frivolous-

looking Silenus box, is accessible only to those

who through “curiosity” and “frequent medita-

tion break the bone and suck out the marrow”

(G prol.). Although this metaphor serves as the

cornerstone for allegorical readings of Rabelais’s

text, it is also undermined by the narrator’s sub-

sequent caution about seeking hidden meaning

where none exists: “If you believe Homer

thought about allegories while he was writing the

Iliad and the Odyssey,” he says equivocally,

“then your interpretation is a far cry from my

own” (G prol.).

Readings: Mary Farrell, “The Alchemy of Rabe-

lais’s Marrow Bone,” MLS 13.2 (1983): 97–104; Fred

W. Marshall, “Worrying the Bone Again: The Struc-

ture and Significance of the Prologue to Gargantua,”

AJFS 24.1 (1987): 3–22; Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, “The

Myth of the Sustanficque Mouelle: A Lacanian Per-

spective on Rabelais’s Use of Language,” Literature

and Psychology 34.3 (1988): 1–21.


MEDAMOTHI (4BK 2) The island where

Pantagruel and his companions make their first

stop on the way to the Holy Bottle in the Fourth

Book. According to the glossary or Briefve De-

claration that accompanies Rabelais’s text, Me-

damothi means “no place” in Greek. Although

some scholars have attempted to identify the ge-

ographic location of Medamothi, others insist

that its name and nature function to discourage

any literal or realistic reading of the voyage. Ar-

riving on the island during the annual fair that

attracts the richest and most famous merchants

of Asia and Africa, the Pantagruelists purchase a

series of paradoxical art works and exotic ani-

mals which raise fascinating questions about

literary and artistic mimesis. The inventory of

Pantagruel’s art acquisitions has prompted con-

flicting interpretations, suggesting either a sud-

den penchant for “Alexandrian” symbolism on

Rabelais’s part or a preclassical taste for ideal-

izing imitation or a demonstration of the auto-

referentiality of fiction. In particular, the painting

of Platonic ideas purchased by Epistemon may

be understood to parody the Neoplatonic ambi-

tion to render the intelligible visible by means of

hieroglyphs and other occult symbols. This par-

ody of the utopian impulse to materialize the im-

material may in turn remind us of the materiality

of language, which in Rabelais often assumes

the density and opacity of a work of visual art.

In this way, language becomes visible in Rabe-

156 Medicine

lais’s text just as it does on Medamothi in the

portrait of Echo or the paintings of proverbs. For

its many paradoxes, Medamothi remains a pop-

ular destination of Rabelais criticism.

Readings: Michel Beaujour, Le jeu de Rabelais

(Paris: L’Herne, 1969); Antoinette Huon, “Alexandrie

et l’alexandrinisme dans le Quart Livre: L’escale a

Medamothi,” ER 1 (1956): 98–111; Abel Lefranc, Les

navigations de Pantagruel. Etude sur la geographie

rabelaisienne (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967); Eric

MacPhail, “The Masters of Medamothi: Rabelais and

Visual Prose,” ER 35 (1998): 175–91; Paul J. Smith,

Voyage et ecriture (Geneva: Droz, 1987).

Eric MacPhail

MEDICINE Renaissance field of study and

profession intimately intertwined with religion

and philosophy, selected as an interest by Ra-

belais as early as 1520 when he learned Greek

and began to pour over ancient texts. During his

years as a novice, exposure to the sick and des-

titute likely formed in the future doctor a foun-

dation of interest in charity toward his fellow

man. Upon arrival in Fontenay, discussion and

quarrels in which he participated led him further

in the direction of medical studies, pushed on by

the humanistic promise of medicine to seek ever

more deeply a complete and encyclopedic

knowledge of the human body and soul. The

leap from novice and future priest to medical

doctor was not unrealistic for Rabelais, in light

of the nature of his studies to this point, for he

had been exposed to both ancient and modern

philosophies. According to Erasmus in his in-

terpretation of Galenic theory, the medical pro-

fession is perfectly aligned with religion. He

placed the doctor’s care for the body in line only

behind Christ’s care for the soul, naming the

practice of medicine the most important profes-

sion in Christian life. The respect for life nec-

essary in the medical field could only be mani-

fested though multiple acts of charity and indeed

through a focus on moral philosophy. Healing

the sick and caring for general health could take

place only if doctors also served as moralists.

Reforms in lifestyle, during the Renaissance as

today, were considered essential to the mainte-

nance of health. Rabelais’s humanistic studies

and life experiences thus impressed upon him the

importance of medicine as a career choice and as

a way of living out the ideals expressed in his

reading.

From 1528 until 1530, possessing a strong

command of Greek and having abandoned the

Benedictine order to become a secular priest, Ra-

belais made his way from Paris to Montpellier

where he enrolled in medical school. A mere six

weeks after the opening of classes, Rabelais was

granted his diploma in testimony to the consid-

erable preparation he had received through prior

tutoring and personal study. Study in this case

was key; medical school involved no practical

application of the healing arts but rather focused

on deciphering and commenting on texts by the

ancients. Rabelais could do this so well that he

gave a public lecture (an exit requirement for

medical students having obtained their diplomas)

on Hippocrates’s Aphorisms and a medical trea-

tise by Galen, translating directly from Greek

manuscripts. Needless to say, his presentation

made a grand impression. Still, the goal of many

years of patient, diligent work, according to all

that he had read and studied, was actually to care

for the body as a practicing physician, with the

hope that healing the body would ultimately

bring peace and contentment to the soul.

In the two years that span his graduation from

Montpellier and subsequent arrival at the Hotel-

Dieu in Lyon, Rabelais added to his growing

reputation with several scholarly publications. In

1532 he was named primary physician of the

Lyon public hospital and began the practice that

would complement and complete his years of

study and preparation. It is impossible to know

the physician’s exact impressions as he encoun-

tered the stark realities of the public hospital. He

had accepted work among the very poorest and

indeed most physically suffering patients in the

city. The hospital’s beds were full of people in

the clutches of a wide variety of ailments ranging

from dermatological problems to syphilis, from

battle wounds to full-blown contagious disease.

Although he had some access to pharmaceuticals

and could prescribe surgical procedures to be

carried out under his supervision by a barber-

surgeon, little could be done to assuage pain,

much less actually cure those under his care. The

difficulty of this work, the pitiful salary received

for it, and a recognition of the limits of the trade

most certainly played a role in Rabelais’s deci-

Menippean Paradox 157

sion to take up the pen in a singularly caring act

of genius.

Presenting his books from the outset as med-

icine for the very public he could do little to help

tangibly as a physician, Rabelais concocts a po-

tion of words with a promise of beneficial heal-

ing for all who partake. The allegories are thor-

oughly filled with references to the doctor’s

Greek mentors and medical themes of all sorts.

Fantastical gestation and birth are followed by

unbelievable, life-restoring surgical procedures

and miraculous healing, while diet, exercise, and

musings on the role of vital organs are intermin-

gled with discussions of women and sexuality.

The books are infused with Rabelais’s vast

knowledge of anatomy, physiology, botany, and

a variety of other disciplines. Yet the healing his

allegories purport to contain resides not in the

author’s knowledge or transmission of these sci-

ences, but rather in a specific and encompassing

attention to the soul. For in Rabelais’s quest to

create laugher and thus “resjouir le malade” (give

enjoyment to the sick), in his desire to buoy the

spirit, he knows that the body will no more be

healed than by his daily visits to the sick of the

Hotel-Dieu. His target, as dictated by his human-

ist past, is the whole person—body and soul. Ra-

belais’s primary medico-philosophical “message”

of health calls for moderation, simplicity, and hu-

mility in all aspects of life. Only in this manner,

he maintains, will the human being find balance

and health. In writing, Rabelais goes beyond his

objective to exercise the most important profes-

sion in Christian life, for his charitable act and

message of health reach far beyond the sphere of

his work as physician in Lyon to all readers who

encounter the substantial, healing marrow of his

texts.

Reading: Roland Antonioli, Rabelais et la mede-

cine, ER 12 (Geneva: Droz, 1976).

Lesa Randall

MENIPPEAN PARADOX A characteristic of

the hybrid genre of Menippean satire, founded

by Menippus (third century b.c.), whose writings

have been lost. Our knowledge is based on imi-

tations by Varro (first century b.c.) and the Greek

Cynic Lucian of Samosata (second century a.d.).

Lucian’s influence on Renaissance writers is

considerable. He claimed to have been the first

to combine comedy and dialogue, which marks

the menippea’s typical mixture of genres, allow-

ing for a formal framework incorporating philo-

sophical profundity and levity in the same text

and thus achieving the Horatian utile dulci mix-

tum. This syncretism of quasi-incompatible gen-

res is mirrored on the content level by the device

of the Menippean paradox: in Rabelais’s case,

multiple, often seemingly mutually exclusive, in-

terpretative possibilities that surface especially in

the Third and Fourth Books, whose prologues

display perhaps the most explicit Lucianic influ-

ence.

Gargantua displays the timid beginnings of

this phenomenon, particularly in the prologue

with its emphasis on the paradoxical Silenus fig-

ure and its convoluted commentary on methods

of interpretation. The paradox becomes even

more prevalent in the contrasting readings of the

final Enigmatic Prophecy (alternatively a tennis

match or the persecution of Christians [G 58]).

Because of its central question of Panurge’s

marital fate, the entire Third Book may be seen

as a prime illustration of the Menippean paradox,

and so can the trickster’s sole persona, espe-

cially considering his change in attitude and

status from Pantagruel to the Third and Fourth

Books, which accentuates his initial ambivalence.

Panurge is simultaneously a “mischievous rogue”

and the “best fellow in the world” (P 16). It is

Pantagruel, who, at the end of the philosophical

banquet (3BK 35), presents a model for resolving

paradoxes through careful and informed interpre-

tation. Drawing on common sense and sound er-

udition, he shows how the philosopher Trouil-

logan’s contradictory answers to the question of

Panurge’s marriage (“both” and “neither”) mu-

tually enhance each other, thereby illustrating the

menippea’s characteristic concordia oppositorum

or union of opposites.

The Fourth Book abounds in paradoxical epi-

sodes that are henceforth most often combined

with another essential Menippean element: the

grotesque. Prime examples would be the contro-

versial farces of Dindenault (4BK 6–7) and

Basche (4BK 12–16), questioning, in our per-

spective, the right measure for punishment. The

monstrous episodes of Quaresmeprenant (4BK

29–32), the Chitterlings or Andouilles (4BK 35–

42), and Messere Gaster (4BK 57–62) stand out

158 Mercury

as their hermeneutic cornucopia is embedded in

an anatomy of the grotesque, which helps them

exceed the boundaries of conventional human

thinking and perceptions. In Gaster’s case, for

instance, the criticism is directed not only at the

disturbing image of the ambivalent ventripotent

god, “first master of arts in the world,” but

equally at the idolatry of his followers.

Because of its roots in Cynicism, the Menip-

pean paradox enables us to escape the tyranny of

dogmata and universal truths. It is therefore a

powerful device in Rabelais’s satire of the abuses

of ecclesiastical, political, or intellectual author-

ities, challenging the validity of the officially

sanctioned altior sensus and thus opening the

door to radical doubt—hence the anti-intellectual

bent of this extremely erudite approach. This fun-

damental skepticism provides an epistemological

grounding to the plurality of meanings and in-

terpretations, one of Rabelais’s major themes.

Consequently, it even inscribes the paradox in its

modus operandi and questions the authority of

human reason by appealing to the potential of

that very same reason, capable of pushing back

the limits of human knowledge if one keeps an

open mind and the willingness to think outside

the norm.

Readings: W. Scott Blanchard, Scholars’ Bedlam.

Menippean Satire in the Renaissance (Lewisburg, PA:

Bucknell University Press, 1995); Dorothy G. Cole-

man, Rabelais. A Critical Study in Prose Fiction

(Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1971);

Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre

de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Christiane

Lauvergnat-Gagniere, Lucien de Samosate et le lu-

cianisme en France au XVIe siecle: atheisme et po-

lemique (Geneva: Droz, 1988); Bernd Renner, “Du

coq-a-l’ane a la menippeenne: la satire comme forme

d’expression litteraire chez Rabelais” (Ph.D. diss.,

Princeton University, 2000); Andre Tournon, “Le par-

adoxe menippeen dans l’œuvre de Rabelais,” Rabelais

en son demi-millenaire, ER 21 (Geneva: Droz, 1988):

309–18.

Bernd Renner

MERCURY As official messenger to Jupiter,

the smallest of the major planets, or a metallic

element easily distinguished from all others by

its constant liquid state, the name Mercury ap-

pears with regularity throughout the Rabelaisian

corpus of allegories. Although Rabelais mentions

it in passing—in enumerations of other gods—

or as a planet whose position may influence af-

fairs, he was likely best acquainted with mercury

as a chemical element used in the medico-

pharmaceutical community as a powerful ingre-

dient in lotions and ointments destined to treat

patients suffering from syphilis. When used ex-

tremely sparingly, treatment involving frictions

with mercurial ointment followed by sessions in

a steam bath produced positive results that were

well-documented. However, in the hands of em-

pirics and charlatan doctors the element was

overused, and mercury treatments acquired con-

notations of dreadful pain and, ultimately, death.

Rabelais had these associations in mind when

reserving a main role for Jupiter’s messenger in

the Couillatris story (4BK prol.). In this mock

parable, as woodsmen lose their axe blades, sym-

bols of sexual health, Mercury is charged with

presenting them the choice of their own axe

blade along with one of gold and another of sil-

ver, the latter two symbolizing sexual excess and

desire. Selecting one’s own blade thus represents

moderation in sexual activity and carries the re-

ward of living richly. Opting for one of the other

blades carries the penalty of instant death at Mer-

cury’s terrible hand. Rabelais’s dear syphilitics

would not have mistaken the meaning of this

tale, told by the doctor who wished to spare them

the fateful horrors of mercury.




1988).

Lesa Randall

MODERATION (MEDIOCRITAS) Principle

of measure and balance promoted by Rabelais

in his books as essential for health and content-

ment in life. Made popular by Galen, whose

medical texts Rabelais knew well, this notion of

equilibrium encompasses moral and spiritual liv-

ing but involves the physical as well. Recogni-

tion of and respect for the body’s limitations was

deemed the surest manner to maintain health. In

his allegories, Rabelais encourages readers to

make moderation a goal in all things with the

examples of biblical and invented characters like

Zachhaeus and Couillatris (4BK Prol.). In the

Money 159

case of Zachhaeus (Luke 19.1–10), who climbed

a sycamore tree in order to see Jesus passing

through town and was later visited and blessed

by him in his own home, Rabelais demonstrates

that positive consequences are likely to result for

those with moderate desires. The Couillatris

story includes the same lesson, but with strong

emphasis on health and balance with regard to

sexuality.

To make his point, Rabelais shows a wealthy,

happy Couillatris who, after praying for the re-

turn of his lost source of livelihood—in this tale

a metaphor for sexual health—was rewarded for

his simplicity and honesty with land, animals,

and gold. Rabelais then juxtaposes a contented

Couillatris with the hoards of greedy men who,

interested only in pleasure and rapid wealth, are

given the extreme punishment of death for their

desires of excess. Sure to appeal to the sensibil-

ities of philosophers, doctors, and patients alike,

Rabelais’s lessons on this rule of measure may

be considered a form of medicine insofar as they

provide both preventive instruction and amuse-

ment. In an age of epidemic disease, syphilis and

warfare, Rabelais seeks to prolong and improve

lives by popularizing mediocritas as the best and

most accessible method he knows.

Readings: Vivian M. Gruber, “Rabelais: The Di-

dactics of Moderation,” EC 32 (1963): 80–86; James

S. Hans, The Golden Mean (Albany, NY: State Uni-

versity of New York Press, 1994); Todd W. Reeser,

“Framing Masculinity: The Discourse of Moderation

in Renaissance Culture,” Ph.D. diss., University of

Michigan, 1997; Todd W. Reeser, “Moderation and

Masculinity in Renaissance Marriage Discourse and in

Rabelais’s Tiers livre,” RR 90.1 (1999): 1–25.

Lesa Randall

MONEY The presence of representations of

monetary exchange and financial terms through-

out Rabelais’s novels is indicative of the budding

of capitalism and the concomitant changes in the

mentality of sixteenth-century France. Historian

Eugene Rice identified the period from 1460 to

1560 as the period when Western Europe became

capitalist (Lavatori 1996: 1). According to

Michel Foucault in The Order of Things, after

the sixteenth century, the entire organization of

signs, or episteme, changed from one where signs

were seen as based on a natural order or resem-

blance to one where money and other signs were

considered arbitrary couplings of signifier and

referent functioning by pure convention (168–

76).

The inflationary nature of the French economy

is well known. Pierre Vilar stipulates that prices

rose fourfold in France during the period from

1520 to 1600 (1976: 178). The circulation of for-

eign coins added further confusion to monetary

exchanges. Vilar mentions that eighty types of

coin were in circulation even in seventeenth-

century France (21). Furthermore, while the

pound (livre) had at one time been an actual

pound of silver, the actual coin had ceased to be

produced, although, throughout the sixteenth

century, people continued to estimate prices in

terms of livres and sous which had become imag-

inary counting monies (Vilar: 21). Adding to the

difficulty in calculating fair prices, governments

maintained the right to devalue or inflate the

value of the currency in circulation to suit their

needs (Vilar: 21). The means of payment could

also include premonetary barterlike exchange,

with the actual payment at times involving such

diverse means as horses, weapons, sacks of grain,

or cloth estimated to hold the value of the agreed

upon price (Bloch 1954: 48). Finally, the emer-

gence of credit in the form of bills of exchange,

which permitted payment through the balancing

of debts and credits without the exchange of ac-

tual gold, proliferated in the sixteenth century,

particularly at the fairs such as the one in Lyon

(Vilar: 73).

Rabelais seems to delight in exploring the

multiplicity of means of payment and competing

value systems with their possibilities for decep-

tion and the creation of paradoxical relations. Ze-

gura and Tetel identify this practice as Rabelais’s

propensity for “trafficking in two-sided tokens”

(1993: 23). They see Panurge in his immoral

economic practices as a reference to the schemers

of Gallic folklore and the ethics of personal ec-

onomic profit which were reputed to dominate

Italian business practices at the time (24–25).

Panurge characteristically manipulates economic

transactions for personal gain, often producing an

effect contrary to the acknowledged purpose of

the exchange and crediting the windfall to his

own sense of justice. Whenever he met a mon-

eychanger, he managed to secret away five or six

160 Money

coins without the changer’s knowledge (P 16).

Rabelais seems to be redressing the abuses of

moneychangers and lenders who, through their

knowledge of the rates of exchange, could sur-

reptitiously extract money from their clients.

In a similarly carnivalesque reversal, Panurge

outwits the sellers of pardons, returning from

kissing relics with his pockets full of money.

Panurge explains that, while only giving a “de-

nier” or small change coin, he did so with such

reverence as to make it seem a much more im-

portant denomination, actually taking twelve or

more deniers as “change.” Although Pantagruel

denounces the practice as heresy, Panurge de-

fends himself using the pardoners’ own promise

of a hundredfold return against them (P 17). Re-

versing similar inequalities from the real world

which Rabelais inhabited, the underworld Epis-

temon visits has popes selling paper and meat

pies to earn a meager living and usurers collect-

ing rusty pins and scrap metal just to earn a mis-

erable penny (P 30).

As with many enumerations in Rabelais, ex-

pressions of monetary value are often indications

of the self-referential nature of Rabelais’s texts.

For the construction of the Abbey of Theleme

which Gargantua offers in feudal fashion to

Frere Jean in recognition of his service, Gar-

gantua pays out 2,700,831 Agnus Dei gold coins

in cash (G 53). This very exact figure recalls its

fictive nature and casts doubt on the credibility

of such a playful narrator. According to Zegura

and Tetel, one of Rabelais’s goals from the very

first prologue to the end of the book is to culti-

vate a skeptical and informed reader through his

constant references to conflicting and indetermi-

nate expressions of value (54).

In the prologue to the Third Book, the nar-

rator initially fears that his readers will be of-

fended by the arbitrary nature of his production.

Later he realizes that the readership he has cul-

tivated will accept his eccentric production in

good faith as he has seen them take good-will,

or credit as payment (prologue). In this way Ra-

belais links his production of fiction with its pro-

ductive play of pure signs to the developing of

credit in the economic domain. In chapters 2–5,

Rabelais presents Panurge’s famous Praise of

Debts through which the trickster defends his

own cause by casting credit as a form of distrib-

utive justice (3BK 2), promoting natural or even

celestial harmony (3BK 4). However, in his por-

trayal of the perfect peace, Panurge presents a

world where gold, silver, coins, jewelry, and

merchandise are exchanged (3BK 4). His portrait

of the ideal economy presents the transitional na-

ture of the sixteenth-century economy in which

gold and silver circulated as coins and in the

more personalized form of rings. In this incom-

pletely monetary economy, more financially ad-

vanced processes such as debt or credit are pres-

ent and praised (Lavatori 1996: 73–74). There is

no absolutely privileged way of determining

value or meaning in the systems evoked in the

sixteenth-century episteme as it appears in the

Third Book.

In contrast, Rabelais at times proposes a func-

tional model of society in which exchanges are

based not on the materiality of the signs pro-

duced but on relationships of good-will between

participants in exchange. In an effort to convince

Panurge to take advice from a fool, Pantagruel

recounts how Seigny Joan once settled a notori-

ously difficult dispute by determining that a por-

ter had paid for the smoke he had used from a

meat-roaster’s fire to season his bread by simply

taking out a silver coin and ringing it (3BK 37).

Rabelais is pointing to a realm of symbolization

where signs have a value in themselves beyond

their intrinsic value, serving to facilitate

exchange, much as fiduciary or paper money

does in more developed economies (Vilar 1976:

20).

In the Fourth Book, Rabelais investigates the

fetishization of economic signs and their produc-

tivity in exchange. Dindenault, an insulting and

dishonest sheep merchant whom Panurge and the

crew of the Thalamege meet on a ship they come

across on their voyage to consult the oracle of

the Divine Bottle, goes so far as to call his live-

stock “moutons a la grande laine,” playing on a

pun that refers to both high-quality wool sheep

and gold coins stamped with an image of the

Lamb of God (4BK 6). Christophe Deberre

points out that Dindenault literally sees his sheep

only for their exchange value as money (Lavatori

1996: 127–128). Similarly, Panurge conflates his

economic transaction with the merchant and a

secondary emotional payoff. When Dindenault

and Panurge finally agree upon a price, it is only

Monsters 161

for Panurge to throw the sheep purchased over-

board, knowing that the nature of sheep is such

that the others will follow, eventually taking Din-

denault with them as he attempts to save his live-

stock. Panurge thus exploits the productivity of

signs and claims to have profited from the

exchange, getting “fifty thousand francs’ worth”

of amusement at the drowning of his adversary

(4BK 8).

The prologue to the Fourth Book tells the

story of Couillatris, a poor woodcutter who one

day loses his ax and loudly implores Jupiter to

have it returned or provide its fair market equiv-

alent in “deniers” (4BK prol.). Jupiter eventually

rewards Couillatris for his modest request with

gifts of a gold and a silver ax in addition to his

own. In turn, he exchanges the gold and silver

axes at the Chinon market for quantities of gold

and silver coins with which he purchases farms

and livestock. Because of this productive chain

of exchanges, Couillatris is the envy of his fellow

countrymen who intentionally “lose” their axes

and are punished (4BK prol.).

On the Island of Procuration, in chapter 12,

Panurge and the crew meet the Chiquanous who

earn their living by being beaten. The practice

illustrates to what extent the monetary economy

and the desire for money had denatured relation-

ships to the point where they are objectified and

become “purely instrumental relations,” as Jur-

gen Habermas describes the effects of money on

human interaction (qtd. in Lavatori 1996:

p. 140). For the Chiquanous, all social relation-

ships are defined and justified by monetary

exchange; the Chiquanous refuse to provide food

or drink to the crew but instead offer to be at

their service “en payant,” for a price (4BK 12).

For Panurge, money is an easy substitute for ac-

tion and piety. When a storm threatens to sink

their ship, Panurge, gripped with fear, refuses to

assist his comrades but sees money as his sal-

vation. He proposes that the crew help him to

pay for a pilgrim in order to ensure that a miracle

will save them (4BK 20). The Isle of Papimania

is inhabited by a race of Papimaniacs who mis-

direct their adoration to the portrait of a Pope

(4BK 50) and whose bishop recommends the for-

saking of all occupations for the studying of pa-

pal decrees called Decretals (4BK 51). When

these Decretals are used as parchment for striking

coins, all the money from them is misshapen and

full of holes (4BK 52), reinforcing the theme of

distorted values. However, the Papimaniacs are

not without funds. Their bishop appears from

their temple with basins full of Papimaniac

money (4BK 51). In rather ethnocentric fashion,

even these distant islands reflect the economic

situation of their contemporary France with its

developing capitalism. The bishop Homenaz ex-

plains that the Decretals benefit the Papimaniacs

with their “aurifluous energy,” which causes hun-

dreds of thousands of “ducatz” to flow from

France to Rome each year (4BK 53). Clearly, the

exotic world of the Fourth Book with its mys-

terious economic practices is not so removed

from the realities of France, which was supplying

the Roman court to its own detriment.

Reflecting the historical reality of his society,

Rabelais’s characters experiment with the varied

means of symbolization and of exchange char-

acteristic of the transitional nature of the Ren-

aissance episteme. In this sense, Rabelais’s de-

pictions of monetary exchange can be seen as an

exploration of the basis of representation at a

pretheoretical level.

Readings: Marc Bloch, Esquisse d’une histoire mo-

netaire de l’Europe (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin,

1954); Jean-Christophe Deberre, “La genealogie du

pouvoir dans les trois premiers livres de Rabelais,”

Litterature 50 (1983): 15–35; Michel Foucault, The

Order of Things, ed. Ronald D. Laing (New York:

Vintage Books, 1973); Gerard Lavatori, Language and

Money in Rabelais (New York: Peter Lang, 1996);

Pierre Vilar, A History of Gold and Money 1450–1920,

trans. Judith White (Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities

Press, 1976); Elizabeth Chesney Zegura and Marcel

Tetel, Rabelais Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1993).

Gerard Lavatori

MONSTERS The Rabelaisian books contain a

noteworthy collection of monsters and monstrous

bodies. The Renaissance world, from which Ra-

belais originated, produced a literature filled with

monsters and monstrosities, incorporating beliefs

evolved largely from Greek and Roman sources,

including Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, Livy, He-

rodotus, and Saint Augustine. Throughout the

Renaissance, the term monster, whether derived

from monstrare, “to show,” or from monere, “to

warn,” evoked a diverse range of meanings: an-

162 Monsters

imal or human, physical or moral malformations,

or large size. Aristotle, in the Generation of An-

imals, categorized monsters as something created

praeter naturam, not in the ordinary course of

nature, while still adhering to natural laws.

Rabelais’s treatment of monsters was informed

by Greco-Roman sources, by Renaissance ge-

ographies and histories, and by early sixteenth-

century thought in general. From Pliny’s Natural

History, Rabelais espoused the belief that mon-

strous races lived in distant, exotic regions of the

earth. Herodotus’s detail of the dog-headed cy-

nocephali of Libya appears in the compilation of

obscure terms in Rabelais’s Fourth Book, Bri-

efve Declaration: “canibales: a monstrous peo-

ple in Africa who have faces like dogs and who

bark instead of laughing.”

In the prologue to the Third Book, perhaps to

intensify his readers’ xenophobic curiosity, Ra-

belais characterized monsters as members of ex-

otic races. Drawing from Ptolemy’s tale of the

“motley-colored man” presented to the Egyptians

as a curiosity, but whom they instead abominated

as a monster, Rabelais contrived to create a cul-

tural appetite for oddities within his own narra-

tive. Undeniably, Rabelais exploits and commo-

difies monsters and monstrosities to fulfill

various demonstrative functions, either to gain a

readership, to reveal certain abuses, to expose re-

ligious or political zealots, or to criticize or op-

pose his detractors.

The monsters and monstrous bodies scattered

throughout the works of Rabelais appear in sev-

eral traditional forms, the most common being

the folkloric giants Grandgousier, Gargantua,

and Pantagruel. While constituting a race apart

from ordinary humanity, these gigantic protago-

nists, reputed for their heroic, moral, and intel-

lectual stature, were neither physically monstrous

nor evil. A second type of giant embedded in the

works of Rabelais is the traditional classical or

allegorical giant embodying evil, stupidity, and

unnaturalness. The Pantagruel contains images

of three hundred stupid, warring giants, and their

gigantic captain Loup Garou who fought, “jaws

wide open” and with an “enchanted mace” (P

29). Although lupine features are largely absent

from Rabelais’s description, loup garou (were-

wolf) suggests a monstrous deformation of the

appearance known as lycomorphosis.

Pygmies occupy the other extreme of

grotesque-size deformation in Pantagruel where

they appear in opposition to giants’ bodily pro-

portions, while sharing similar extraordinary

births. Borrowing from the most famous account

of pygmies found in the Iliad (3.5), Rabelais in-

corporates their constant battle with the cranes

into his account of Pantagruel engendering “fifty-

three thousand little men, deformed dwarfs,” and

“as many stooped little women,” from the gas he

passed (P 27).

One of the more distinctive geographical and

zoological episodes in Rabelais’s Fourth Book

(4BK 33–34) chronicles Pantagruel’s killing of a

monstrous whale (physetere), the epitome of all

sea monsters. The “sea monster” (Greek, “the

blower,” or “spouter”) was a sperm whale as de-

scribed in Pliny’s Natural History and depicted

on Olaus Magnus’s illustrated Carta Marina

(1539) near the Faroe Islands, which Rabelais

clearly associated with Isle Farouche in his

Fourth Book. Panurge equated this violent and

powerful monster with “Diable Sathanas, Levi-

athan,” the embodiment of Old Testament evil.

Two episodes surrounding the physetere (4BK

33–34) are thematically linked: Quaresmepren-

ant (4BK 29–32), an ambiguous, Lent-like fig-

ure, and the Andouilles (4BK 35–42), who stand

for Mardi Gras. Taken together, the three epi-

sodes form part of Rabelais’s anticlerical (Popish

Rome or Calvinist Geneva) satire. On another

level, the monstrous Quaresmeprenant, whose bi-

zarre anatomy is described by Xenomanes, be-

comes Rabelais’s illustration of excessive self-

indulgence, since he violated the rules of

mediocritas or moderation.

Readers of Rabelais encounter many more

monsters in the Fourth Book, including “Amo-

dunt and Discord,” the grotesque and ugly chil-

dren of Antiphysis, “monsters deformed and mis-

shapen in despite of Nature” (4BK 32);

Bringuenarilles, a traditional giant, “swallower

of windmills,” who yearly exploited the Island of

Ruach, consuming indiscriminately (4BK 44).

Both Bringuenarilles and Quaresmeprenant have

been identified as Emperor Charles V, insofar as

he embodied religious bigotry.

Because Rabelais’s treatment of monsters is

used to frame denunciations and scorn directed

at his enemies, or fanatics who attacked his writ-

Mouth, World in Pantagruel’s 163

ings, scholars have noted that, by focusing on

what monsters do, or on what they are like,

vengeful representations such as those seen in the

Third and Fourth Books become complex and

effective means for Rabelais to express derision

of real persons, or to engage readers.

Readings: Michel Jeanneret, “Rabelais, les mon-

stres et l’interpretation des signes (Quart Livre 18–

42),” Writing the Renaissance, ed. Raymond La Char-

ite (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1992); Samuel

Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Paul

J. Smith, Voyage et ecriture, etude sur le Quart livre

de Rabelais (Geneva, 1987).

Karen Sorsby

MORE, SIR THOMAS (?1477–1535) One of

England’s greatest humanists and a celebrated

figure of the European Renaissance. More

hosted visits by Erasmus and Hans Holbein to

his house in Chelsea, met Guillaume Bude at

the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, and with

John Colet was the foremost supporter of Greek

learning in the early English Renaissance. He en-

tered Parliament in 1504, became master of re-

quests and a privy councillor in 1517, and suc-

ceeded Cardinal Wolsey as lord chancellor in

1529. His fame as the “Man for All Seasons”

rests upon his opposition to the divorce of Henry

VIII from Catherine of Aragon. Although More

was willing to agree to the Act of Succession, he

was implacably opposed to any oath that would

have impugned the authority of the Pope or ren-

der valid the king’s divorce. In 1534 he was

committed to the Tower of London and found

guilty of high treason; he was beheaded in 1535.

For his principled Catholic stand he was beatified

in 1886 and canonized in 1935. His most famous

works include: a translation (with Erasmus) of

Lucian’s Dialogues (1506); Utopia (1516), a de-

scription of an imaginary island where reason

and justice reign; and the Dialogue touchynge

Luther and Tyndale (1528), a controversial work

that illustrates the obsessive nature of More’s

pursuit of heresy. Rabelais may have had More

in mind when he created the character of the

English cleric Thaumaste, a humble seeker after

truth (P 13). Similarly, Amaurotum, the capital

city of More’s Utopia, is echoed in Rabelais’s

Pantagruel, where Utopie is the kingdom ruled

by Pantagruel’s royal father and “la ville des

Amaurotes” is the largest city in the land; Bad-

ebec, wife of Gargantua, who dies giving birth

to Pantagruel, is the daughter of the king of the

Amaurotes (P 2), and in the same book, Panta-

gruel and his army defend the Amaurotes against

invasion by the Dipsodes (15, 21). Such Morean

echoes emphasize the fact that Rabelais was de-

liberately associating his book with learned cir-

cles linked to Erasmus himself. In the same per-

spective, the use of dice by Judge Bridoye (3BK

43) to resolve casus perplexi is also discussed in

the same evangelical context in More’s Dialogue

(Works, II, 106).

Readings: Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More

(London: Chatto and Windus, 1998); Raymond W.

Chambers, Thomas More (1935; Ann Arbor: Univer-

sity of Michigan, 1958); Richard Marius, Thomas

More: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1984; Andre

Prevost, Thomas More (1477–1535) et la crise de la

pensee europeenne (Paris: Marne, 1969); St. Thomas

More: Selected Letters, edited by Elizabeth Rogers

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961); The

Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas

More, 15 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press, 1963–1997).

John Lewis

MOUTH, WORLD IN PANTAGRUEL’S In

chapter 32 of Pantagruel, the narrator Alcof-

rybas Nasier climbs into the protagonist’s giant

mouth to escape a rainstorm. In contrast to the

series of fantastic locales that provide the setting

of the Fourth Book, the world in Pantagruel’s

mouth is remarkable in its everyday banality. At

a time when accounts of a New World inhabited

by unfamiliar peoples were readily available in

Europe, Rabelais’s narrator describes an encoun-

ter with a French-speaking peasant who is busy

planting cabbages in a Franco-Italianate country-

side. After an early run-in with some brigands—

hardly exotic creatures in sixteenth-century Eu-

rope—Alcofrybas settles down for a good, long

sleep. He emerges six months later.

By focusing attention on both the giant’s body

and the narrator’s bodily functions, the episode

enlists conventions typical of the medieval comic

realism of the Gargantuan Chronicles (Chro-

niques gargantuines), popular tales from which

Rabelais explicitly borrowed. In addition, the

164 Music

fairly detailed mapping of Pantagruel’s interior

incorporates Rabelais’s humanist medical train-

ing by drawing on Galen’s Hippocratic topog-

raphy of the human body. The specifically med-

ical resonance of the episode has echoes in the

following chapter, in which a constipated Pan-

tagruel is cured when he swallows a series of

copper pills containing little men who set about

clearing out his intestines with picks and shovels.

The scene inside Pantagruel’s mouth has been

characterized on the thematic level as both quin-

tessentially realistic and typically grotesque.

Most critics consider the primary source of the

episode to be Lucian’s satirical True History, in

which an eyewitness narrator enters the mouth of

a whale. There are also several precedents for

Alcofrybas’s buccal journey in the Chroniques

gargantuines. Though not particularly innovative

on the thematic level, Rabelais’s rendering of the

mouth voyage nonetheless departs significantly

from both its classical and medieval models by

creating profound discontinuities between the

world in Pantagruel’s mouth and the worlds out-

side of it.

In medieval versions of the voyage into the

mouth of the giant Gargantua, the giant is al-

ways asleep. The narrators of the various Chro-

niques thus never abdicate their position as

chronicler, since the giant has no adventures to

speak of while they explore his innards. Simi-

larly, entry into the mouth of the whale does not

take Lucian’s eyewitness away from some other

narrative sphere, since the narrative sphere of the

True History is nothing other than the sum total

of all the things its narrator happens to see. The

buccal voyage in Pantagruel, by contrast, creates

a complex, multilayered narrative in which the

narrator actually loses sight of his protagonist.

Upon exiting his master’s mouth, Alcofrybas

learns that he has entirely missed the culmination

of the mock-epic war between good and evil that

he had been chronicling when the storm broke

out.

Just as news of Pantagruel’s final victory fails

to reach the world in Pantagruel’s mouth, so does

any but the most superficial news of the mouth

world fail to reach Pantagruel and his compan-

ions. The apparent mutual exclusivity of these

two worlds effectively disrupts the totalizing pre-

tensions of epic narration while simultaneously

exploiting the possibilities for creating multiple

worlds within a single text.

Readings: Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard

Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

1953); Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World,

trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-

sity Press, 1994); Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabe-


Press, 1991); Andrea Frisch, “Quod vidimus testamur:

Testimony, Narrative Agency and the World in Pan-

tagruel’s Mouth,” FF 24 (September 1999): 261–83;

Francois Rigolot, Les Langages de Rabelais (Geneva:

Droz, 1972).

Andrea Frisch

MUSIC That Ponocrates, the humanistic tutor

who replaces the stultifying sophists, should en-

courage the young Gargantua to “sing musically

in four and five parts” and to play the harp, lute,

flute, and clavier (G 23) is no surprise. Classified

as a part of the quadrivium or as one of the

“mathematical sciences” (G 23), music in the six-

teenth century was considered an essential part

of the cursus studiorum, anticipating today’s ad-

vocacy of early training in music. As one might

expect from a Renaissance man, moreover, Ra-

belais himself exhibits a strong knowledge of and

interest in music, both religious and secular,

throughout the Pantagrueline chronicles. On a

pedagogical level, the musical curriculum he out-

lines for Gargantua is characteristically ambi-

tious: the young giant learns to play half a dozen

instruments simultaneously—strings (harp, lute,

violin), winds (flute, trombone), and keyboard

(spinet)—and enjoys (“se esbaudiss[oit]”) his in-

struction, which immediately follows his geom-

etry and astronomy lessons. In addition to

playing a key role in the formation of his intel-

lect, Gargantua’s music lessons also contribute to

his social development: after dinner he and oth-

ers in the household “sing musically” and “play

harmonious instruments,” a skill that also figures

in the training of Thelemites (G 57).

Far from limiting his comments on music to

pedagogical theory, Rabelais also demonstrates a

familiarity with musical vocabulary, instruments,

and composers that is far from routine. His abil-

ity to list fifty-eight musicians of his own era,

ranging from Josquin des Pres to Jannequin, in

the Fourth Book prologue is a feat that few

Music 165

modern-day novelists, physicians, naturalists, or

clergymen could replicate. On the basis of this

list and the musical similes, metaphors, and im-

ages that permeate his text from start to finish,

Nan Cooke Carpenter surmises that Rabelais al-

most certainly received musical training (1954:

79). Her classic monograph, which features an

exhaustive catalogue and analysis of musical

terms in the chronicles, reveals the wide range of

contexts in which Rabelais expresses himself

musically. Quite predictably, given the Platonic

overtones of his text, the author evokes the “har-

mony of the spheres” repeatedly as a referent to

the Ideal. But allusions to wind and percussion

instruments, analogous in their shapes and

sounds to various bodily functions and anatom-

ical parts, also figure in comic, erotic, and scat-

ological contexts.

That Rabelais views his own literary vocation

musically is in fact suggested in the prologue to

the Third Book, where he likens his creative ef-

forts to those of Amphion, who assembled the

walls of Thebes by playing his lyre. By analogy,

the Gallic physician writes “to the sound of [his]

musette.” In fact, parallels between Rabelais’s

polysemic text and musical polyphony are strik-

ing; and his literary conflation of learned and

popular culture is mirrored by sixteenth-century

musical practices, which feature both the inser-

tion of popular materials into courtly or

“learned” compositions and the composition of

popular songs by “serious” or liturgical compos-

ers like Jannequin.

Finally, Rabelais’s text itself has served as the

inspiration for a number of musical composi-

tions, including the comic opera Pantagruel

(1910) by Alfred Jarry and Eugene Demolder;

Panurge, haute farce en trois actes (1913) by

Jules Massenet; and the “Marche de Cocagne”

(1920) by Erik Satie.

Readings: Nan Cooke Carpenter, Rabelais and Mu-

sic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

1954); Guy Demerson, Rabelais. Une vie, une oeuvre,

une epoque (Paris: Balland, 1986); Frank Dobbins,

Music in Renaissance Lyons (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1992); Clement Jannequin Ensemble, Les cris

de Paris (Burbank, CA: Harmonia Mundi, 1996);

Newberry Consort, Villon to Rabelais, Sixteenth Cen-

tury Music of the Streets, Theatres, and Courts (Bur-

bank, CA: Harmonia Mundi, 1999); Mary Springfels,

“Paris from Villon to Rabelais: Music of the Streets,

Theater, and Courts” (http://www.newberry.org/nl/

consort/villonprogram.html).


N

NARRATOR, FIGURE OF The first two

books of the Pantagruel series were published

under Francois Rabelais’s anagrammatic pseu-

donym, Alcofrybas Nasier. In the “author’s pro-

logue” to Pantagruel, Alcofrybas assumes both

the narrative stance characteristic of a traditional

medieval storyteller and that of a firsthand eye-

witness, reminiscent of the narrator of Lucian’s

True History. Like the narrators of the medieval

Chronicques gargantuines, Alcofrybas fre-

quently addresses his readers directly in this

book, as if to replicate an oral storytelling situ-

ation in a circumscribed community. Unlike the

narrators of medieval popular romance, however,

Alcofrybas sometimes appears as a character in-

side the story he is telling. In chapter 17, we find

him walking down the streets of Paris with Pan-

tagruel’s companion, the trickster Panurge;

more famously, in chapter 32, he enters the giant

Pantagruel’s mouth. Alcofrybas’s position as a

character in Pantagruel ultimately serves to dis-

tance him from his audience. When he addresses

this volume’s readers, he usually adopts a defen-

sive posture, spewing invective at those who

don’t believe his tale.

In Gargantua, by contrast, Rabelais’s narra-

tor softens his antagonistic stance toward the au-

dience and appears to position himself firmly in

their world. Having abandoned the Lucianic pre-

tense to eyewitnessing—perhaps in part because

Gargantua’s story precedes Pantagruel’s chron-

ologically—Alcofrybas cultivates a sympathetic

relationship with a community of readers that he

continues to address as if they were physically

present to him. The Third Book, for its part, is

made up largely of the direct discourse of Pan-

tagruel, Panurge, and their companions. As in

Gargantua, the narrator never appears to be

among them. Although the Third Book was pub-

lished under Rabelais’s name, the author’s pro-

logue to this volume maintains and develops the

relationship with the audience that Alcofrybas es-

tablishes in the first two books.

The narrative voice of Rabelais’s novel

changes again with the Fourth Book. The pro-

logue, signed by Rabelais, opens with greetings

to a community of readers with which the nar-

rator is by now on very familiar terms, thus re-

inforcing the atmosphere of medieval storytell-

ing. Further on, however, the narrator subtly

reestablishes his links to the world of Pantagruel

when, in chapter 5, he begins recounting the

story in the first-person plural (“we . . . discov-

ered a merchant vessel”), thus implying that he

was among those sailing with the giant in search

of the Holy Bottle or Dive Bouteille. From this

point on, the narrator is a relatively quiet but con-

sistent presence inside the story, periodically

coming to the fore as in chapter 38, where he

adopts the defensive posture of the eyewitness

we saw in Pantagruel: “Believe if you wish to

. . . I know exactly what I saw” (4BK 38). The

Fifth Book is dominated by the eyewitness nar-

rator. In this volume, however, he has many

more conversations with Pantagruel and com-

pany than he does with the reader.

In both the Fourth Book and the Fifth Book,

little effort is made to link the narrator of the

prologue, who chats amiably with his fellow

pantagruelistes, with that of the novel proper,

who constantly sets himself apart from his read-

ers by making repeated, explicit claims to have

“seen” any number of fabulous objects and

events. This kind of mixed rhetoric owes as

much or more to contemporaneous firsthand

travel accounts, such as those of Jacques Car-

tier, than it does to Lucian. Like Rabelais’s

traveler-narrator, eyewitness historians in the pe-

riod openly struggled to articulate a perspective

at once individual and unique (“I saw” [“je

Nature 167

veidz”]), yet also sanctioned by a community of

fellow travelers (“we discovered” [“nous des-

couvrismes”]) and by a community of readers (a

community usually constructed by means of a

separate prologue, as in Rabelais’s novel).

Ultimately, over the course of the five books

of Pantagruel, we witness some of the central

aspects of the evolution of the figure of the sto-

ryteller in an age when the local communities

that grounded narration in the medieval period

were being redefined by the increasing centrali-

zation of the French state and by the technology

of print.

Readings: Andrea Frisch, The Invention of the Eye-

witness (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Press, 2004); Floyd Gray, “Rabelais’s First Readers,”

Rabelais’s Incomparable Book, ed. Raymond C. La

Charite (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986); Ruth

Mulhauser, “Rabelais and the Fictional World of Al-

cofribas Nasier,” RR 64 (1973): 175–83.

Andrea Frisch

NATURE There are 121 instances of the word

“nature” in Rabelais’s corpus, not counting cog-

nates. As in all Renaissance discourse, it is a

highly polysemantic word in Rabelais’s writing,

but some of the principal meanings are the fol-

lowing:

1. Nature as a creating or generative force (natura na-

turans), often written with a capital N, the antith-

esis of destructive Antiphysie (4BK 32). In most

instances, the word has theological connotations,

which are typical of the Renaissance notion of na-

ture as a whole. Natura naturans was understood

as a power or entity subject to God which per-

formed the work of His creation in the sublunary

world. The creation itself, natura naturata, was a

physical manifestation of divine order, the under-

standing of which would lead to a greater under-

standing of a manifest God. Nature’s primary pur-

pose is to ensure that the cycle of death and

reproduction continues, both human and nonhu-

man, as Panurge indicates before his encomium to

the codpiece (3BK 8). It is thus part of the sublu-

nary corruptible world and “makes nothing immor-

tal” (G 20). After the second coming, Gargantua

suggests, there will be no more nature, since “all

generation and corruption” will cease (P 8).

2. The normative order created by that force (natura

naturata), in expressions such as “which colors are

in nature” (G 9), “a vacuum, which is not tolerated

in nature” (4BK 62), or (a sense very closely bound

to the first) “strange births against the order of na-

ture” (G 6). “Order of nature” here can mean the

order of what has been created, nature, or the order

intended by the creating force, Nature. (It should

be noted that the word nature is rarely, if ever, con-

comitant with “landscape” in the modern sense, ex-

cept inasmuch as place and surroundings are part

of Nature’s creation). The notion of natural order

is particularly freighted in the Renaissance, with

much debate about the cause of disturbances to that

order: were monsters, cataclysms, strange events,

considered to be part of nature’s order or against

it? Were they miracles, portents, punishments, or

simply another, albeit rare, facet of nature’s struc-

ture? Rabelais is of course very engaged with such

debates and shows many sides of the question. His

race of giants, for example, is alternately against

nature and normalized.

3. Qualities inherent to an object or a being, as the

Parisians who are “silly by nature” (P 7). This is

the meaning shared with “naturellement” (twenty-

seven instances), and recalls the shared etymology

between “nature,” “naıtre,” (to be born) and “na-

tion,” as does Panurge’s warning that “human na-

ture”—that is, the race or nation of humans—

would die without the testes (3BK 8). The notion

of human nature is complex, in fact. Picrochole’s

nature pushes him to excess, whereas the Thelem-

ites are virtuous “by nature” (G 57).

The relationship between the human and the

nonhuman worlds, the microcosm and the mac-

rocosm, generated varying theories in the six-

teenth century, many of which Rabelais explores.

Particularly controversial is the question of por-

tents, or whether events in the macrocosm can

be interpreted as predictions of microcosmic (hu-

man) events. Rabelais wrote several Almanachs

and Prognostications. In the Almanachs of 1533

and 1535, he denounces divination, stating that

we should rather put our faith in God and leave

his secrets untouched. The third book as a whole

is an exploration of just such questions, and Her

Trippa (3BK 25) is a reductio ad absurdum of

the figure of the diviner who claims to read hu-

man futures in every possible natural sign. The

other side of the argument, however, is that God

willingly reveals his intentions to the alert ob-

server through his natural creation, an opinion

that is also found in Rabelais. Pantagruel’s

speech on the death of heroes (4BK 27) states

firmly that macrocosmic nature is thrown into

168 Nature

confusion “against all natural order” by a tragic

event in the human microcosmos. On the other

hand the sea tempest is given no such definitive

gloss (4BK 22), and Rabelais in the Pantagrue-

line prognostication states that it is folly to think

that there are certain stars reserved for kings

alone (PP 5).

The notion of an occult link between nonhu-

man and human nature is often schematized as a

prescientific mentality. It has been posited that

medieval and Renaissance notions of nature were

incompatible with the systematic attempt to un-

derstand and describe its workings and that the

concept of nature as an object of study emerged

only with the so-called Scientific Revolution.

This is not the case. Even medieval “books of

secrets,” however occult they may seem to us,

promised power to the reader who studied and

understood nature’s mysteries. A significant dif-

ference between modern and premodern inquiry

into nature lies, rather, in the place of theological

teleology, with the premodern initiate a privi-

leged witness into divine design, whereas mod-

ern study of nature coexists uncomfortably at

best with religion. In Rabelais, nature does ap-

pear as an object of study—for example, in Gar-

gantua’s letter to his son (P 8) in which he out-

lines an ideal educational program that includes

zealous study of the “facts of nature.” Some crit-

ics have read this as evidence that Rabelais’s

conception of nature witnesses a paradigm shift

toward human mastery and possession of nature,

and away from Nature as a force greater than

human. Rabelaisian nature, then, is situated at a

pivotal point between the old and the new.

Messere Gaster is read as an example of an

emerging spirit of control over nature and its

forces: his inventions escalate in the degree of

manipulation from agriculture and building to

genetic manipulation and, finally, gunpowder, by

which Nature herself admits defeat (4BK 61). It

would also be possible to read the chapters on

the Pantagruelion with the same slant. The en-

comium makes increasingly extravagant claims

for the plant, ending up with a vision of nations

that have overcome the physical limits of dis-

tance, and an intriguing but little-studied moment

of paranoia on behalf of the Olympic gods, who

see what Pantagruel has achieved and worry that

his sons will penetrate the secrets of nature, visit

the source of rains, ascend to the moon, and fi-

nally topple the gods from their place.

The notion of an emerging rationalist spirit of

control over nature is useful, provided one keeps

in mind certain caveats that prevent us from

calquing modern polemic too directly onto the

semantic field of nature in Rabelais. For exam-

ple, the study of nature is not yet designated by

the word “science” (“natural history” is the term

used): “science” in sixteenth-century French con-

serves the sense it has in the Latin scientia, that

is, knowledge in general. When Gargantua fa-

mously says that “science without conscience is

the ruin of the soul” (P 8), he is not referring to

unscrupulous manipulation of nature’s resources

and secrets, but to any knowledge that is not ac-

companied by ethical considerations. Gaster’s

mastery of Nature is followed by a chapter that

presents two very different types of human in-

teraction with nature: the first is a rational “sci-

entific” inquiry into the properties of magnets

that allows Gaster to create a cannonball deflec-

tor; the second is a long list of miracles (mostly

from Pliny the Elder) attested to certain plants,

which support the claim that Gaster has used an

occult property in a plant to repel bullets (4BK

62). The contrast is marked for modern readers,

but the conceptual gap seems to be ours, not Ra-

belais’s. Rational and mystical-occult views of

nature frequently coexist in his text. For exam-

ple, the magnetic door in the Fifth Book is ex-

plained with a similar bewildering blend of dis-

courses (GP 5BK 37; OB 5BK 36). What does

seem new in Rabelais’s text compared with ear-

lier notions of the study of nature is the idea that

all can be known. Gargantua encourages his son

to learn literally everything there is to be known

about the “facts of nature” (P 8), although the

vision of encyclopedic knowledge is made iron-

ical by Thaumaste, who assures his spectators

that Panurge opened up to him “an encyclopedic

abyss.”

Rabelais writes in a period when notions of

nature and the natural were every bit as multi-

faceted as they are today, but with different par-

ameters. The semantics of the word “nature,” as

well as ways in which the nonhuman world was

perceived and studied, were shifting in the six-

teenth century, and Rabelais engages consciously

with such shifts. Over the whole hovers the fig-

Neoplatonism 169

ure of Alcofrybas, the narrator controlling his

text as the alchemist effects changes in nature,

making nature signify differently as he sees fit.

Readings: Jean Ceard, La nature et les prodiges

(Geneva: Droz, 1996); Guy Demerson, Rabelais

(Paris: Fayard, 1991); Stanley Eskin, Physis and An-

tiphysie: The Idea of Nature in Rabelais and

Calcagnini (Berkeley: University of California, 1962);

Michel Jeanneret, “Rabelais, les monstres et

l’interpretation des signes (Quart Livre 18–42),” Writ-

ing the Renaissance. Essays on Sixteenth-Century

French Literature in Honor of Floyd Gray, ed. Ray-

mond C. La Charite (Lexington, KY: French Forum,

1992); Robert Marichal, “Commentaires du Quart Li-

vre,” ER 1 (1956): 188–202; Francis Metivier, ed., Ac-

tes des conferences du cycle “Rabelais et la nature,”

ER 31 (1996); Andre Pellicier, Natura, etude seman-

tique et historique du mot latin (Paris: PUF, 1966);

Harold S. Wilson, “Some Meanings of ‘Nature’ in

Renaissance Literary Theory,” Journal of the History

of Ideas 2.4 (1941): 430–48.

Louisa Mackenzie

NAZDECABRE (3BK 19–20) A deaf mute

whom Panurge consults, after his visit to the

Sibyl of Panzoust and prior to his encounter with

the dying poet Raminagrobis, regarding his di-

lemma as to whether or not to marry. Following

a by now familiar pattern, an exposition of this

particular method of divination (3BK 19) paves

the way for the actual consultation of the mute

and the interpretation of his signs (3BK 20).

Since methods of divination relying on the inter-

pretation of words have so far failed, Pantagruel

proposes an alternative method, relying on ges-

ture rather than on articulated language, which

he claims is deceptive and equivocal. Humanists

attached a great importance to gestures, deeming

them to be a natural language in certain respects

superior to the conventional language of words.

Pantagruel chooses a mute deaf by birth in order

to ensure that he be naıf—that is to say, effec-

tively uncontaminated by verbal language. Naz-

decabre’s name, which signifies “nose-of-goat,”

has bawdy connotations and suggests connivance

with the devil. The comic gestural exchange be-

tween Panurge and Nazdecabre recalls a similar

debate by signs in the Thaumaste episode (P

18). But here the gestures, in turn erotic and vi-

olent, are more down to earth and transparent in

their meaning, exciting Panurge’s anger. These

chapters of the Third Book touch on some of the

central preoccupations of the whole work: lan-

guage and its origin, conventional and natural

signs, Cratylist and Aristotelian linguistic theo-

ries, communication by signs and gestures, and

problems of interpretation.


L’insolite au XVIe siecle, en France (Geneva: Librairie

Droz, 1977); Marie-Luce Demonet, Les voix du signe.

Nature et origine du langage a la Renaissance (1480–

1580) (Paris: Librairie Honore Champion, 1992).


NEOPLATONISM Idealistic philosophy stem-

ming from the writings of Plato, especially the

Timaeus, and rearticulated by such Neoplatonists

as Plotinus, Proclus, and the Florentine humanist

Marsilio Ficino. Linked in some of its Renais-

sance manifestations to astrology, divination,

demonology, and hermeticism, Neoplatonism in-

forms Rabelais’s work virtually from start to fin-

ish. The seminal prologue to Gargantua, with its

allegory of the marrowbone and Sileni, evokes

the Neoplatonist tradition from the outset by pos-

iting a gap between appearance and reality that

the discerning reader must bridge, like Plato’s

philosophical dog, by seeking the text’s hidden

meaning or substantificque mouelle (marrow).

Rabelais continues in a Platonizing vein with his

choice of the Androgyne for Gargantua’s im-

age; his fascination with symbols and hiero-

glyphs, his own convivium that rivals the Pla-

tonic symposium; the Frozen Words episode

and allegorical painting of Plato’s Ideas in the

Fourth Book, and the transcendent quest for the

Divine Bottle that drives the Fifth Book. Al-

though some would argue that these Neoplatonic

echoes are largely playful, intended to bamboo-

zle the reader with the lure of hidden meanings

that do not in fact exist, G. Mallary Masters sug-

gests, on the contrary, that the author is inviting

us to “play with him” (17) and extract the mar-

row from Rabelais’s hermetic text.



University of New York Press, 1969); Jean Seznec,

The Survival of the Pagan Gods, Bollingen Series 38

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972).


170 Niphleseth

NIPHLESETH Queen of the female “An-

douille Sausage Warriors,” who mistake Panta-

gruel for their archenemy Quaresmeprenant

and attack the giant and his party in an episode

of carnivalesque mock warfare (4BK 35–52).

The Briefve Declaration defines her name as the

Hebrew term for the “male member,” thus ex-

plicitly blurring gender distinctions that have al-

ready been called into question by the phallic

shape of her subjects. She symbolizes the cor-

nucopia of frequently mutually exclusive allu-

sions and interpretations common to most epi-

sodes of the Fourth Book, in this particular case

through inherent sexual, religious, and political

ambiguities. The most obvious of these ambi-

guities is the phonetic proximity of “eels” (an-

guilles), a Lenten food, and chitterlings (an-

douilles), a carnival food, an ambivalence

extended into the biblical realm (Genesis) by an-

guis, “snake.”

Politically, the designation of infanta for Ni-

phleseth’s daughter, the only procreative Chitter-

ling and thus truly a counterpart to sterile Quar-

esmeprenant, identifies the Chitterlings’ island as

a Spanish dependency. Pantagruel’s gift of a

knife to Niphleseth is reminiscent of Cartier’s

dealing with native peoples, the topos of the ex-

ploration of the New World being further rein-

forced by the tribute of 78,000 Chitterlings an-

nually to be sent to Gargantua, who, in turn,

offers them to the “King of Paris.”

The Amazon queen’s request for pardon after

the defeat in the culinary battle is granted in an-

other display of Pantagruel’s magnanimity in vic-

tory. The demand is based on the statement that

chitterlings contain more excrement than malice.

While certainly reflecting imperfect contempo-

rary techniques of preparing tripe sausage, this

observation adds to the negative connotations

that Mikhail Bakhtin’s “lower bodily stratum,”

as well as the genre of the farce (via its culinary

origin, the “stuffing” of meats), acquires in the

Fourth Book—hence Pantagruel’s absence from

the mock battle, and, more importantly, the re-

fusal to consume the sausages (as in the corre-

sponding episode from Le Disciple de Panta-

gruel, Rabelais’s model): Friar Jean’s army of

cooks prefers to eliminate them, and dead Chit-

terlings in Paris are simply buried.

Readings: Barbara Bowen, “L’episode des An-

douilles (Rabelais, Quart livre, chapitres XXXV–

XLII): esquisse d’une methode de lecture,” Cahiers de

Varsovie 8 (1981): 111–21; Barbara Bowen, “Lenten

Eels and Carnival Sausages,” EC 21 (1981): 12–25;

Francoise Charpentier, “La guerre des Andouilles,

Pantagruel, IV, 35–42,” Etudes seiziemistes offerts a

V. L. Saulnier (Geneva: Droz, 1980); Samuel Kinser,

Rabelais’s Carnival (Berkeley: University of Califor-

nia Press, 1990).

Bernd Renner

NOURRY, CLAUDE (fl. 1493–1533) Printer/

Bookseller in Lyon, produced the first edition of

Pantagruel, probably in 1532.

Reading: Henri Louis Baudrier, Bibliographie ly-

onnaise: recherches sur les imprimeurs, libraires, re-

lieurs et fondeurs de lettres de Lyon au XVIe siecle,

ed. J. Baudrier, vol. 12 (Lyon: Librairie Ancienne

d’Auguste Brun, 1895–1921).

Stephen Rawles

NOVEL The question of the genre of Rabe-

lais’s fictional narratives remains undecided.

They have evident parallels with epic and chi-

valric romance as well as with dramatic forms

like the dialogue. The hybrid nature of Rabelais’s

work inspires hybrid generic designations such

as the term “epic New Testament” applied to

Pantagruel. To refer to Rabelais’s works simply

as novels may seem both limiting and anachro-

nistic.

Although Rabelais’s fictions predate the offi-

cial inception of the modern novel, they occupy

a prominent place in what the Soviet critic Mik-

hail Bakhtin called the prehistory of the novel.

For Bakhtin, the novel began as an encyclopedia

of genres, incorporating dialogues, poems, let-

ters, speeches, descriptions, and short stories, all

forms present in Rabelais’s heterogeneous fic-

tions, with their vast range of genres and styles.

Above all, in Rabelais, language, from a me-

dium of representation, becomes an object of rep-

resentation. It becomes the hero of the story,

which is the fundamental attribute of novelistic

discourse for Bakhtin.

Rabelais exemplifies Bakhtin’s thesis that the

novel supersedes the epic by portraying the char-

acters and events of fiction on the same temporal

level as the audience, thus abolishing epic dis-

tance. The most obvious method he employs to

Nursemaids 171

bridge epic distance is simply to refer directly to

events in contemporary French history, such as

the Battle of Marignano fought in 1515 (P 1), the

persecution of university professors suspected of

Lutheranism (P 5), or the collapse of one of the

towers of the Cathedral of Bourges in 1506 (P

29). One consequence of the proximity Rabelais

achieves between the fictional world of his he-

roes and the real world of his audience is the

deflation or humanization of heroism. To main-

tain their dignity, epic heroes recede into an in-

accessible, legendary past, while the parodic gen-

res that give rise to the novel contemporize

characters and events so as to bring them low.

The classic instance of this debasement of the

heroic is Epistemon’s visit to the underworld (P

30), which brings together the inaccessible he-

roes of classical epic with more recent and more

comic figures in a corrosive, contemporizing

contact. In this way, Rabelais assures the break-

through of a truly modern temporality necessary

for development of the novel.

Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagi-

nation, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist

(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Guy De-

merson, “Paradigmes epiques chez Rabelais,” Rabelais

en son demi-millenaire (Geneva: Droz, 1988); Barry

Lydgate, “Printing, Narrative, and the Genesis of the

Rabelaisian Novel,” RR 71 (1980): 345–73.

Eric MacPhail

NURSEMAIDS Maids entrusted with the

suckling or care of a child. In Rabelais, refer-

ences to nursemaids point to their mammalian

function, even though right after Gargantua’s

and Pantagruel’s births, no nursemaids, other

than cows, could provide the necessary amount

of milk to feed the gigantic toddlers. Their mam-

malian function put aside, they fulfill especially

in Gargantua the more significant role of a sex-

ual surrogate. The narrator refers to the nurse-

maids as objects of the boy’s libidinal desire. In

chapter 11 Gargantua is said to be always grop-

ing and/or fondling his nursemaids. In so doing,

the narrator adds, he was already exercising his

“codpiece.” While sprucing up Gargantua’s cod-

piece with bouquets, ribbons, flowers, and silken

tufts, as it seemed to be their duty, the nurse-

maids caused the boy to have an erection. As

each one claims it for herself, one greedily men-

aces to cut it off. An earlier narratorial reference

(G 8) to how Jupiter cut off the horn of his goat,

Amaltheia, transformed it into a horn of plenty,

and offered it to his own nursemaids, Adrasteia

and Ida, in gratitude for their taking care of him

might explain why Gargantua’s nursemaids

wanted to cut it off. They regarded the boy’s

“horniness” as a reward for their daily adorning

of his codpiece. The nursemaids later realize that

if they cut it off Gargantua would be infertile and

they would prohibit the ultimate gift: to see their

master have offspring, which after all was the

reason they were entrusted with his care.



ford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1979); Hope Glidden,

“Childhood and the Vernacular in Rabelais’s Gargan-

tua,” Lapidary Inscriptions: Renaissance Essays for

Donald Stone, Jr., ed. Barbara C. Bowen and Jerry

Nash (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1991); Levilson

C. Reis, “The Role of Nursemaids in the Awakening

of Gargantua’s Sexuality,” French Studies Bulletin 65

(Winter 1997): 11–13.

Levilson C. Reis

O

ORLANDO FURIOSO (ROLAND FURIEUX)

Mock-epic romance written by Ferrarese author

Lodovico Ariosto (1474–1533) and mentioned

by Rabelais in his prologue to Pantagruel

(1532). Heralded by Alcofrybas as a volume

with “occult properties,” this sequel to Boiardo’s

Orlando innamorato chronicles the adventures

and misadventures of knights errant from the me-

dieval Charlemagne cycle, including Roland,

who is unlucky in love and goes mad. Although

there is little evidence that Rabelais borrowed di-

rectly from his Italian predecessor, both authors

combine Renaissance ebullience and an enco-

mium of humanistic achievements with a critical

look at the era’s underside. Similarities between

the two works include their fantasy, burlesque

elements, satire, paradox, and ambiguity; their

episodic narratives and shifty narrators; their

mockery and interrogation of heroic models;

common references to the voyages of discovery

and a journey to the moon; Lucianic elements;

and a shared focus on fools, folly, and madness.



of Two Renaissance Mock Epics (Chapel Hill: Duke

University Press, 1982); Marcel Tetel, Rabelais et

l’Italie (Florence: Olschki, 1969).


P

PAN, DEATH OF The tale of the death of Pan

is recounted by Pantagruel while on the Island

of the Macreons in chapter 28 of the Fourth

Book. This tale of Thamous, the Egyptian pilot

commanded by a mysterious voice to report the

death of “the Great Pan,” comes on the heels of

an extended discussion of natural upheavals oc-

curring at the deaths of great men. The tale is

taken from Plutarch’s De defectu oraculorum and

was understood as referring to the shepherd-god

Pan, son of Mercury and Penelope. Although it

strikes the modern reader as a legend, Plutarch

presents it as an historical event and Rabelais

likely understood it as such. Through Pantagruel

he interprets the event as referring to the death

of Christ based on a reading of the name Pan

(“all” in Greek), their common vocation as shep-

herds, and because Thamous was commanded to

deliver the message during the reign of Tiberius

Caesar, who governed Rome at the time of the

Crucifixion. The chapter closes with the giant

moved to tears in contemplation of the tale he

has just told. Crowning a discussion regarding

the immortality of souls, Pantagruel’s interpre-

tation of the death of Pan demonstrates Renais-

sance Christianization of ancient thought. The

death of Pan has also been read as allegory in-

spired by the religious troubles in sixteenth-

century France. Christ is again killed as his

Body, in the form of the Church, is misused and

dismembered. This chapter is followed immedi-

ately by the visit to Tapinois, the island governed

by Quaresmeprenant, and has been interpreted

as marking a thematic move into Lenten sorrow

that will not be lifted until Pantagruel responds

to Frere Jean’s request to “haulser le temps”

(find a pastime) at the end of the Fourth Book.



Press, 2000); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca,


Douglas L. Boudreau

PANTAGRUEL Pantagruel, the son of Gar-

gantua and Badebec, is the principal character

in the four books definitely written by Francois

Rabelais. In Pantagruel, Rabelais does stress the

gigantic dimensions of this character, but the

Third Book and the Fourth Book do not refer

to his enormous physical size. His mother Bad-

ebec died while giving birth to him, and for that

reason Pantagruel was raised in an almost exclu-

sively male environment. In the sixth chapter of

Pantagruel, the title character reveals his con-

tempt for those who use language in order to

impress others and not to seek truth. He threatens

the Ecolier Limousin who speaks French in such

a Latinized style that his comments are almost

incomprehensible.

Pretentiousness and a lack of sincerity are both

unacceptable to Pantagruel, and this is why he

has so many conflicts with Panurge, a sophist

who does not seek truth. Although he is at first

impressed by Panurge’s ability to speak in both

real and imaginary languages, Pantagruel soon

begins to notice Panurge’s bad faith and lack of

respect for others. In chapter 17 of Pantagruel,

Panurge mocks religion by selling indulgences,

and in the next two chapters Panurge uses ob-

scene gestures in his debate with the learned but

foolish Englishman Thaumaste. When a Pari-

sian noblewoman (see Haughty Parisian

Woman) refuses to grant Panurge a date, he has

dogs urinate on her dress as she leaves the Ca-

thedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Rabelais makes

it clear to his readers that Pantagruel does not

possess Panurge’s repulsive qualities, and this

enhances his readers’ opinion of Pantagruel. Like

174 Pantagruel

his father Gargantua, Pantagruel hates war, but

he does not shy away from his military obliga-

tions. Like his father, he also obtains victory

through strategy and skill, and he does every-

thing possible to limit the number of deaths in

battle. He treats the defeated Dipsodes with mag-

nanimity.

In both his Third Book and Fourth Book, Ra-

belais frequently contrasts Panurge and Panta-

gruel. In the third and fourth chapters of the

Third Book, Panurge develops clearly specious

and self-serving arguments in a vain effort to jus-

tify his huge debts. Pantagruel sees through this

argument, and he states that Panurge should stop

being a parasite and should instead work hard to

earn respect from others. Panurge, who has

shown contempt for women, now asks Panta-

gruel whether or not he should marry. Panta-

gruel, who has not forgotten how Panurge gro-

tesquely treated the Parisian noblewoman,

recognizes the insincerity of Panurge’s question.

Pantagruel realizes that a successful marriage de-

pends on the fidelity and sacrifices of two equals.

Unlike Pantagruel, Panurge does not respect

women. The wisest advice that Panurge receives

is from the theologian Hippothadee in the thir-

tieth chapter of the Third Book. This theologian

tells Panurge that if he turns away from alcohol-

ism, lives virtuously, obeys the Ten Command-

ments, and does not treat his wife as a sexual ob-

ject, he will have a good marriage, if it pleases

God. He encourages Panurge to trust in God’s ab-

solute love. The selfish and misogynistic Panurge

refuses to listen to such exemplary advice.

The Fourth Book also stresses profound dif-

ferences between Panurge and Pantagruel. Chap-

ters 18 to 22 in the Fourth Book describe how

different characters react when their lives are

threatened during a storm at sea. Pantagruel first

prays fervently to God and then does whatever

the pilot asks him to do in order to save all the

crew and passengers from drowning. There is no

conflict between what Pantagruel does and what

he says. Such is not the case for Panurge, who

feigns a religious conversion but will not do any-

thing to help others during this storm. Panurge’s

hypocrisy is made obvious once the storm ends.

His newly found religious faith disappears, and

both Pantagruel and Frere Jean criticize him for

his clearly bad faith.

Rabelais very effectively defines Pantagruel in

opposition to Panurge. Panurge is such a total

egotist, misogynist, coward, and hypocrite that

Rabelais leads his readers to attribute to Panta-

gruel the positive character traits that are the op-

posite of those negative qualities shown by Pan-

urge in both his deeds and words.

Readings: Richard Crescenzo, “Les controverses in-

terpretatives de Pantagruel et Panurge dans le Tiers

Livre: Etude des strategies rhetoriques et argumenta-

tion,” Rabelais: A propos du Tiers livre, ed. James

Dauphine and Paul Mironneau (Biarritz: J & D Edi-

tions, 1995); Dorothy Gabe Coleman, Rabelais: A

Critical Study in Prose Fiction (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1973); Carla Freccero, Father

Figures: Genealogy and Narrative Structure in Ra-

belais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991);

G. Mallary Masters, Rabelaisian Dialectic and the

Platonic-Hermetic Tradition (Albany: State University

of New York Press, 1969); Michael A. Screech, Ra-

belais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979).

Edmund J. Campion

PANTAGRUEL The earliest of Rabelais’s four

entirely authentic “books of Pantagruel,” first

published in 1532 in Lyon as a small chapbook

under the anagrammatic pseudonym Alcofrybas

Nasier. Rabelais presents his work as a sequel to

the Grandes chroniques de Gargantua, an anon-

ymous and quite mediocre Arthurian mock epic

published earlier the same year in Lyon, from

which he borrowed certain salient characteris-

tics—gothic format, popular style, low-brow hu-

mor, and the basic idea of a giant hero and his

comic exploits—but combined these with great

humanistic learning and a serious political, ethi-

cal, and religious purpose. The result is one of

the greatest satirical works of the Renaissance.

Its unique blend of high and low cultures, of ex-

quisite learning and vulgar humor, of lofty ideals,

vinous buffoonery, and mean pranks, was enor-

mously successful in its time but has proven sin-

gularly disconcerting to post-Reformation, post-

classical readers weaned on ideas of generic

purity, stylistic and behavioral decorum, and the

incompatibility of Christian revelation and what

Mikhail Bakhtin euphemistically called “the

lower bodily stratum.” The prominence given to

wine and high jinks has led many to view the

work as an inconsequential bacchanalian bur-

Pantagruel 175

lesque, a view compatible with the fact that

“Penthagruel” was already known to Rabelais’s

readers not as a good giant but as a tiny devil

who, during the comic interludes or “diableries”

of mystery plays, drove poor sinners to drink by

pouring salt down their throats. But much of this

burlesque is a pretext for mordant satires against

various incarnations of pretension, power, and

orthodoxy, and a vehicle for progressive political

and religious ideas inspired by Christian human-

ists like Erasmus and Thomas More.

Set in a Utopie inspired by More’s recent sat-

ire, Pantagruel narrates in episodic but linear

fashion the birth, education, and heroic exploits

of its eponymous hero, son of the giant Gargan-

tua and direct descendant of such notorious

ogres as Nimrod and Goliath, Polyphemus and

Cacus, Fierabras and Fracassus. According to a

quasi-messianic prophecy uttered at the moment

of his birth, Pantagruel is predestined to become

the “dominateur des alterez,” or “Lord of the

Thirsty.” The hero eventually fulfills this proph-

ecy by liberating his native Utopie from the in-

vading Dipsodes (“Thirsty”) and establishing a

utopian colony in Dipsodie (“Land of the

Thirsty”). Most of the book narrates Pantagruel’s

preparation for his eventual victory over the Dip-

sodes. Sent by his father to France to pursue his

formal studies, Pantagruel finds only lazy stu-

dents and incompetent, benighted professors in

each of the ten universities of late medieval

France. In Paris, an encounter with a schoolboy

from one of the poorest provinces in France (the

Ecolier Limousin) spouting comically preten-

tious, “highfalutin” speech, suggests that the only

effect of a Parisian education is to turn ignorant

boys into conceited snobs (P 6). To complete this

entirely negative picture of French learning, an

inventory of the library of the Abbey of Saint-

Victor suggests the futility of all scholastic and

pietistic learning of the Middle Ages (P 7).

In contrast, Gargantua’s famous letter to his

son spells out a humanistic program of studies

that includes classical languages (Latin, Greek,

Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic), classical rhetoric,

history, civil law informed by moral philosophy,

medicine informed by natural history, and the-

ology consisting of direct readings from the Bi-

ble in the original languages (P 8). Thanks to this

progressive education, Pantagruel becomes a vir-

tual incarnation of the new learning (an “abysme

de science”) who confounds the greatest experts

in all medieval disciplines by defending 9,764

theses against all comers and resolves an intrac-

table, incomprehensible legal dispute between

two lords, Baisecul and Humevesne, by putting

into practice the principles of humanistic law (P

10–14). Together, the chapters devoted to Pan-

tagruel’s education constitute a scathing satire of

medieval learning and an idealized picture of hu-

manism as the solution to all the world’s ills.

The most vivid and memorable character of

Pantagruel is the hero’s epic companion Pan-

urge, an unsavory and somewhat diabolical

trickster in the mold of Till Eulenspiegel. In

contrast to Pantagruel, a royal heir become a

learned sage, Panurge is a rootless drifter who

has gained practical knowledge of the world

through experience and hard knocks and who has

learned to survive by his wits, similar in this way

to wandering Odysseus and the picaresque heroes

of the following century. By his own account he

has just returned to France from an ill-fated cru-

sade against the Turks, where he was nearly

roasted alive (P 14). In his travels he has learned

to speak all modern languages, as he demon-

strates in his first meeting with Pantagruel (P 9).

Fed and clothed by Pantagruel, he soon proves

to be a bizarrely lovable knave—“mischievous,

a cheat, a drinker, a hobo, a scrounger if he was

in Paris, and for the rest, the best son in the

world” (P 16)—who delights in humiliating civil

and ecclesiastical authorities and his social su-

periors (16), who makes ends meet by stealing

from alms boxes (17), and who takes ignoble re-

venge on a Haughty Parisian Lady who has

rebuffed his obscene advances (21–22).

Pantagruel and Panurge would seem to form

an unlikely pair, and indeed a curious rivalry be-

tween the two is played out throughout the book.

Nearly every action by Pantagruel is mimicked

in degraded form by Panurge. But the relation-

ship between them soon proves to be mutually

beneficial. When a wily representative of the old

guard, the “great cleric” Thaumaste, arrives

from England to confound Pantagruel with un-

answerable questions about illegitimate arcane

sciences like alchemy and astrology, the even

wilier Panurge substitutes himself for the de-

fenseless hero and easily defeats and humiliates

176 Pantagruelion

the cleric in a hilarious debate by signs (18–20).

The partnership of Pantagruel and Panurge thus

combines strength and humanistic learning with

expedience and popular cunning.

No sooner has this partnership been estab-

lished than news arrives that Gargantua has been

transported to the land of the fairies and that Uto-

pie has been invaded by Anarche, the lawless

king of the Dipsodes (23). Pantagruel quickly

leaves Paris to defend his homeland, taking with

him Panurge and three other companions whose

names suggest qualities useful in war: Carpalim

(quick), Eusthenes (strong), and Epistemon

(learned). In an initial encounter with 660 enemy

knights, Panurge devises a trick that allows the

hero’s four companions to destroy all their ad-

versaries, thus demonstrating the superiority of

wit over force in military operations (25). Pan-

tagruel immediately puts this knowledge to good

use, devising a stratagem of his own to allow the

utopian Amaurotes to surprise and overwhelm

hundreds of thousands of besieging soldiers (28).

The war is won by Pantagruel alone, however,

when he defeats Loup Garou and all his 299

giant henchmen in single combat (29).

Epistemon, decapitated during this final battle

and resuscitated by Panurge, relates that in Hades

the rich and the powerful of this world (epic he-

roes, kings, emperors, popes) all serve menial

functions (30). On learning this, Panurge pre-

pares the defeated Anarche for his future role in

Hell by making him green sauce crier (31), while

Pantagruel establishes a new Golden Age of

peace, justice, and evangelical Christianity in

Utopie. The narrator, meanwhile, has ventured

into the hero’s mouth, where he discovers an

entire country that seems to be France (32). The

epic ends anticlimactically as Pantagruel is

purged of a gastric malady and the narrator

promises to tell the rest of his tale in a sequel.

The thread that holds this rambunctious and

variegated narrative together is the idea that the

world as we know it is tainted with murder and

violence, that universal peace and harmony will

result only from a systematic inversion of the old

medieval order and all its hierarchies, and that

humanistic learning is the natural ally of the

meek in spirit in the establishment of such an

evangelical Utopia.



Press, 1968); Gerard Defaux, Le curieux, le glorieux

et la sagesse du monde dans la premiere moitie du

seizieme siecle: L’exemple de Panurge (Ulysse, De-

mosthene, Empedocle), French Forum Monographs 34

(Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1982); Edwin M. Du-

val, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven,

CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Raymond C. La

Charite, Recreation, Reflection and Re-creation: Per-

spectives on Rabelais’s Pantagruel, French Forum

Monographs 19 (Lexington, KY: French Forum,

1980); Walter Stephens, Giants in Those Days: Folk-

lore, Ancient History, and Nationalism (Lincoln: Uni-

versity of Nebraska Press, 1989).

Edwin M. Duval

PANTAGRUELION (3BK 49–52) Rabelais’s

Third Book of Pantagruel ends with four cryptic

chapters (49–52) in the form of a paradoxical

eulogy meant to parallel Panurge’s opening

Praise of Debts (2–5). As the companions pre-

pare to put to sea and visit the Oracle of the Holy

Bottle, Pantagruel takes on board a large supply

of a mysterious product called Pantagruelion,

which the narrator, following Pliny’s Natural

History (19–20), describes as a textile plant

(hemp, flax) with numerous manufactured appli-

cations (clothes, ropes, sails, etc.). At the same

time, Pantagruelion takes on many other forms,

including fire-resistant asbestos, mood-enhancing

hashish (cannabis sativa), and the “philosopher’s

stone” (OC 1454). More enigmatically, its many

virtues are supposed to bring human beings to-

gether and make them conquer the universe. This

frightens the Olympian gods, for Pantagruel’s

children, they fear, may “invade the regions of

the moon, enter the celestial signs, and take our

goddesses as wives, which is the only means of

being deified” (51).

Numerous interpretations of the episode have

been proposed. For the editors of the early

twentieth-century critical edition of Rabelais’s

Œuvres, it was a “technical enigma” meant to be

deciphered as the symbol of the Renaissance be-

lief in human industry and progress (Lefranc

1931; Plattard 1910). For supporters of Rabe-

lais’s Erasmian evangelism, however, the

enigmatic formulation of the episode was the key

Pantagruelion 177

to Rabelais’s hidden thought: the magic plant had

to be decoded as a veiled message of steadfast

faith in the face of persecution. For political rea-

sons Rabelais had resorted to the ingenious de-

vice of enigmatic speech, covertly appealing to

his contemporaries for a tacit attitude toward

evangelical freedom (Saulnier’s “hesuchist” the-

ory). In hermeneutical terms, Pantagruel’s epon-

ymous plant could thus be an emblem of inter-

pretive progress toward the full revelation of

divine meaning, given the assured unfolding of

salvation history (Quint 1983).

More recent scholarship has generally focused

on the rhetorical aspects of the episode, stressing

its place within the formal or moral structure of

the book and displaying the self-reflexive move-

ment of the encomium as a symbol of textual

productivity (Bernard 1981; Delegue 1983; Ras-

son 1984; Rigolot 1972, 1996). Rabelais shares

a fascination for paradox with many of his con-

temporaries. In the Pantagruelion chapters, how-

ever, lyricism becomes an end in itself, distin-

guishing the episode from other satirical

eulogies of burlesque intent (Colie 1966; Losse

1980; Screech 1958). Other readings of the epi-

sode are based on the confrontation between Ra-

belais’s satirical genius, his evangelical leanings,

and the Renaissance literary tradition. For the

first time in the Third Book, Rabelais signs his

name as an author who seeks literary recognition.

His desire to counteremulate his great predeces-

sors might best be fulfilled by creating a mock-

lyric emblem of its own, a modern equivalent of

the laurel for self-glorification (Rigolot 1989).

At the same time, deciphering the meaning of

this emblematic plant is complicated by its am-

bivalent, often negative aspects. (Ropes are also

used to hang people, and hemp seeds can cause

sterility.) To be sure, there is a double edge to

this so-called miraculous plant. It is the source

of seemingly inexhaustible possibilities and it

contains the threat of extinction of the human

race. As such it reminds one of Plato’s phar-

macon: a wonderful remedy in which there al-

ways lurks the danger of poisoning, impotence,

and death (Delegue 1983). Thus, as Edwin Du-

val (1997: 209–214) has compellingly remarked,

“the enigma of Pantagruelion seems to resist any

completely satisfactory interpretation and to re-

main enigmatic and frustratingly ambivalent to

the end.” As such, it appears to serve as “a kind

of final test of our own skill and understanding

as interpreters.” Yet, the problem may be less a

hermeneutic one than a moral one. Perhaps we

should not be fooled by a narrator who, much

like Panurge, tries to impress us with his soph-

istry as he lets himself be carried away by his

own rhetoric. Although the eventual ascent to

the heavenly seats of the gods, which Pantagrue-

lion makes possible, undoubtedly represents the

narrator’s quest for immortality, Rabelais’s

choice of an ambivalent enigma as a literary form

functions as a productive strategy for questioning

his own fictional project. The Tiers livre is a

book about interpretation, and it begins and ends

appropriately with an interpretive problem—an

enigma that allows for the duplicitous nature of

Rabelais’s authorial self-creation as it both re-

produces and subverts the analogical system of

emblematic representations.

Readings: Claudie E. Bernard, “Le pantagruelion

entre nature et culture,” Degre second, Studies in

French Literature 5 (July 1981): 1–20; Rosalie Colie,

Paradoxia Epidemica (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-

versity Press, 1966); Yves Delegue, “Le pantagruelion,

ou le discours de la verite,” RHR 16 (1983): 18–40;

Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre

de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Mireille Huchon,

ed., Rabelais, Œuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard,

1994); Abel Lefranc, Œuvres de Rabelais, vol. 5, Le

tiers livre (Paris: H. Champion, 1931); Deborah N.

Losse, Rhetoric at Play. Rabelais and Satirical Eulogy

(Berne: Peter Lang, 1980); Anna Ogino, Les eloges

paradoxaux dans le Tiers et le Quart livre de Rabelais.

Enquete sur le comique et le cosmique a la Renais-

sance (Tokyo: France Tosho, 1989); Jean Plattard,

L’œuvre de Rabelais (Paris: H. Champion, 1910); Da-

vid Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Lit-

erature. Versions of the Source (New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press, 1983); Luc Rasson, “Rabelais et la

maıtrise: l’exemple du Tiers Livre,” Revue belge de

philologie et d’histoire 62.3 (1984): 493–503; Fran-

cois Rigolot, “Encomie et botanique,” Les langages de

Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1996); Francois Rigolot,

“Rabelais’s Laurel for Glory: A Further Study of the

Pantagruelion,” RQ 42.1 (Spring 1989): 60–77;

Verdun-Louis Saulnier, “L’enigme du pantagruelion,”

ER 1 (1956): 48–72; Verdun-Louis Saulnier, Le des-

178 Pantagruelism

sein de Rabelais (Paris: SEDES, 1957), rpt. in his Ra-

belais dans son enquete, vol. 1 (Paris: SEDES, 1983);

Michael A. Screech, The Rabelaisian Marriage

(London: Arnold, 1958).

Francois Rigolot

PANTAGRUELISM A term invented by Ra-

belais to denote the characteristic virtues and

qualities of his hero Pantagruel. Essentially a

form of Christian charity, Pantagruelism consists

in a cheerful spirit of benevolence, generosity,

and joy that overlooks imperfections, pardons of-

fenses, and disregards adversity for the sake of

good companionship, conviviality, and commun-

ion.

Pantagruelism is defined for the first time in

the prologue to the Third Book (1546) as the

benevolence the narrator hopes to find in his

own readers. Acutely conscious of the imperfec-

tions of his own book, the narrator worries that

the Third Book will be despised by those he

wishes to please. But he is reassured by the

knowledge that his chosen readers possess “a

certain specific form (as the old scholars used to

say), a definite, unique character trait which our

ancestors called Pantagruelism, proving that they

will never take offense at things which, as they

know perfectly well, spring from a good, loyal,

open heart. I’ve often seen them take goodwill

as their only payment, and take it gladly, when

their debtor clearly couldn’t pay them with any-

thing else” (GP 246). This well-known passage

defines a frame of mind that does not easily take

offense, but rather inclines to view the necessar-

ily imperfect words and deeds of fellow mortals

in the most favorable light, overlooking any

flaws and pardoning any offense they may con-

tain. Thanks to this quality, Rabelais’s readers

will not be scandalized by his book but will wel-

come it, receiving it in the spirit in which it is

offered.

Within the Third Book, this same quality is

attributed to Pantagruel and illustrated by all his

actions. Informed of Panurge’s outrageous mis-

management of his newly acquired fief, for ex-

ample, Pantagruel “was neither indignant, angry,

nor sad. . . . He took everything just as it came,

putting everything in the best possible light; he

never tortured himself with anxiety, and never

permitted himself to be scandalized by anything”

(GP 251). The entire Third Book can in fact be

read as a narrative of Pantagruelism in action, as

the hero again and again “interprets” the foolish

and often offensive words of Panurge and others

in the best possible sense. This kind of heroic

Pantagruelism is associated throughout the book

with canonical definitions of charity: “forgive us

our debts, as we have forgiven our debtors”

(Matt. 6.12); “judge not, and you will not be

judged; condemn not, and you will not be con-

demned; forgive, and you will be forgiven” (Lk.

6.37); “love bears all things, believes all things,

hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor.

13.7); etc.

Before the Third Book, the word “Pantagruel-

isme” occurs only once, and with no trace of its

later meaning. (Gargantua is advertised on its

title page as a “book full of Pantagruelism.”) But

as early as 1534, passages containing cognates

like “Pantagruelistes” and “Pantagrueliser” al-

ready hint at the quality that will eventually be

named Pantagruelism. In the prologue to Gar-

gantua, for example, the narrator shrugs off the

criticism that his books “smell of wine more than

of oil”: “To be a jolly man, a good friend, a good

boozer—to me, that spells honor and glory. And

that well-deserved reputation makes me welcome

anytime Pantagruelists sit down together” (GB

9). He then urges his readers to avoid the ex-

ample of his overly critical censors, and instead

to put the best possible interpretation on his

books: “Nevertheless, interpret everything I do

and say in the most gracious light” (GP 9). A

similar passage occurs in a text inserted some

eight years later (in 1542) into the epilogue of

Pantagruel. Here the narrator rails against certain

censors who have condemned his books, and he

advises his readers that if they wish to be “good

Pantagruelists (which means to live peacefully,

happily, and healthily, always having a good

time), never trust anyone who looks out at you

from under a cowl” (GP 235), they must flee all

hypocrites, inquisitors, and calumniators. Given

the obvious similarities between these passages

and those quoted above from the Third Book, the

as-yet-unnamed quality they ascribe to Rabe-

lais’s readers may properly be viewed as Panta-

gruelism avant la lettre.

After the Third Book, Pantagruelism is no

longer an important concept. The hero of the

Panurge 179

Fourth Book (1552) still embodies that quality

in many of his actions, but neither the word nor

its definition occurs in the text, and the narrator

no longer solicits anything like Pantagruelism in

his readers. (An increasingly bitter Rabelais is

more inclined to condemn the calumny of his

enemies than to appeal to the good-will of his

friends.) The word “Pantagruelism” does occur

parenthetically in the prologue to the Fourth

Book, but is now defined much more narrowly to

suggest something more akin to Horatian epicu-

reanism: “a certain gaiety of spirit, an indiffer-

ence to all the accidents of daily life” (GP 383).


lais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel, ER 34 (Geneva:

Droz, 1997): 187–221; Edwin Duval, “Interpretation

and the ‘Doctrine Absconce’ of Rabelais’s Prologue to

Gargantua” ER 18 (1985): 1–17.

Edwin M. Duval

PANURGE One of the greatest characters in

Rabelais’s books, Panurge makes his memorable

first appearance in chapter 9 of Pantagruel, as

an indigent vagabond who has nearly been

roasted and eaten alive by the Turks (P 14). De-

spite his disheveled appearance, Panurge already

demonstrates his extraordinary powers by asking

Pantagruel for help and food in a dozen differ-

ent languages, among them Greek and Hebrew,

which joined Latin as the most important learned

languages of the Renaissance. The character’s

role in Pantagruel is a brilliant one and threatens

to eclipse that of the work’s protagonist. In these

early chapters, the text pauses to consider his

protean nature, evident in his linguistic display,

describing a series of adventures that interrupt

the narrative trajectory or “design” of the Rabe-

laisian text, which scholars have described as a

kind of Bildungsroman of the Christian, human-

ist prince of the Renaissance.

Panurge as a character type is derived from a

number of narrative and folkloric traditions, both

ancient and medieval. As Edwin Duval writes,

Panurge has been “variously associated with Her-

mes, the god of magic, arcane knowledge, rhet-

oric, subterfuge, and theft; with Till Eulenspiegel

and Maistre Pierre Faifeu, the merry pranksters

of folk legend; with the Devil, that malevolent

worker of mischief in the world who leaves be-

hind him fire and the smell of sulfur; and with

Ulysses, the classical exemplar of worldly curi-

osity” (Duval 1991: 63). This association with

the primal figures of folk tales, such as the trick-

ster, means that Panurge is a character whose

textual being is cyclical, cosmic, and carnival-

esque, to use Bakhtin’s terms, as opposed to the

linear figure of Pantagruel to whom he acts as a

foil and alter ego. The initial chapters of his in-

troduction (P 9, 14–25), which may seem epi-

sodic and somewhat random to a modern reader,

are in fact written in the comic narrative code

that was characteristic of late medieval stories,

such as the fabliaux and the Cent nouvelles nou-

velles, and which was still alive and well in Ren-

aissance France, in popular festivals into which

Gargantua and Pantagruel would later be incor-

porated in public readings.

Like so many of his predecessors from this

tradition—the millers, Franciscans, and gentils

compagnons of comic tales, for example—Pan-

urge is curiously associated with an animalistic,

almost infantile cosmos in which a gluttonous

appetite for food and an explosive scatology

merge with a sadistic desire to inflict (at least

mock) suffering on others, often in the form of

undesirable substances (eggs, feces, urine, vomit,

dirty oil) that are smeared on the bodies of un-

suspecting victims. Panurge himself is wrapped

in lard by the Turks and roasted on a spit, then

chased and bitten by dogs just before he makes

his escape. After meeting Pantagruel, he turns the

tables and becomes a torturer himself, especially

of the maıtres es arts in the Latin quarter, dis-

playing a formidable arsenal of tricks, including

various means of smearing feces on unsuspecting

students and of attaching fox tails or rabbit ears

to the backs of their robes. His wardrobe contains

a number of secret pockets in which he keeps a

sharp knife for cutting purses, a pair of dice for

flimflamming on the streets, various powders that

make people sneeze, and cones full of lice and

fleas that he throws on women at mass.

This version of Panurge as gremlin reaches its

culmination in the notorious section of the work

(P 22) in which he plays a bon tour on a

Haughty Parisian Lady who refuses his sexual

advances. The procession of big and little dogs

who subsequently cover her body in urine as a

result of Panurge’s trick has been read as a par-

ody of the Corpus Christi procession and even as

180 Papacy

a symbol of “cosmic regeneration” by Bakhtin

(Bakhtin 1984: 229–31). While the ferocity of

this single episode has engendered a considerable

flow of scholarly ink, Panurge’s inexcusable mi-

sogyny should be read in the context of his an-

tagonism toward almost every other social group

represented in the work—from “sugary” ladies

to lowly students, from farcical experts to trav-

eling English charlatans. In general, Panurge as

character reproduces attitudes and actions that

function as literary commonplaces within the tra-

dition of comic literature that Rabelais inherited

from the Middle Ages. As such, he literally is a

compendium of signs meant to signify comic at-

tributes within a specific, historically contingent

narrative tradition. In this sense, his “debate by

signs” with the Englishman Thaumaste (P 19–

20), in which Rabelais puts forth a dazzling se-

ries of meaningless yet somehow suggestive vi-

sual gestures, is perhaps the culminating point of

his description in Pantagruel.

If the Panurge who appears in Pantagruel is

the devilish alter ego of Pantagruel the humanist

prince, then the Panurge of the Third Book per-

sonifies the kind of paranoid masculinity that

subtended both the serious clerical literature on

marriage and the comic tales that depicted the

ubiquitous figure of the cuckold. (In fact, in the

Fourth Book, Dindenault immediately recog-

nizes Panurge as a cuckold [4BK 5]). The re-

dundancy that was apparent in Panurge’s earlier

introduction takes over both his character and the

entirety of Rabelais’s Third Book, in which the

character merely travels from place to place re-

peatedly seeking an answer to the question as to

whether he will be cuckolded by his future wife

if he marries. While the transformation of Pan-

urge from charlatan and trickster in Pantagruel

to potential cuckold in the Third Book may be

read as an example of inconsistent character de-

velopment, Panurge’s obsession with signs, por-

tents, and omens could be interpreted as the log-

ical next step in the development of a character

whose entire being on the page is devoted to the

exposition of multiple series of comic, narrative

signs and icons, from steaming turds to decorated

codpieces. Read from this perspective, the Pan-

urge of the Third Book is a pretext for a set of

variations on Rabelais’s favorite theme: the re-

lation between signs and their signification, and

between the apparent “surface” of the text and

its ultimate “meaning” for the reader. In this

sense, the forlorn Panurge of the Third Book be-

comes an allegorical figure in his quest for an

answer to a simple question and represents per-

haps the plight of the reader who seeks a kind

of impossible knowledge from the books that he

or she reads. If the ultimate lesson of the Third

Book is that the future cannot be foretold, then

Panurge leaves behind his childish, prankster

persona at least temporarily and assumes the

more serious aspect of a reader who seeks the

true meaning beyond the surface of textual phe-

nomena.

Panurge the trickster and charlatan returns,

however, in the famous episode of the moutons

or sheep of the Fourth Book (5–8), in which all

of his major characteristics—verbal bombast as-

sociated with sexuality, scatology, vigorous yet

meaningless debates, comic violence inflicted on

others—resurface forcefully. According to Ger-

ard Defaux, Panurge’s ferocity, thoroughly en-

meshed in the vitriol of Rabelais’s rhetoric in this

masterpiece, reflects the author’s reaction to the

difficult political and religious situation in which

he found himself and is hence one of the key

elements that must be grasped if one is to un-

derstand this last of his completed books. In con-

clusion, as paradoxical and inscrutable as Pan-

urge may seem, his character and attributes are

crucial to Rabelais’s oeuvre, the profound mul-

tiplicity of which cannot be appreciated without

an attentive reading of this puzzling and devilish

figure.


World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1984); Gerard Defaux, introduction

to the Quart Livre (Paris: Livres de Poche, 1994); Ed-

win Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New

Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Carla Frec-


Haulte Dame de Paris (Pantagruel, 22),” JMRS 15.1

(Spring 1985): 57–67; Raymond C. La Charite, Rec-

reation, Reflection, and Re-creation: Perspectives on

Rabelais’s Pantagruel (Lexington, KY: French Forum,

1980).

David LaGuardia

PAPACY The government of the Roman pon-

tif, who heads up the Western Christian church.

Papimanes and Papefigues 181

The papacy during Rabelais’s time was held by

a series of popes from grand Italian families

(e.g., della Rovere, Medici, and Farnese). Such

wealth, power, and influence rivaled that of

Spain and France, kingdoms that the popes con-

sistently played against one another. Sumptuous

and extravagant, the existence of the Roman Cu-

ria resembled a courtly lifestyle. Great artists

flourished thanks to papal patronage. Nepotism,

simony, and mistresses were not uncommon.

However, the Holy See considered itself above

terrestrial kingdoms; it claimed that the Pope

oversaw temporal authority as the representative

of God on earth. Rabelais uses the Papimanes,

who revere the holy “butt and balls” of the Pope,

to poke fun at the idolatry of a preening pontiff

(4BK 48). Their irreverent neighbors the Pap-

efigues replaced the portrait of the Pope with a

fig (4BK 45).

During the sixteenth century, the papacy was

in crisis inside and out. Abuses had taken their

toll, creating a climate of corruption. The resis-

tance to Church reform alternated between a Cu-

ria that stymied papal efforts and popes that re-

mained unresponsive to calls for action. The

early Reformation pressed the question from

outside Rome, raising the bugbear issue of

whether the Pope or the Council had ultimate

authority in the Church. Rabelais mocks the

bickering over who had the upper hand in the

ludicrous trial of Baisecul and Humevesne (P

10–12). Papal politics retarded the calling of the

Council of Trent until it was too late to mend

fences. Even then, it was dominated by Italian

clergy, and Rabelais parodies the council’s doc-

trinal discussions in the reactions of the main

characters to the storm in the Fourth Book (18–

22). Martin Luther went from addressing a

good Pope trapped in a “Babylonian captivity”

of evil advisers to calling him the Antichrist. In

France, the kingdom (even the Sorbonne) had

always exercised its own prerogative. Rabelais

shares a brand of royalist Gallicanism with his

patrons the du Bellays, and his work often shows

support of their policies at crucial political mo-

ments. During his trips to Rome in the entourage

of Cardinal Jean du Bellay, Rabelais saw the

Roman Church at first hand. His critiques per-

haps speak to this experience. It is significant that

Rabelais felt free to express his distrust of Ro-

man Church politics and the “legalese” of papal

law statutes, the Decretales (4BK 49–53).

Readings: Jean Batany, “Les ‘Quatre Estats’ de l’Ile

des Papimanes,” BAARD 3.10 (1981): 425–29; Rich-

ard Cooper, “Rabelais et l’eglise,” Rabelais et son

demi-millenaire: Actes du colloque international de

Tours (14–29 Septembre 1984), ER 21 (Geneva: Droz,

1988); Lawrence Kritzman, “Rabelais in Papimania:

Power and the Rule of the Law,” RR 75 (1984): 25–

34; Michael A. Screech, L’evangelisme de Rabelais:

Aspects de la satire religieuse au XVIe siecle, ER 2

(Geneva: Droz, 1959).

Amy C. Graves

PAPIMANES AND PAPEFIGUES (4BK 45–

48, 49–54) These two episodes in Rabelais’s

Fourth Book are part of a cluster that also in-

cludes Quaresmeprenant, L’Isle Farouche, and

the physetere. At the level of generality, the phy-

setere (fusis teras), a natural monstrosity that all

fear, represents death. Speculation on the foul

waters (or figuratively, writings) that spout from

its mouth and head might ascribe to it a species

of death deriving from the cascade of religious

pamphlets associated with Reformist polemics,

that is, the factional disputes that Rabelais attacks

in the fouaces or “flatcakes” episode (G 25) and

in the 1552 prologue to the Fourth Book. But as

generic Death the monster is conquered by the

replicate Christ, Pantagruel, not by cross and

resurrection as Jesus, the Great Pan, conquered

death, but by a fleet drawn up in a Y formation,

that is, by human reproduction. This is not sim-

ply the physical reproduction envisaged by Gar-

gantua (P 8), but rather the intercourse of minds

and ideas, ensuring the transmission of thought

from generation to generation. It is how that

transmission is to take place that lies at the heart

of Panurge’s perplexities about marriage.

The inhabitants of L’Isle Farouche are identi-

fied for us by Joachim du Bellay in his Regrets

(135) as “Swiss people, whom the good Rabelais

named ‘Sausages’ ” (“Suysses . . . que le bon Ra-

belais a surnommez Saulcisses”), who by their

generic designation are Swiss reformers (An-

douilles, Saulcissons Montigenes) with German

allies (Boudins). These are a fierce and warlike

people who by no means practice the Christian

virtues of peace and tolerance. In addition to be-

ing at daggers drawn with the Holy Wowser,

182 Papimanes and Papefigues

Quaresmeprenant, they also attack Pantagruel

and company, symbolically associated with the

true Church, without even identifying them.

They worship a bizarre God—a flying pig that

shits healing mustard on them; they are of am-

biguous sexuality, being all female but with a

queen bearing the name of Niphleseth, meaning

“penis”; once transported into the peace and

plenty of Utopia, they ultimately die out. Given

this negative portrayal of reformers, it is unlikely

that Rabelais was a Protestant.

Papimanie or Papimania, the last visit in the

cluster, presents us at the outset with a paradox.

The island is blessed, or benoiste, and its people

are characterized as “good” (gens de bien or

bonnes gens), a term not used ironically in the

Chronicles. They recognize and welcome Pan-

tagruel and company, and the giant and his peo-

ple obviously approve them. And yet no other

island draws such heavy criticism from the com-

pany. Papal authority and its instrument, the De-

cretals, the papal presumption of being God on

earth, veneration of objects, relics, unnecessary

rituals, confessions, holy water, monastic insti-

tutions, indulgences, the self-indulgence of prel-

ates, warring popes, purgatory with its devils and

boiling cauldrons, and finally the financial levies

made on surrounding countries, especially

France, to maintain the papal institution—these

abuses and more are attacked and have led em-

inent critics to regard Rabelais as a Papefigue,

one who gives the Pope the finger.

But if we compare the Island of the Antipap-

ists with Nuts-on-the-Popeland, we find it deso-

late, storm-ridden, and overrun by devils, as the

Papefigues eke out a precarious living. In Papi-

mania, Pantagruel and his followers partake in

the rituals and feasts; in fact that is the only visit

during which they take mass in the whole ex-

pedition. In Papefiguiere, however, they go into

a chapel to take holy water and are then merely

witnesses of events. In the spectrum of sixteenth-

century sects reflected in this cluster of episodes,

the Papefigues, by the maintenance of ritual and

doctrine and the rejection of papal authority,

most resemble the Gallican/Anglican movement

in the Church. Rabelais does not belong there!

To understand this paradox, it is useful to look

at two symbolic features, the nose and woman,

both of which are of pivotal importance in the

Papefigues episode. The nose is a symbol of wit,

reason, and wisdom in the Chronicles: Frere

Jean has a big nose, Socrates is given one

against the evidence that his real nose was flat

(G prol.), and the people of Ennasin have no

noses. In the instance of the Papefigue farmer,

who has kept the devil at bay for successive

years by mental astuteness, he has taken refuge

in a stoup of holy water (Scripture) with only his

nose (or his native wit) sticking out. Meanwhile,

his wife undertakes the scratching match the

devil has demanded, to resolve the dispute be-

tween them. She sends the little brute running for

his life by opening her legs and displaying the

token of her femininity, symbolizing the power

of doctrine (see Symbolic System).

The symbols of the nose (wit, wisdom) and

woman (doctrine) also feature prominently in

Papimania. Homenaz, the bishop of Papimania,

carries wisdom in the second half of his name—

Home–naz—and dispenses it to Frere Jean and

Pantagruel in the course of the banquet offered

to the guests. This contrasts sharply with the rid-

icule heaped on Homenaz in the satiric sections

of the episode. The true Church as hypothesized

by Rabelais is made up of a utopian figure—

Pantagruel, perfect replicate Christ—and imper-

fect beings—Frere Jean in the Church and Pan-

urge, the humanist mind. Homenaz is human and

therefore imperfect; he therefore carries in his

name the wisdom of his episcopal office and the

imperfections of his humanity. He represents

symbolically the paradox on which the episode

is based.

It is in the banquet that the paradox is resolved

in the figures of the Serving Maidens (Clerices)

and the Good Christian Pears (Bonchretien

Pears). Banquets in the Chronicles are the hu-

manist equivalents of Communion—Symposia.

In the Papimanian banquet, the guests are waited

on at table by Clerices who are both Clarisses,

the Little Sisters of Saint Claire, and female

clerks (i.e., in Holy Orders). If Homenaz by his

name is a Man/mind, then Clerices symbolize

Church Ideas or doctrines. They are all virgins,

that is, doctrines not yet promulgated. When they

are summoned (“Clerice, esclaire ici” [4BK 53]),

they pour the wine of the Holy Spirit to enlighten

the proceedings. Frere Jean lusts for them (4BK

54). Now Panurge is a repentant lecher and lust-

Paris 183

ful by nature, but this is the first and only time

in all the chronicles that Frere Jean lusts. Why?

Because the Clerices belong in the Church, in his

domain. Homenaz reproves him, and when Pan-

tagruel departs from Papimania he leaves a

dowry for the Clerices who will be married in

due time. He also takes with him the unique

product of the Island—Good Christian Pears, to

grow and multiply back home in Utopia.

Rabelais uses paradox as a regular means of

revealing the higher sense of his work (G prol).

Here then is the resolution of this paradox. Hu-

manity in the figures of Frere Jean and Panurge

is imperfect; so also is Homenaz in Papimania,

the Church of Rome, the home of good Chris-

tians. Yet Pantagruel, the exemplar of the Perfect

Church, says of the Roman Church, “I never saw

better Christians than these Papimanians.” Its im-

perfections are many and often absurd, but in the

office of the Man/Bishop there is also the nose—

inherent wisdom—and the island contains the

Clerices, doctrines for the future. Of all the

places in this cluster of sects, Protestants, Galli-

cans, and Romans, it is surprisingly the Papi-

manes for which Rabelais shows the most affin-

ity. The Reform commonplaces with which the

episodes and particularly the last are full are a

smoke screen intended to distract the reader; the

sustantificque mouelle or marrow lies above and

behind them. Faith, patience, and tolerance in

love will in time bring ignorant and imperfect

humanity to understanding and fulfillment. This

is the lesson at the heart of the Rabelaisian mes-

sage, seen throughout the Chronicles, but specif-

ically in the Couillatris story of the Fourth Book

prologue, the Clerices in Papimania, and the Bot-

tle episode of the Fifth Book. A delightful irony

runs all through the story. Pantagruel, the true

Church, the Body of Christ on earth, judges by

his presence the imperfect earthly Church and its

head, the Pope, self-styled Deum in terra.

Readings: Fred W. Marshall, “Papimania, the

Blessed Isle: Rabelais’ Attitude to the Roman

Church,” AJFS 31.3 (1994): 245–58; Verdun L. Saul-

nier, Rabelais II: Rabelais dans son enquete; Etude

sur le Quart et le Cinquieme livre (Paris: SEDES,

1982); Michael A. Screech, “Sagesse de Rabelais: Ra-

belais et les ‘bons Christians,’ ” ER 21 (Geneva: Droz,

1988): 9–15; Michael A. Screech, L’evangelisme de

Rabelais: Aspects de la satire religieuse au XVIe sie-

cle, ER 2 (Geneva: Droz, 1959).

Fred W. Marshall

PARIS A noisy, bustling, crowded urban cen-

ter, with a widely variable population (150,000

to 300,000 inhabitants over the course of the six-

teenth century). Clearly one of the major com-

mercial centers of France, it was also an impor-

tant university town. As a royal city, its political

centrality was evident. The majority of Parisians

remained staunchly Catholic throughout the cen-

tury. The conservative scholasticism that domi-

nated the faculties of the Sorbonne (theology,

medicine, canon law, and the arts) at first stifled

the sort of literary Renaissance that was flour-

ishing in Lyon, even if a number of colleges in

Paris housed inspiring humanist scholars. The

power of the Sorbonne included control over

censorship and participation in the persecution

of heretics.

Paris contained four distinct parts: Ile de la

Cite, the religious and judicial heart of the city,

where Notre Dame and the Palais de Justice were

located; “la Ville,” on the Right Bank, where

commerce dominated; the Latin Quarter, site of

the university and a number of colleges; and the

faubourgs, located outside of the twelfth- and

fourteenth-century walls.

In G 17 and P 7, the narrator mocks Parisians

as stupid, superstitious, and gullible. Panurge’s

famous suggestion to improve the fortifications

of Paris (P 15) reflects not only an expanding

population ill served by the medieval defenses,

but also the reputation for promiscuity that had

attached itself to the city. Panurge’s pranks re-

semble extreme versions of those played by the

boisterous students of the Latin Quarter (P 16).

The episode of the Haughty Parisian Lady (P

21–22) reveals tensions at play in the city: re-

sentment of the rich and of their privileges on

the part of the numerous poor, and the extreme

misogyny that existed. Panurge’s trick is an ugly

urban version of the carnivalesque behavior that

often turned violent.

The first execution in Paris of an accused Prot-

estant (Lutheran) heretic took place in 1523. Re-

ligious repression escalated after the Affaire des

Placards (1534), when posters against Catholic

mass were posted all around Paris and elsewhere

184 Parlement

in France. In January 1535, an elaborate proces-

sion was held, in the course of which Francis I

demonstrated his devotion to the Catholic faith,

and six convicted heretics were burned at the

stake. Rabelais’s relatively open criticism of the

Sorbonne, the cult of saints, and other aspects of

Catholicism are remarkable in the context of this

repression.

Architecturally and artistically, Rabelais’s

Paris was still more of a medieval than a Ren-

aissance city. Francis had literally brought the

Italian Renaissance to the Loire Valley and to

the Ile de France region, but the rebuilding of the

Louvre was not undertaken until the end of his

reign. Major projects only came to fruition in the

second half of the sixteenth century.

Readings: Barbara Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross:

Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Pierre Mi-

quel, Les guerres de religion (Paris: Fayard, 1980);

William Monter, Judging the French Reformation:

Heresy Trials by Sixteenth-Century Parlements (Cam-

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); David

Thomson, Renaissance Paris (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1984).

Kathleen Perry Long

PARLEMENT Currently, a legislative body

consisting of the Senate and National Assembly,

France’s Parlement (from “parler,” meaning “to

speak”) developed during the Middle Ages from

the King’s Court (Curia Regis) and was the

country’s highest judicial body under the Ancien

Regime. Divided into multiple chambers during

the Renaissance, including the infamous Cham-

bre Ardente (“Burning Chamber”) where accused

heretics were tried in the late 1540s and early

1550s, Parlement enjoyed both inflated ranks, the

result of royal venality or the crown’s willing-

ness to appoint new magistrates in exchange for

money, and increased power and autonomy in

the sixteenth century.

Somewhat surprisingly, given the monarchy’s

active role in choosing judges, there is little ev-

idence that the court’s decisions were unduly in-

fluenced by the king. In fact, the magistrates rou-

tinely delayed action on royal proposals that did

not suit them, including a plan by Francis I to

establish a new Chambre des Enquetes in 1521

(Roelker 1996: 10). True, conservative groups

within the high court actively supported the Sor-

bonne’s suppression of religious dissidence,

earning Parlement a reputation for rubber stamp-

ing the Faculty of Theology’s antiheretical

edicts. However, Nancy Lyman Roelker suggests

that the Parlement of Paris actually consisted of

humanists, reform sympathizers, and centrists as

well as conservatives.

Rabelais’s own attitude toward and references

to “parlement” are mixed. While on occasion he

uses the term generically to mean “talk” or “dis-

cussion,” at times his superficially positive allu-

sions to Parlement, within a legal context, leave

room for satiric interpretations. For instance,

Panurge bases his extravagant expenditures on

examples set by the Sorbonne and Parlement

(3BK 2); Pantagruel considers the wisdom dis-

played by a Parisian fool to be equal to that of

France’s high court (3BK 37); and the Mirelin-

guan parliament, often identified with the Paris

Parlement, is characterized as “evil and corrupt”

(3BK 44). Yet in his allegory of Messere Gaster,

Rabelais’s vision of a world without parlements,

and ruled by poverty, is troublingly ambivalent:

for if the resulting lack of order recalls Picro-

chole’s reign of rage in Gargantua, a cautionary

episode advocating a “parliamentary” or dialogic

approach to problem solving, it also suggests,

much more darkly, that the judiciary itself is

driven by personal interest, that principles of jus-

tice are routinely perverted by base human ap-

petites, and that “all laws” are futile in the face

of poverty, hunger, and greed (see also Heresy;

Judiciary).

Readings: Nancy Lyman Roelker, One King, One

Faith. The Parlement of Paris and the Religious Ref-

ormations of the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: Univer-

sity of California Press, 1996).


PARODY See Imitation and Parody

PAUL, SAINT (c. A.D. 3 – c. 65) The name by

which Saul of Tarsus has come to be known to

history. Many Christians consider Paul to have

been the most important disciple of Jesus of Naz-

areth (although he never met him) and next to

Jesus the most important figure in the early de-

velopment of Christianity. He is also one of the

primary sources of early Church doctrine, since

Petrarch and Petrarchism 185

approximately one-third of the New Testament

canon consists of epistles ascribed to him. Paul’s

major contribution in reaching out to non-Jews

was his contention that the “literal” requirements

of Jewish ritual and practice had been superseded

by belief in Jesus as the promised Messiah and

that this faith alone guaranteed salvation. Augus-

tine’s interpretation of Paul’s teaching on origi-

nal sin, the corruption of human nature, grace,

faith, and free will became authoritative for

Western Christianity.

It was the mature Luther’s liberating encoun-

ter with Paul’s Epistle to the Romans which led

him to challenge a thousand years’ accretion of

human traditions that had obscured the purity and

brilliance of the primitive Church. Paul’s teach-

ing that justification comes by faith alone prom-

ised deliverance from the massive, corrupt eccle-

siastical establishment which had imposed itself

between individual believers and their God, re-

placing Christ as the only true Mediator and Ad-

vocate. This regenerative aspect of the early Lu-

theran message appealed to believers in France

variously known as bibliens, reformistes, or

evangeliques. Marguerite d’Angouleme and

Bishop Guillaume Briconnet gathered together

in the “Cercle de Meaux” like-minded evangeli-

cal humanists, including Jacques Lefevre

d’Etaples and Clement Marot. Only in this con-

text can we understand Rabelais’s relentless at-

tacks on unworthy clerics, mindless rituals and

ceremonies, rote memorization of meaningless

words and formulas, blind obedience to absurd

traditions, idolatrous adoration of saints and

popes, pilgrimages, and the like (G 45).

Readings: Robert K. Rapa, The Meaning of “Works

of the Law” in Galatians and Romans (New York:

Peter Lang, 2001); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais and

the Challenge of the Gospel: Evangelism, Reforma-

tion, Dissent (Baden-Baden: V. Koerner, 1992); Ste-

phen Westerholm, Preface to the Study of Paul (Grand

Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997).

William H. Huseman

PETRARCH AND PETRARCHISM Fran-

cesco Petrarca, or Petrarch (1304–1374), Italian

humanist and lyric poet; the imitation of his

work, especially his vernacular poetry, became

known as “Petrarchism.” Petrarch’s masterpiece,

the Rime sparse, was the prototype for a new

genre, the canzoniere, a sustained sequence of

poems dedicated to a single inaccessible lady.

This work recounts the story of Petrarch’s love

for the virtuous yet desirable Laura, whom he

supposedly met in a church in Avignon. Laura’s

name also evokes, through wordplay, the image

of the laurel, symbol of poetic glory. Petrarch’s

imitators focused on his trademark rhetorical de-

vices, including antithesis, adynaton (a declara-

tion of impossibility or inexpressibility), paro-

nomasia (the use of words that sound alike but

differ in meaning), and oxymoron. They also

popularized short lyric forms, especially the son-

net, and drew from his favorite themic material,

including exaggerated descriptions of the lady’s

beauty. Petrarchism became increasingly fash-

ionable in France during the 1530s under the

reign of Francis I, who supposedly encouraged

a Lyonnais humanist, Maurice Sceve, to locate

Laura’s lost tomb in a chapel of Avignon in

1533.

Although Rabelais might seem an unlikely

candidate to engage in Petrarchism, there are

nevertheless episodes in his work that exhibit

traces of this literary phenomenon, albeit in a pa-

rodic mode. The first is the story of the Haughty

Parisian lady courted by Panurge (P 21–22).

The scene of the initial encounter of the “lovers”

(in church), the lady’s inaccessibility (both so-

cially and sexually), the highly rhetorical de-

scription of her “celestial beauties,” and the com-

position of a lyric poem to win her favors are all

prominent features of Petrarchism.

A second nod to Petrarchism may be found in

G 1, a chapter that shows how the giant’s ge-

nealogy became known through the unearthing

of a long-forgotten tomb. Rabelais wrote this

chapter in Lyon at a time when Sceve’s discov-

ery of Laura’s tomb would have been widely dis-

cussed. Indeed, certain details from this chapter

closely parallel the account of the discovery pub-

lished by Jean de Tournes in his 1545 dedication

(to Sceve) of an edition of Petrarch’s Rime. Most

notable among these parallels is the mysterious

inscription “HIC BIBITUR” (which recalls the

equally cryptic “M.L.M.I.” or “Madonna Laura

Morte Iace” found on Laura’s tomb), as well as

the role of the narrator summoned to decipher

and transcribe the nearly illegible writing of the

genealogy that was worn with age (which cor-

186 Philautia

responds to Sceve’s reading and copying of a

faded sonnet found inside Laura’s tomb).

A third recollection of Petrarchism might be

observed in the Third Book 49–52, in the enig-

matic Pantagruelion—a plant whose green

leaves evoke Petrarch’s emblematic laurel. Just

as Petrarch’s wordplay intertwined the fates of

the laurel and Laura, so too did Rabelais describe

a plant whose name evokes that of his hero.

Moreover, it has been suggested that the scat-

tered leaves fallen from the Sibyl’s tree on which

she writes the destiny of Panurge’s marriage

(3BK 16–18) may constitute a comic, literal ver-

sion of Petrarch’s Rime sparse or “scattered

rhymes.”

Readings: Carla Freccero, “Damning haughty

dames: Panurge and the haulte dame de Paris,” JMRS

15 (1985): 57–67; Enzo Giudici, “Bilancio di una an-

nosa questione: Maurice Sceve e la ‘scoperta’ della

‘tomba di Laura,’ ”Quaderni di filologia e lingue ro-

manze 2 (1980): 1–70; Jean-Luc Nardonne, Petrarque

et le petrarquisme (Paris: PUF, 1998); Francois Ri-

golot, “Rabelais’s Laurel for Glory: A Further Study

of the ‘Pantagruelion,’ ” RQ 42 (1989): 60–77.

JoAnn DellaNeva

PHILAUTIA (SELF-LOVE, AMOUR DE

SOY) (3BK 29) Based on two Greek roots, Fi-

li¬a (love, affection) and ayto¬ ß (self), it is the

opposite of the first principle of Christian ethics:

a¡ ga¬ ph, charitable love based on compassion and

unselfish concern for the well-being of others.

The term is attested in pre-Christian Greek. In

his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle presents rea-

soned philautia as the basis for all human rela-

tionships. However, the term was used more fre-

quently to denote selfishness and excessive pride.

Christianity assigned it a completely negative

meaning as “the mother of vices” (Maximus the

Confessor). According to Augustine, “two cities

have been formed by two loves: the earthly by

the love of self (amor sui), . . . the heavenly by

the love of God, even to the contempt of self”

(City of God, 14. 28). Erasmus presents Philau-

tia as one of Folly’s indispensable servants, and

Alciato uses Narcissus as the personification of

this vice in his Emblematum Liber (1546: Em-

blem 69).

Panurge, of course, incarnates philautia

throughout the Third Book. Although Panta-

gruel uses the term only once, it is an extremely

important reference that summarizes his compan-

ion’s increasingly uncontrollable narcissistic ob-

sessions: “philautie et amour de soy vous decoit”

(3BK 29). The only possible remedy for such

destructive self-love is “le Pantagruelisme”

(3BK 2).

In a larger sense, however, the major institu-

tions denounced so virulently by Rabelais can all

be described as victims of philautia. The Church,

the monarchy, the feudal nobility, and the fac-

ulties of theology, law, and medicine had origi-

nally been established to minister to the needs of

the entire population, particularly the weak, the

sick, and the powerless; but those in authority

had transformed them into vehicles of self-

aggrandizement and self-enrichment and had

themselves become the chief beneficiaries. Ra-

belais clearly saw his humor as a means of prick-

ing their inflated egos.

Readings: Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’

Tiers Livre de Pantagruel, ER 34 (Geneva: Droz,

1997); Irenee Haussherr, Philautie: de la tendresse

pour soi a la charite selon saint Maxime le Confesseur

(Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Stu-

diorum, 1952); Michael A. Screech, The Rabelaisian

Marriage: Aspects of Rabelais’ Religion, Ethics, and

Comic Philosophy (London: Edward Arnold, 1958).

William H. Huseman

PHYSETERE (4BK 33–34) The Fourth Book

whale or marine monster, which Paul J. Smith

(1987: 110) situates at the crossroads of the

mythological, biblical, and naturalistic traditions,

is virtually a requisite component of the imagi-

nary, epic voyage. Serving as an obstacle that the

hero must overcome to test his mettle, at the risk

of being swallowed up or destroyed, the physe-

tere engenders intense fear in Panurge, who in-

flates the animal’s mystique rhetorically by lik-

ening it to Leviathan or the jaws of Hell.

Pantagruel, by way of contrast, demystifies the

creature by scoffing at his friend’s terror, killing

the “monster” so easily that the episode becomes

a parody of itself (Smith 1987: 112). Moreover,

within the economy of the Fourth Book, the

whale is closely intertwined with neighboring ep-

isodes that enhance and are enriched by the sea

monster’s myriad connotations. Connected to

Physis and Antiphysie by virtue of their pho-

netic similarity, for example, the phystere also

Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 187

functions implicitly as a Lenten fish in the ten-

sion between Quaresmeprenant and the reform-

ist Andouilles. Finally, the crew members’ de-

cision to dissect the whale and sell the oil from

its kidneys smacks of pragmatic maritime com-

merce, a far cry from the mythic encounter Pan-

urge imagined.

Readings: Paul J. Smith, Voyage et ecriture. Etude

sur le quart livre de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1987);

Marcel Tetel, “Le physetere bicephale,” Writing the

Renaissance (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1992).


PHYSIS AND ANTIPHYSIE (4BK 32) An

allegory on monsters and the world upside

down that Rabelais borrows from Calcagnini and

inserts between the episodes of Quaresmepren-

ant and the physetere. In this narration, Physis

or Nature, likened to an upright tree with her

head in the air and both feet on the ground, gives

birth to Beauty and Harmony, while Antiphysie,

the opposite of Nature, produces monstrous off-

spring named Immoderation and Discord (GP

453). Profoundly envious of Nature and her per-

fect children, Antiphysie invents a myth to legit-

imate her own deformity, contending it is her

own children and not those of Nature who resem-

ble the Creator, walking with their feet in the air

and their head to the ground. While on one hand

this allegory serves as a template for Rabelais’s

creative foray into alterity and the world upside-

down, it also functions as a condemnation of

what the author deems monstrous in his own so-

ciety, especially those religious and political big-

ots who persecute the “upright,” claiming their

own unnatural theology is that of God.

Reading: Alice Fiola Berry, The Charm of Catas-


Press, 2000).


PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA, GIOVANNI

(1463–1494) This influential Renaissance hu-

manist was known for his syncretism and the

breadth of knowledge he brought to it, a breadth

that is also evident in Rabelais’s five books. Pico

was born in 1463, the youngest child of the count

of Mirandola. He began studies in canon law at

Bologna in 1477 and then philosophy at Ferrara

in 1479. The following year he moved to Padua,

a center of Aristotelian philosophy. There he

came under the influence of the Jewish Averroist

Elia del Medigo, who introduced him to Jewish

mysticism, the kabbala. In 1484 he settled in

Florence and became a friend of the Plato scholar

Marsilio Ficino. Pico continued to pursue his

broad intellectual interests and added Hebrew

and Arabic to his studies in Latin and Greek.

In 1486 Pico published for debate the Conclu-

siones, 900 statements on thinkers as diverse as

Plato and Aristotle, Avicenna and Averroes, and

Pythagoras, and on ideas from hermetic and kab-

balistic texts as well as standard philosophy and

theology. What has come to be known as the

“Oration on the Dignity of Man” was intended

as an introduction to the theses, and it has be-

come the classic statement of the intellectual am-

bitions of the Renaissance humanist. Pico’s in-

sistence on breadth of knowledge underlies

Gargantua’s letter to Pantagruel (P 8). His em-

phasis on the kabbala led to the beginnings of

Christian kabbalism, and familiarity with it is ev-

ident in Rabelais’s books: references to kabbala

and kabbalists (e.g., its inclusion in P 8) and kab-

balistic ideas (e.g., l’isle de Ruach, 4BK 43). In

1487, Pico published a kabbalist interpretation of

the creation story called Heptaplus. He also in-

tended to write a work reconciling the philoso-

phies of Plato and Aristotle but only published

one part in 1491, On Being and the One.

Pico’s earlier works suggest that he believed

that astrology could provide knowledge about

human personalities and events, but like Rabelais

and other contemporaries, he was uncomfortable

with the way prediction through astrology threat-

ened human free will. Before he died in 1494,

Pico, possibly under the influence of the Domin-

ican friar Girolamo Savonarola, decided that as-

trology was irreconcilable with Christianity and

wrote Disputations against Judicial Astrology.

It was the most widely debated work on the

subject of astrology for the century and a half

after it was written. Although Rabelais counseled

against astrological divination (e.g., G 8), he did

not go as far in his condemnation as Pico.



University of New York Press, 1969); Sheila J. Rabin,

“The Qabbalistic Spirit in Gargantua and Panta-

188 Picrochole

gruel,” Voices in Translation, ed. Deborah Sinnreich-

Levi and Gale Sigal (New York: AMS Press, 1992).

Sheila J. Rabin

PICROCHOLE Petty tyrant and antagonist in

Gargantua, whose name, taken from the Greek

and linked in French to colere or anger, means

“bitter bile.” Both a neighbor and a former friend

of the utopian king, Picrochole refuses to nego-

tiate following an altercation between his bakers

and the shepherds of Grandgousier’s domain,

rushing instead to arms with a precipitousness

that has been identified with the “world conquest

motif” in literature, with the military strategy of

Charles V, and with a withdrawal of God and

divine order from the world (Berrong 1985). Pi-

crochole may also be viewed as the behavioral

antipode of the anti-Machiavellian ethical and

behavioral ideals that Gargantua develops over

the course of the novel. Although his own in-

stinct as a youth was to act selfishly and impul-

sively, Gargantua matures dramatically over the

course of the Picrocholine War, following the

lead of his temperate father. In contrast to Picro-

chole, who rushes to judgment in a rage to

avenge his wounded honor, Grandgousier calmly

tries to ascertain the facts, takes the counsel of

others, and even apologizes in the interest of

peace and the common good. It is this model that

Gargantua embraces as an adult, offering leni-

ency to the prisoners he has conquered (G 50).

Readings: Richard Berrong, Every Man for Him-

self: Social order and Its Dissolution in Rabelais

(Stanford, CA: Anma Libri, 1985); Max Gauna, The

Rabelaisian Mythologies (Madison: Farleigh Dickin-

son University Press, 1996).


PLACARDS, AFFAIR OF (L’AFFAIRE DES

PLACARDS, OCTOBER 17–18, 1534) Con-

sidered a turning point in the relationship be-

tween the French crown and the Reformation.

During the night of October 17–18, copies of an

inflammatory text denouncing the mass appeared

attached to doors all over Paris, Tours, Orleans,

Blois, and Amboise. The text is attributed to a

pastor from Neuchatel, Antoine Marcourt. The

reaction of the Parisian authorities was swift and

brutal: over three hundred people were arrested

(including the poet Clement Marot), and thirty-

five burned. In January 1535, an impressive pro-

cession was organized, during which the Parisian

clergy walked in pomp behind the king himself,

displaying many Church relics and reinforcing

the impression of Church power. Francis I even

proposed an edict in January banning all print-

ing, but the measure was soon reconsidered. The

king did mollify his reaction in 1535, owing in

part to the influence of the du Bellay family. Al-

though the affair did not mark an abrupt transi-

tion from tolerance to persecution, as has some-

times been argued, it did reveal the level of

discord within France, crystallize opposing po-

sitions, and show the extent to which the king

was willing to engage state power as a tool of

repression.

There has been debate about whether Gargan-

tua was published before or after the affair. Al-

though Rabelais makes no direct mention of the

Placards, references to the religious quarrels

abound in his work, and it is certain that the un-

rest in Paris in 1533–1534 provides much of the

inspiration for the episode of the bells (G 17–

20). When Rabelais denounces as a hoax the sal-

amander’s supposed consistency in fire (3BK

52), he may be expressing his disappointment at

what he perceived to be a change of policy by

Francis I, whose emblem was a salamander. The

voyagers of the Fourth Book, who start their

journey by singing Psalm 114 (sung by French

Reformists) have been seen by critics as emblem-

atic of a community of persecuted Protestants in

search of a more tolerant society. However, Ra-

belais spares neither side of the quarrel, as on-

going critical debates show.

Readings: Gabrielle Berthoud, Antoine Marcourt:

reformateur et pamphletaire du ‘Livre des Marchans’

aux placards de 1534 (Geneva: Droz, 1973); Gerard

Defaux, “Rabelais et les cloches de Notre-Dame,” ER

9 (1971): 1–28; Marcel Francon, “Note sur la datation

de Gargantua,” ER 11 (1974): 81–83; Arlette Jouanna

et al., “Presence reelle,” Histoire et Dictionnaire des

guerres de religion (Paris: Laffont, 1998); R. J.

Knecht, “Francis I, Defender of the Faith?” Wealth

and Power in Tudor England: Essays Presented to

S. T. Bindoff, ed. E. W. Ives, Robert J. Knecht, and

J. J. Scarisbrick (London: Athlone, 1978); Michael

Screech, introduction to Francois Rabelais, Gargantua

(Geneva: Droz, 1970); Michael Screech, Rabelais and

Pliny, The Elder 189


tion, Dissent (Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1992).

Louisa Mackenzie

PLAGUE Highly contagious, incurable sick-

ness responsible for widespread fear and death

in European populations from the Middle Ages

through the sixteenth century. Prior to settling in

Lyon, Rabelais had his first encounter with the

plague from a distance, having been prevented

from entering the city of Tours during his travels

because of an outbreak. At the time the doctor

began writing, however, fear of the plague and

an array of social reactions to it had become just

as common and harmful, though not as deadly,

as the sickness itself.

Rabelaisian textual treatment of the plague

ranges from merely mentioning an outbreak in

Angers (P 5) to Panurge’s intentional contami-

nation of Sorbonne scholars with his infamous

“tartre bourbonnoise,” a dreadful concoction

made of an array of foul-smelling ingredients

that he spread on the ground before them (P 16),

and to attributing plague’s origin in the cities of

“Laryngues et Pharingues,” located inside Pan-

tagruel’s throat, to the giant’s stinking garlic

breath (P 32). By placing deadly plague within

the realm of the carnivalesque, Rabelais ac-

knowledges a subject of concern while promot-

ing a transformation of public reaction to it; what

provoked fear may now bring laughter.

Rabelais also speaks out against fear and as-

sociations of plague and other epidemics with di-

vine punishment in Gargantua 45. Here Gran-

gousier becomes Rabelais’s mouthpiece in

severe judgment of “faulx prophetes” (false

prophets) whose influence caused those in fear to

go to great lengths to appease God and the saints

in hopes of avoiding contracting the plague.

Meeting a group of pilgrims returning from Saint

Sebastian, Grandgousier severely condemns

those who made them believe in a need to ap-

pease God and the saints as more poisonous than

the plague itself—a deadly sickness to the soul.

Rather than embarking on futile, dangerous trav-

els, Gargantua’s wise father encourages the

travelers to stay home, care for their families and

land, and work hard. Living in this way, unaf-

fected by unreasonable fear, he promises, guar-

antees that God, the angels, and the saints will

protect them from plague.




1988).

Lesa Randall

PLINY, THE ELDER (GAIUS PLINIUS SE-

CUNDUS, A.D. 23–79) Author of the Natural

History (Historia Naturalis), thirty-seven books

containing a compendium of facts about the nat-

ural world. Pliny’s work is an important source

of information on Roman beliefs concerning na-

ture, and his accounts of monsters were widely

imitated during the Renaissance. Rabelais may

well have read Guillaume Bude’s edition of the

work (1532) or the 1516 Paris edition. His com-

plex attitude toward Pliny, mocking him at some

points and citing him as a reliable authority at

others, reflects the work’s status as a core text of

medieval scholasticism as well as of Renais-

sance humanism.

Perhaps Rabelais’s most famous citation of

Pliny occurs in G 3, where the narrator cites

Pliny’s claim (7,5) that pregnancies can last

eleven months. He then mockingly numbers

Pliny among the Pantagruelistes. Yet Pliny is

cited on topics, particularly in the Fourth Book,

ranging from the effect of emeralds on the libido

to the properties of a wide range of plants. Evi-

dently, Rabelais was familiar with the entirety of

the Natural History. Pliny was a crucial, if in-

accurate, source of information on distant races

and exotic plants for Renaissance readers. Ra-

belais cites Pliny’s seventh book (on strange

births) again in P 4; he may have known the

popular edition, De prodigiosis partubus, which

was influential in the production of treatises on

childbirth and teratology for the rest of the cen-

tury. Nonetheless, Rabelais rejected the “medi-

cal” information Pliny offered. Rabelais’s allu-

sions to Pliny constitute a lesson in reading:

even when faced with an authoritative text, the

reader must use some judgment to sort out useful

information from nonsense.

Readings: R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and

Its Beneficiaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University

190 Plotinus

Press, 1954); Pliny, Natural History, 10 vols. (Cam-

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

Kathleen Perry Long

PLOTINUS (A.D. 205–270) A leading early

Neoplatonic philosopher, author of six books of

Enneads in Greek. Born in Egypt, Plotinus was

Hellenic in education and culture, and taught phi-

losophy in Rome. His philosophical system con-

sisted of an exposition of Plato’s dialogues, in

particular the Parmenides, and contained an im-

portant anti-Gnostic element. He presented not

only a philosophy but a religion, a way for the

mind to ascend to God, and his system was easily

assimilated by Christian thinkers. Plotinian real-

ity is founded upon three principles or “hypos-

tases”: the One, the Intellect or Being, and the

Soul. The One is that from which all proceeds.

We cannot know it or its qualities; we can only

know what it is not: this is “negative theology.”

The One is constantly overflowing into the In-

tellect, which is also the domain of Forms, a mul-

tiple unity that is the intelligible model of reality.

The Intellect in turn overflows into the Soul, a

movement in time that creates the world and the

multiplicity of individual souls. This movement

downward is known as “procession”: the reverse

movement upward, through which each hypos-

tasis contemplates its superior state, is “conver-

sion.” These processes have their parallel in the

human mind, and the implications of Plotinus’s

system for the individual’s spiritual life was of

particular interest to Renaissance thinkers.

Although Plotinus’s thought was diffused

throughout the writings of the Church Fathers

and the late Neoplatonists, the sixteenth century

knew him principally as presented by Marsilio

Ficino, who translated the Enneads into Latin in

1492. It is hard to trace a current of thought in

the sixteenth century that is purely Plotinian,

since his ideas are often tied up with Renaissance

Neoplatonism; some confusion also exists be-

tween him and Plato. Plotinus’s name is often

associated with obscure, difficult mysticism, and

it is as an obscure mystic that his name appears

in Rabelais.

Although Rabelais was directly familiar with

other Neoplatonic writers, it is unclear whether

he actually read the Enneads. Plotinus is men-

tioned twice, both in contexts that might suggest

parodic intent toward his reputation as an occult

thinker. Pantagruel reads Plotinus’s “book On

Inexpressible Things” as preparation for his de-

bate against Thaumaste (P 18). (No editor of

Rabelais to date has noticed that this is a ficti-

tious title.) Pantagruel also cites Plotinus as one

of many authorities in support of his recommen-

dation of dream interpretation to Panurge

(3BK 13). Plotinus’s influence on Renaissance

theories of dream interpretation is more general

than specific: the Plotinian conversion of the in-

dividual mind upward while asleep is certainly

based on his hypostases. The doctrine of the im-

mortality of the intellectual soul expounded by

Pantagruel (4BK 27) may also owe something to

Plotinus. To date, however, there has been very

little criticism on Plotinus in Rabelais, although

several studies on Neoplatonism have been pub-

lished.

Readings: Max Gauna, The Rabelaisian Mytholo-

gies (London: Associated University Presses, 1996);

Francoise Joukovsky, Le regard interieur: themes plo-

tiniens chez quelques ecrivains de la Renaissance

francaise (Paris: Nizet, 1982); Robert Marichal,

“L’attitude de Rabelais devant le neo-platonisme,”

Francois Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1953).

Louisa Mackenzie

PONOCRATES See Education

POPULAR CULTURE Popular culture is so

difficult to define that some critics have denied

its very existence. Giving a meaning to the

phrase requires that “culture” be interpreted in its

broad, and nowadays current, sense, which may

include habits, customs, shared beliefs, unwritten

institutions, traditional stories, rites, and obser-

vances of every kind. “Popular” culture is de-

fined in contradistinction to “elite” or “official”

culture, but what each of these expressions

means at a given time and in a given place is

hotly debated.

Plainly, the “official” culture of Rabelais’s

France, against which Mikhail Bakhtin defines

the “popular” culture celebrated, he believed, by

the Frenchman’s book, was very different from

the official culture of Stalin’s Russia by which

the critic was personally threatened. One is per-

haps on safer ground in defining popular culture

in the early modern period as the culture of the

Power, Discourses of 191

preponderantly nonliterate as against the literate

and Latinate culture of the Church and the pro-

fessions. The difficulty that then arises is that we

can know nothing of the observances, to say

nothing of the mentality, of nonliterate people in

former times, except what survives in records

kept by the literate. Nor does the nonliterate/lit-

erate division exactly correspond to the popular/

elite one, if we are speaking of a social elite.

Low-born males in the Middle Ages and early

modern period might achieve literacy and rise in

the world through the Church (Erasmus is the

most striking example of such social mobility),

while many medieval and even some sixteenth-

century noblemen remained illiterate. (The liter-

acy of women follows different patterns and is

now beginning to be studied intensively.) Per-

haps “popular” culture is that of laypeople,

townspeople, artisans, and the rising bourgeoisie,

as against that of the Church—once a popular

idea with Marxists. But we immediately see that

many of the structures of popular culture are

taken from those of the Church—its calendar,

based on the liturgical year, pilgrimages, and lay

sodalities founded on the cult of saints, and so

on. (Rabelais, like other humanists, makes cruel

fun of such popular beliefs and observances in

Gargantua.) Much of what we think of as pop-

ular culture could thus be seen as a “trickle-

down” from elite or “official” culture, just as

many of the tales kept alive by fireside storytell-

ing or circulated in chapbooks by peddlers as late

as the nineteenth century had their origins in

“elite” poems devised and performed for noble

audiences in medieval times.

Despite the theoretical problems in defining

popular culture and the difficulty of accessing

uncontaminated examples of it, most critics of

Rabelais have worked on the assumption that

such a thing exists and that his books are at the

very least strongly colored by it. The full title of

Bakhtin’s extremely influential book is The Work

of Francois Rabelais and Popular Culture in the

Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but French

critics much earlier than 1965 had already ex-

plored the popular and “folk” origins of many of

Rabelais’s motifs and verbal devices. “Popular”

elements in Rabelais are thought to include the

story itself, with its giant figures (found in pre-

existing chapbooks) credited with the creation of

landscape features and archaeological remains;

the “tall-tale” humor based on disproportions of

size; the privileging of the physical in the story,

with its constant emphasis on eating, drinking,

and excretion; and the reverence for “good”

kings accompanied by mockery of unworthy au-

thority figures, particularly those associated with

the learned professions. One might add the use

of a “wily” narrator, who is never to be held to

account for the literal truth or dangerous impli-

cations of his story. The text itself is a tissue of

now recondite allusions to traditional stories,

proverbs, jokes, puns, games, and songs that

would once have been familiar to unlettered as

well as learned hearers, and perhaps more to the

former. It is thought that they could have had

access to Rabelais’s book through the then com-

mon practice of reading aloud, or storytelling, to

an audience from the point of departure of a

printed text (which is what, after all, Maistre Al-

cofrybas is supposed to be doing in the pro-

logues of Pantagruel and Gargantua).



Press, 1968); Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early

Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978); Carol

Clark, The Vulgar Rabelais (Glasgow: Pressgang,

1983); Robert Muchembled, Culture populaire et cul-

ture des elites dans la France moderne (XVe-XVIIIe

siecles) (Paris: Flammarion, 1978); Jean Plattard,

L’oeuvre de Rabelais, chapter 7 (Paris: Champion,

1910).

Carol Clark

POWER, DISCOURSES OF Michel Fou-

cault has redefined the term discourse to refer to

circulating language that reflects certain types of

knowledge and generates power. This discourse

does not represent individual subjectivity, but

different loci of social and political power. The

privileged wield institutional language and deter-

mine the rules of its usage. The disempowered,

too, can use discourses of power in their favor

just as they can counter them with other regional,

professional, or class discourses reinforced by

certain circumstances. Although Foucault, struc-

turalism, and twentieth-century linguistics have

contributed to a contemporary notion of dis-

courses of power, Rabelais’s sixteenth-century

interest in language as it affected politics, relig-

192 Printing

ion, and personal lives offers many interesting

parallels. Furthermore, Rabelais’s fiction pro-

vides a wealth of discourses to analyze (for ex-

ample: legal, medical, theological, pedantic, mer-

cantile, maritime, scatological, and regional).

Verbal exchanges in Rabelais’s fiction often

take the form of interpersonal contests (G 15; P

18–19), and fear and an imbalance of power dis-

rupt speech (P 6; G 38). Those who dominate

physically or politically determine discursive

normalcy, as Pantagruel illustrates through his

threat directed at the Ecolier Limousin: “I will

teach you how to speak” (“je vous apprendray a

parler” [P 6]). These linguistic enforcers dismiss

noninstitutional discourses as unintelligible,

heretical, or foolish.

Panurge nevertheless proves that those out-

side of the dominant group can also use discourse

to advance themselves socially. His rhetorical

skill gives him access to power through imita-

tion. Simply by appropriating fragments of the

institutional discourse which he skillfully places

in alien contexts, he succeeds in furthering his

own interests (P 17). Like the Ecolier Limousin,

Panurge seeks self-glorification, but his under-

standing and manipulation of the discursive rules

meet with a happier outcome.

One of the most interesting discursive con-

frontations pits Panurge against the Haughty

Lady of Paris (P 21–22). Both of them have

claims to elements of a male, aristocratic hege-

monic discourse, but neither dominates it en-

tirely. Both vie to establish discursive superior-

ity. The Lady does not fall for Panurge’s

rhetorical trickery and code-switching because

she, too, is capable of expressing personal desires

through institutional language. Ultimately, Pan-

urge resorts to physical revenge, cowed by the

threat of the woman’s voice, if not her discourse.

Panurge’s verbal failure, however, becomes

another message in a dialogue he continues with

Pantagruel whom he calls to witness the Lady’s

demise. Rabelais tests the limits of verbal dis-

course by exploring many of the same themes

(unintelligibility, double meanings, domination)

through signs as well as through words. He iron-

ically (and perhaps wistfully) evokes the possi-

bility of a universal language of signs (G 10).

But he dedicates many more pages to semiotic

codes that intentionally restrict comprehension.

His fiction illustrates characters in a constant, and

conscious, struggle to appropriate a set of key

discourses vital to maintaining their social status.

Readings: Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Se-

lected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed.

Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980);

Carla Freccero, “Damning Haughty Dames: Panurge

and the Haulte Dame de Paris (Pantagruel XIV),”

JMRS 15.1 (1985): 57–67; Francois Rigolot, Les lan-

gages de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1996); Jerome

Schwartz, Irony and Ideology in Rabelais: Structures

of Subversion (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1990).

Emily E. Thompson

PRINTING Invented in Germany with the

publication of Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible during

the 1450s, printing came to France in 1470; and

by 1530 it was already reaching great heights of

achievement in design and technical process. By

that period the dominant centers of printing were

already Paris and Lyon, and nearly all of Ra-

belais’s early editions, printed by such noted

publishers as Francois Juste, Sebastian Gryphius,

and Chretien Wechel, were produced in those

two cities.

Rabelais published at a time when the final

vestiges of manuscript practice (e.g., the use of

various “gothic” typographies, characterized by

traditional medieval letter forms, for certain clas-

ses of books) were giving way to a nearly uni-

versal adoption of the modern “roman” and

“italic” styles of type. Rabelais’s learned editions

reflect this “humanist” style, which was deemed

appropriate for scholarly works. Although Pan-

tagruel and Gargantua, in keeping with their

popular trappings, were apparently meant to be

printed in the “outdated” batarde of early ver-

nacular printing, a semi-cursive script related to

everyday handwriting, the first editions of the

Third and Fourth Books adopted italic and ro-

man, respectively. Rabelais understood the im-

portance and the technicalities of printing, and

this is reflected in his works.

Aside from the prologue to Pantagruel, where

Alcofrybas urges readers to memorize his words

in case “l’art de l’Imprimerie” (the art of print-

ing) should cease, the most important early dis-

cussion of printing in Rabelais’s fiction occurs in

the famous letter from Gargantua to the student

Printing 193

Pantagruel (P 8). Here, in his non-giant per-

sona, Gargantua refers to the progress made in

learning, especially in the ancient languages (a

clear reference to the establishment of the Lec-

teurs royaux in 1530) since the invention of di-

vinely inspired printing, which he contrasts (as

had Erasmus and others) with diabolically in-

spired artillery. In Gargantua, printing shops are

among the places visited during the hero’s “new”

education (G 24), and, significantly, the prisoners

of the Picrocholine War are leniently given no

punishment, other than to work in Gargantua’s

new printing works (G 51).

Rabelais himself was a modest contributor to

humanist learning, working for the Lyonnais

printer Sebastian Gryphius to produce, in 1532,

an edition of the Aphorisms of Hippocrates and

the Ars medica of Galen, which was reprinted

twice (NRB 105–107). Complimentary references

to Gryphius occur in his liminary material, both

here and in other works.

If Rabelais was happy with Gryphius for his

humanist output, he was dissatisfied with the fate

of his fictional work, which for ten years contin-

ued to be reprinted on a regular basis, frequently

without his sanction. Notably, satirical references

to the Sorbonne removed from the 1542 editions

of Gargantua and Pantagruel (NRB 12, 23) by

his printer, Francois Juste, were retained in edi-

tions published by Etienne Dolet, also in 1542

(NRB 13, 24). Whether this contributed to the

condemnation of these works in 1543 is unclear,

but Rabelais was put in a position of some dan-

ger. In his later fictional work he took steps to

protect himself.

Rabelais’s first privilege or Royal Privilege,

which authorized the publication of his works

and provided an early form of copyright protec-

tion, dates from September 19, 1545 [OC 1362–

3]. Prohibiting the publication of editions unau-

thorized by Rabelais, the Royal Privilege issued

by Francis I praises the Gargantua and Panta-

gruel as “no less useful than enjoyable,” but

complains that “the printers corrupted and per-

verted the books in several places.” As a result,

we are told, Rabelais has refrained from publish-

ing a sequel to his earlier bestsellers (“se seroit

abstenu de mectre en public le reste et sequence

des dictz faictz et dictz Heroıques”), despite

strong encouragement by “learned and knowl-

edgeable people” to do so. This royal defense of

works proscribed by the Sorbonne, largely on the

basis of their literary merits, is particularly note-

worthy.

Despite the privilege, and the volume’s dedi-

cation to Marguerite de Navarre, the Third

Book (NRB 28), printed by the humanist Chre-

tien Wechel of Paris, was also banned in Decem-

ber 1546. Shortly thereafter, Rabelais himself

fled France for Metz: ultimately the Royal Priv-

ilege of 1545 protected him neither against the

Sorbonne, nor against pirated editions. Nor was

he on good terms with his new printer. In the

Fourth Book, Rabelais appears to blame Wechel

for a textual blunder in 1546 (OC 520), and there

is evidence of a lawsuit between him and Wechel

in a document of February 27, 1546. Not sur-

prisingly, Rabelais did not employ Wechel for

the definitive editions of the Third and Fourth

Books in 1552.

These (NRB 36, 45–46) definitive editions of

the Third and Fourth Books were published by

Michel Fezandat of Paris and were protected by

an even more remarkable privilege dated August

6, 1550 (343–44). Granted under the aegis of a

powerful protector, Odet de Chastillon, and read-

ing like a humanist manifesto, the new Royal

Privilege repeats many of the terms of 1545. It

also covers Rabelais’s learned works and seeks

to suppress the inauthentic works connected with

Rabelais’s name. Notwithstanding the privilege

authorizing its publication, however, the Fourth

Book was quickly condemned. The king backed

Rabelais in the face of this condemnation, vir-

tually guaranteeing the volume’s succes de scan-

dale, and the Fourth Book was reprinted, first by

Fezandat and then illegally by others, in part to

satisfy public curiosity about the controversy.

Rabelais’s death in 1553 prevented any test of

his reinforced privilege and powerful patronage.

Rabelais was typical of authors of his period:

his views on printers were not uniformly favor-

able, and like other sixteenth-century writers he

could not fully control the output or quality of

his published works. Overall, however, his ref-

erences to printing indicate that he was positively

disposed toward its development, viewing it as a

positive tool for learning and for humankind.

Readings: Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press

194 Prognostications

as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural

Transformations in Early Modern Europe. 2 vols.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Ste-

phen Rawles, “What Did Rabelais Really Know about

Printing and Publishing?” Editer et traduire Rabelais

a travers les ages, ed. Paul J. Smith (Faux titre; no.

127; Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997); Stephen Rawles and

Michael A. Screech, A New Rabelais Bibliography

[NRB]: Editions of Rabelais before 1626, ER 20 (Ge-

neva: Droz, 1987).

Stephen Rawles

PROGNOSTICATIONS Genre in which Ra-

belais began writing at the same time he under-

took Pantagruel, prompted by the need felt by

Rabelais’s protectors and patrons, the du Bellays,

to counter astrologists writing in favor of

Charles V’s ambition to unite Europe under his

tutelage, Pantagrueline Prognostication gives

voice to reform-minded French Catholics’ sus-

picion of supranational authority and mocks the

“folz astrologues de Lovain” (“the foolish asto-

logers of Louvain” [PP 1.2]), because their

gloom seemed to deny not only the aspirations

of the French crown but the very possibility of

human agency. Pantagrueline Prognostication

also shows much the same combination of evan-

gelical propaganda, delight in learning and scorn

for pedantry, linguistic and literary polyphony,

and popular irreverence and humor verging on

the subversive as Pantagruel, while later Prog-

nostications resemble the surviving Almanachs.

The passage from the du Bellay Memoires that

helped late twentieth-century scholars understand

the context for the Pantagrueline Prognostica-

tion also serves as pretext for one of the earliest

chapters of the Essais (1.11), in which Mon-

taigne unpacked and scrutinized the du Bellays’

account to cast doubt on historical narration as it

was then being practiced.

Readings: Edward Benson, Money and Magic in

Montaigne: The Historicity of the Essais (Geneva

[THR 295], 1995); Carlo Ginzburg, Il Nicodemismo.

Simulazione e dissimulazione religiosa nell’Europa

del ’500 (Turin: Einaudi, 1970); Carlo Ginzburg, Ec-

stasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Ray-

mond Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon, 1991); Pan-

tagrueline Prognostication pour l’an 1533, ed. M. A.

Screech, TLF (Geneva: Droz, 1974).

Edward Benson

PROLOGUE, TO PANTAGRUEL The pro-

logue to Pantagruel (1532) is an interpretive

challenge. Some of the questions raised include

the following: For whom was Rabelais writing

this popular, humanist work? What is the nature

and significance of the relationship between the

mock author and narrator, Alcofrybas Nasier,

and the inscribed audience? Why is there an ad-

versarial relationship between Alcofrybas and

some of the addressees? Why does Alcofrybas

spend the greater part of this prologue praising

the Chroniques gargantuines or Gargantuan

Chronicles, a chapbook appearing six months

earlier than Pantagruel, and one that Rabelais

himself most likely did not write? What impor-

tance can one ascribe to the erudite, biblical, and

popular allusions? What kind of role is expected

of the real reader?

Readings of the prologue have included in-

terpretations focusing on playfulness and un-

predictability, on varying degrees of underlying

coherence, or on stylistic, rhetorical, or narrato-

logical aspects of the text. Floyd Gray (1974)

argues that the heterogeneous audience addressed

by Alcofrybas Nasier at the beginning of the pro-

logue (“Tres illustres et tres chevaleureux cham-

pions, gentilz hommes et aultres”) immediately

suggests play, instability, and equivocation. Ray-

mond La Charite (1980) recognizes Rabelais’s

penchant for play and ambiguity. He contends

that Pantagruel as a whole is tied together by

multiple structuring principles, and he views the

prologue as an invitation to readers to be active

and loyal, as we reread the work and reflect on

it “contrastively, obliquely.” Edwin Duval (1991)

points out the well-developed use of the utile

dulci topos in the prologue, which promises in-

struction as well as pleasure, and emphasizes the

importance of the parallel Alcofrybas draws be-

tween the Chroniques Gargantuines and sacred

texts. This parallel is consistent with the overall

coherence of Pantagruel as a Christian humanist

text.

The rhetorical aspect of the text has been

treated by Losse (1980), who analyzes the pro-

logue in the context of rhetorical paradox, and

who sees Rabelais as exploiting the rhetoric of

billingsgate (named for a London fish market re-

nowned for its foul language) and figures of the

more serious epideictic rhetorical tradition. Paul

Prologues, Fourth Book 195

Smith (1984), who characterizes the prologue as

“a conscientious work, composed according to

the rules of rhetoric” (“un travail conscientieux,

accompli selon les regles de la rhetorique”), ex-

tends the Losse analysis by examining the pro-

logue according to the rules of the dispositio, or

the way speech is ordered and arranged.

In his rhetorical and narratological analysis,

Rigolot (1981) describes the dominating style

(style de domination) of Alcofrybas and sees a

contractual relationship between the narrator

(narrateur) and the reader or narratee (narra-

taire), rendered particularly complex because of

a narrative situation in which the utterance (en-

once) is supposed to be true, but at the same time

cannot be true. Rigolot connects the prologue

with other chapters in the text in which the voice

of Alcofrybas can be heard, most notably chap-

ters 17 and 32, and chapter 34, where the narrator

makes a final admission of powerlessness. Con-

nections between the function of Alcofrybas in

the prologue and other chapters of Pantagruel

are also made by Mary Baker (1990), who de-

fines some common and occasionally over-

lapping critical terminology used to describe the

narrative communication situation. She then ex-

amines the situation in the prologue where the

various roles, including those suggested for real

readers, defy simple categorization. Subsequent

intrusions by Alcofrybas in Pantagruel in Chap-

ters 17 and 32 serve as examples of metalepsis,

a narrative transgression occurring here when the

narrator who has stood outside his story becomes

a character in it. In sum, Rabelais starts out play-

ing with narrative norms in the prologue and

keeps on playing in the rest of the book, contin-

ually thwarting reader expectations.

Finally, interesting and useful insights into the

prologue may be found in many book-length

studies too numerous to list here, as well as in

articles that focus on narration, but not primarily

on the prologue. In this latter category see, for

example, Andrea Frisch (1999). As recent criti-

cism indicates, the gateway to Rabelais’s first

book continues to challenge its readers.

Readings: Mary J. Baker, “Narration in Panta-

gruel,” RR 82.3 (May 1990): 312–19; Edwin M. Du-

val, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1991); Andrea Frisch, “Quod

vidimus testamur: Testimony, Narrative Agency and

the World in Pantagruel’s Mouth,” FF 24.3 (1999):

261–83; Floyd Gray, Rabelais et l’ecriture (Paris: Ni-

zet, 1974); Floyd Gray, “Rabelais’s First Readers,”

Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays on his Art, ed.

Raymond C. La Charite (Lexington, KY: French Fo-

rum Publishers, 1986); Raymond C. La Charite, Rec-

reation, Reflection, and Re-creation: Perspectives on

Rabelais’s Pantagruel (Lexington, KY: French Forum

Publishers, 1980); Deborah N. Losse, Rhetoric at

Play: Rabelais and Satirical Eulogy (Berne: Peter

Lang, 1980); Francois Rigolot, “Vraisemblance et nar-

rativite dans le Pantagruel,” EC 21.1 (1981): 53–68;

Paul Smith, “Le prologue du Pantagruel: Une lecture,”

Neophilologus 68.2 (1984): 161–69.

Mary J. Baker

PROLOGUES, FOURTH BOOK The Fourth

Book, if both the incomplete 1548 edition and

the definitive 1552 edition are considered, in-

cludes three liminary texts: the 1548 prologue,

the 1552 prologue, and the Dedicatory Letter to

Odet de Chatillon, published with the 1552 text.

These three texts may profitably be discussed in

relation to one another, particularly with respect

to content and rhetorical strategies.

The 1548 prologue, in its tone and the violence

of its railings against Rabelais’s old enemies, the

Sorbonne and the Parlement de Paris, is remi-

niscent of the narrator of the first three books.

The fictive reader is parodied, burlesqued, and

thanked for the gift of a bottle-breviary bearing

hieroglyphic designs on its outside, a Silenus-

like figure suggestive of hidden meanings and

serious as well as comic intentions that is remi-

niscent of the Gargantua prologue. Some of this

material is retained in the 1552 prologue, such

as the opening address to the “good people”

whom the narrator is unable to see without put-

ting on his spectacles. The fictive reader is lit-

erally envisaged as judge of Rabelais’s Third

Book and of the individuals who have attacked

it. This device attempts to invert hierarchy by

making the implied reader conscious of his own

power to judge the powers established to judge

him. Beneath the banter on the surface is an al-

most conspiratorial complicity between author

and implied reader. Implementing a strategy of

defiance toward his enemies, this prologue also

contains some implicit criticism of royal politics.

Such criticism had to be sacrificed in the 1552

196 Prophecy and Divination

prologue after Rabelais received royal protection.

Rabelais’s strategy in this prologue is to judge

and condemn his critics, darkly hinting at trial

and execution. The Sorbonne and Parlement de

Paris could hardly have found this prologue, the

most violent of all the prologues, inoffensive.

Rabelais dedicated the 1552 edition of the

Fourth Book in a letter addressed to “The Very

Illustrious and Most Reverend Monsignor Odet,

Cardinal de Chatillon.” It was to the cardinal that

Rabelais owed the obtaining of the Royal Privi-

lege, dated August 6, 1550, for a period of ten

years, allowing him to reprint his prior works and

to print new ones. Odet de Chatillon was at the

time a member of Henry II’s Privy Council and

had the responsibility for decisions concerning

censorship or approval of book publication. He

was a prince of the church and a cousin of Mont-

morency, the constable of France, known to be

an enlightened patron and protector of the arts

and of liberal Christian humanists. He was also

the protector of Pierre de Ronsard, who dedi-

cated his poem Hercule Chrestien to the cardinal.

In his Dedicatory Letter, Rabelais acknowl-

edges the support of Chatillon and reserves the

heights of encomiastic rhetoric for the praise of

the cardinal as Gallic Hercules, a figure of Her-

cules as the god of eloquence which was much

in fashion in French humanist circles in the first

decades of the sixteenth century.

The Dedicatory Letter of 1552 makes the same

points as the 1548 prologue—the defense against

accusations of heresy, the analogies between the

comic writer and doctor, the reader and the pa-

tient, the scorn for his accusers—but with a ma-

jor difference in tone. The sharp verbal irony of

the 1548 prologue has been replaced by more

formal rhetoric, full of praise and deference, in

which Rabelais invokes the protection of highly

placed and powerful admirers. The inflammatory

bravado of the 1548 prologue is tempered, even

when Rabelais reuses material from the 1548

text. The vestimentary anecdote he tells near the

conclusion of the Dedicatory Letter is a metaphor

for, and a clue to, Rabelais’s new strategy of con-

cealment by aesthetic, stylistic, or ironic distance.

The 1552 prologue displays a new tone some-

where between the sarcasm of the 1548 prologue

and the official pieties of the Dedicatory Letter

to Odet de Chatillon. It is typically interpreted as

an expression of the principle of moderation.

Yet even as the prologue passes from the theme

of health to the themes of prayer and moderation

(mediocrite) in the extended exemplum of Couil-

latris—itself fraught with ambiguities—the

Olympian setting of the tale defines an ambigu-

ous mythical and mimetic space, permitting Ra-

belais to comment obliquely on topical contem-

porary controversies and political events.

Thus, the violence of tone and the Silenic am-

bivalence of the 1548 prologue were replaced in

1552 by two discourses functioning in an intra-

textual dialectic. The 1552 prologue and the

Dedicatory Epistle constitute one larger liminary

text presenting two quite different attitudes and

tones that both complement and undermine one

another. The letter invokes worldly power and

eminence in the grand, rhetorical style; the pro-

logue invokes in comic style the humble gout-

teux, or people afflicted with gout, in their mod-

est, limited hope for life and health. The

empirical reader of the two texts should not be

duped either by the exaggerated pieties of the

Epistle or by the humble morality of the pro-

logue. They constitute a disjunctive, oblique dis-

course whose ironies (i.e., contradictions and in-

compatibilities) reveal in the text a space

between the writer’s place in a social hierarchy

dependent on an ideology and a discourse of

power, and his independence and distancing

from that ideology and its rhetoric.


lais’s Quart Livre de Pantagruel, ER 36 (Geneva:

Droz, 1998); Max Gauna, The Rabelaisian Mytholo-

gies (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University

Press, 1996); Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival:

Text, Context, Metatext (Berkeley: University of Cal-

ifornia Press, 1990); Camilla J. Nilles, “Reading the

Ancien Prologue,” ER 29 (Geneva: Droz, 1993); Je-

rome Schwartz, Irony and Ideology: Structures of Sub-

version in Rabelais (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 1990) Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press) 1979.

Jerome Schwartz

PROPHECY AND DIVINATION Prophecy

plays a key role in the major narrative works of

the European Renaissance. For those epics de-

scended from the Aeneid, prophecy serves as an

instrument of teleology and as a legitimation of

Propos des Bien Yvres, Les 197

the ruling dynasty. Epic prophecy wards off di-

gression and ensures an orderly resolution of the

plot. Since Rabelais does not write dynastic ep-

ics, he has no use for the conventional motif of

genealogical prophecy. Nevertheless, his work

abounds in portents and prodigies, apocalyptic

signs and divinatory rituals, and eager inquiries

into an enigmatic future.

In Pantagruel, the hero’s birth is accompa-

nied by a burlesque array of astrological portents

of the sort that Rabelais enjoys parodying in his

own almanacs and prognostications. The very

name Pantagruel, interpreted to mean “all

thirsty,” is taken as a prophecy of his eventual

victory over the Dipsodes, or the Thirsty Ones.

Epistemon’s death and resurrection in chapter 30

parody the epic motif of the descent to the un-

derworld where the hero receives a prophetic vi-

sion intended to spur him on to fulfill his destiny.

To this epic theme of destiny, Rabelais opposes

the comic theme of pastime, which has no pre-

scribed course or goal. Pantagruel ends with a

promise of numerous unwritten sequels that

strangely anticipate the end of the first part of

Don Quijote, which announces the voyage of the

hero to Saragossa, where he never arrives.

Gargantua closes with an Enigmatic Proph-

ecy that provokes a conflict of interpretation be-

tween Gargantua and Frere Jean. This episode

accurately foretells the course of the remaining

books, where the itinerant heroes repeatedly dis-

agree over the interpretation of signs. In the

Third Book, Panurge seemingly consults every

type of divination known to antiquity and the

Renaissance in order to satisfy his curiosity about

his marital prospects. As a result, the Third Book

resembles a vast compendium of divinatory tech-

niques in the tradition of Cicero’s On Divination

(De divinatione), and Panurge’s pursuit of the fu-

ture turns into a commentary on Cicero and his

Renaissance interpreters. In this respect, the

Third Book defines prophecy as an exercise in

reading.

In the Fourth Book, prophecy emerges as a

central preoccupation in the episode of the Ma-

creons, modeled on Plutarch’s discussion of the

decline of oracles. When Macrobe suggests that

the storm that has carried the travelers to his

island portended the death of a local hero or

demigod, Pantagruel responds with a lengthy and

learned disquisition on portents, prodigies, and

other “precedent signs,” which announce the

death of prominent figures and the upheaval of

human affairs. Although Macrobe cannot show

the travelers where they are going, since their

indeterminate and aimless voyage resists any ef-

fort of prognosis, the episode of the Macreons

does offer important insight into the prevalence

of prophecy in a society beset by the pressures

of novelty and change. New inventions, new in-

vasions, new religions, and all the epochal

changes experienced by Rabelais’s contemporar-

ies encouraged an acute sensitivity to prophetic

signs and omens, for which abundant testimony

is available from prognosticators and historians

alike. In this way, prophecy becomes a sign of

the times in Rabelais’s work.

The understanding of prophecy in Rabelais en-

gages the larger question of how to understand

the episodic structure of his work. Recently,

there has emerged in Rabelais criticism a contro-

versy between the architectural reading and the

topographic reading of narrative design. Where

the architectural reading recognizes a perfectly

linear, powerfully teleological narrative whose

origin prophesies its end, the topographic reading

discerns a series of discrete episodes whose spo-

radic connection resists the type of overview or

synoptic vision claimed by prophecy. Many

years ago a prominent critic observed that divi-

nation can only have meaning in an ordered

world, and Rabelais’s world is ordered. This

opinion exemplifies the function of prophecy in

Rabelais’s work. Prophecy reveals the precon-

ceptions that we bring to the text and shows

whether we conceive of reading as the search for

order or the recognition of contingency.


L’insolite au 16e siecle (Geneva: Droz, 1977); Edwin

Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Ha-

ven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Laurent Gos-

selin, “Rabelais, une ontologie de la contingence,” Ca-

hiers Textuels 34/44 4–5 (1989): 33–41; Michael

Screech, “Some Stoic Elements in Rabelais’ Religious

Thought,” ER 1 (1956): 73–99.

Eric MacPhail

PROPOS DES BIEN YVRES, LES (G 5)

The fifth chapter of Gargantua, “Les Propos des

bien yvres,” records the inspired and giddy conver-

198 Propos des Bien Yvres, Les

sations of more than a dozen tipplers feting the

imminent birth of the book’s eponymous hero. It

might be called a textual madrigal and a poly-

logue. The term madrigal is applicable because

the voices originate from different levels of the

social scale—included are clerics, jokers, a

tavern-keeper, a baud and a butcher, locals from

Deviniere, a doctor, all gifted punsters—and are

set in rhythms of crescendo, syncopation, and

sustained harmony. Music of call-and-response,

a mode of “sounding,” causes voiced questions

to be answered by collective and individual ex-

clamation. The text might be called a polylogue

for reason of its free, indirect discourse. The

voices float indiscriminately, speaking in both

unison and isolation, as thought and as speech,

without cumbrous attributions in the order of “he

said” or “she said.” The episode turns into a con-

vivium, a banquet, in which stereophony—

voices heard at one end of the gathering in visual

and vocal counterpoint to those at others—pre-

vails.

Michael A. Screech once said that, with a few

footnotes marking who is saying what and when,

a reader might make sense of the revelry. At

stake is a production of non-sense, in which per-

formance becomes meaning. The text recounts

the speech of a ritual communion in which, for

the duration of the event, social contradictions

are suspended. The words amount to noise, what

in traditional societies was administered to ad-

vance or retard cosmic events or to regulate the

rhythms of nature that might be out of joint or

synchrony (Levi-Strauss 1962: 343–345). In the

mobile architecture of Gargantua, the drinkers’

inspired cacophony prompts Gargamelle (who

in chapter 4, pregnant with child for eleven

months, had just eaten a pile of rotten tripe: “O

wondrous fecal matter that was swelling up in

her!” [12]) to begin the muscular contractions

that push the fetus along the canal of her left ear

and into the world (G 6).

The propos are an intermediate and vital mo-

ment in the generation of Gargantua, causing it,

too, to dilate and give birth to itself. After the

narrator notes that the drinkers went pell-mell

to the willow grove to gather together, “[t]hen

flagons went about, hams trotted, goblets flew,

glasses tinkled and chimed” (12). In the body of

the text, causality and procreation are conflated.

“What came first, thirst or drinking?” Antitheti-

cal answers are proposed when a chiasm makes

the one the cause and effect of the other: “For

me it’s an eternity of drinking, and a drinking of

eternity.” Words and speech are born, as will be

Gargantua, out of the substance of print. Chan-

tons, beuvons; un motet entonnons. Ou est mon

entonnoir? [Let’s sing, let’s drink; let’s intone a

motet. Where’s my funnel?]: a motet (literally a

“word [mot] and [et]”) begins to intone, and in-

tonation (“etonnons”) gives rise to a funnel,

which figures both as an object thrust in the cel-

ebrants’ mouths and as a megaphone their lips

purse when they sing their words (mots) to the

world.

Lusty humor marks their puns, and so does

cosmic vision (“God the great made the planets

[planetes] and we the clean plates [platz netz]”)

and delight of inebriate vision (“O lacryma

Christi!” [14]). A silent reading yields embedded

relations. Bien yvres is the anagram of breviaire,

a divine breviary that resembles beuverie,

roughly, the “boozers’ colloquy.” The bad tripe

that Gargamelle swallowed led to the wit or es-

prit of the propos. Sacred and popular worlds are

of the same order. The ivres celebrate their emer-

gence from winter (hiver), the season of privation

(from the verb priver), as they utter graphic jokes

and allusive figures—spoonerisms, visual puns,

obscene conundrums—in a bookish space that

knows no season. In the midst of joy and revelry

there are also anticipation and disquiet. The pro-

pos are of a textual wealth and complexity that

inspire a great deal of modern writing.

Reading: Claude Levi-Strauss, Mythologiques 1: Le

cru et le cuit (Paris: Plon, 1962).

Tom Conley

Q

QUARESMEPRENANT A monstrous figure

described in Rabelais’s Fourth Book and also

known as King Lent. Characterized by austerity,

lethargy, and impassivity, this perplexing char-

acter functions, in part, as an allegory of Lent.

While the name “Quaresme,” or Careme, desig-

nates “Lent,” the period of nonindulgence be-

tween Carnival and Easter, despite many ambiv-

alences, the combination Quaresmeprenant has

been widely identified with Mardi Gras. Embed-

ded between the physetere and Andouilles epi-

sodes, Quaresmeprenant constitutes part of

Rabelais’s satires of religious extremes. The half-

giant is described in four chapters of the Fourth

Book (4BK 29–32) by Pantagruel’s comrade

Xenomanes who, upon invitation, offers a se-

quence of six appreciations concerning the phys-

ical attributes and demeanor of this bewildering

character. Included in those depictions are Quar-

esmeprenant’s garments, nourishment, pastimes,

and behavior (4BK 29); lists of seventy-eight in-

ternal and sixty-four external body parts (4BK

30–31); and an itemization of thirty-six expres-

sions related to his comportment, including some

rather singular physical features concerning his

composure (4BK 32). Xenomanes’s statements

regarding Quaresmeprenant encompass both an-

atomical or medical panoramas and include rhe-

torical components.

Medically speaking, this freakish character

possesses an exceedingly peculiar anatomy.

While Rabelais’s “grotesquely real” approach to

the internal anatomical dimensions of Quares-

meprenant provides evidence that he conformed

to common practice in sixteenth-century public

dissection, scholars have supplied abundant ar-

gument that Rabelais was playfully making fun

of certain controversial aspects of sixteenth-

century medicine, such as Galen’s erroneous at-

tribution of seven ribs to the human anatomy,

which was based only on his dissection of a mon-

key. With respect to accounts of Quaresmepren-

ant’s external anatomy, while suggesting medical

accuracy, the Rabelaisian text offers a confused,

topsy-turvy format reversing the medically ac-

cepted order of the sixteenth-century dissection.

Rather than beginning with the customary head

to toes order of the sixteenth-century anatomical

dissection, Rabelais moves from the toes to the

head, employing a commentary that perhaps re-

inforces the unnaturalness of this being.

Some scholars contend that Quaresmepren-

ant’s description embraces a number of elements

from the Rhetorica ad Herennium, a prominent

sixteenth-century rhetorical manual attributed to

Cicero. Quaresmeprenant’s physical description

(4BK 29–31) seems to conform to effictio (rep-

resenting bodily form), whereas the account of

his comportment (4BK 32) belongs to the notatio

(describing a person’s character). Lastly, eviden-

tia (the imaginative power of the description of

an object), a third concept of classical rhetoric,

appears to be used by Rabelais in describing

Quaresmeprenant. Even though rhetorical ele-

ments used in Rabelais’s treatment of Quares-

meprenant may have been inspired by contem-

porary rhetorical handbooks, above all the

Rabelaisian text utilized those elements in a com-

ically corrupted form. Throughout the chapters

describing Quaresmeprenant, it is obvious that,

despite all attempts to describe him, Quaresme-

prenant remains enigmatic; the reader is simply

unable to visualize this being. Some scholars

contend that, rather that attempt to visualize the

anatomy of this delusory character, his descrip-

tion should be read “metadiscursively” as enter-

taining considerations of the possibilities and im-

possibilities of either anatomical or rhetorical

description.

Readings: Marie-Madeleine Fontaine, “Quaresme-

200 Queneau, Raymond

prenant: l’image litteraire et la contestation de

l’analogie medicale,” Rabelais in Glasgow, ed. J. Co-

leman and C. Scollen-Jimack (Glasgow, 1984); Sam-

uel Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival: Text, Context, Meta-

text (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990);

Paul J. Smith, “Dissecting Quaresmeprenant—Rabe-

lais’ Representation of the Human Body: A Rhetorical

Approach,” Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with

the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture,

ed. Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg (Burling-

ton, VT: Ashgate, 2003); Elizabeth Zegura and Marcel

Tetel, Rabelais Revisited (New York: Macmillan,

1993).

Karen Sorsby

QUENEAU, RAYMOND Twentieth-century

French poet and novelist whose wordplay and

verbal experimentation offer strong affinities

with the work of Rabelais. Queneau’s most Rab-

elaisian work is his 1965 novel Les Fleurs

bleues, whose intricate pattern of allusions to Ra-

belais has attracted much critical attention. More

generally, Queneau’s work exemplifies the So-

viet critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s insight, founded

largely on a reading of Rabelais, that language

is the hero of the novel. In this respect, Que-

neau’s vertiginous Exercices de style, which of-

fers ninety-nine versions of the same banal in-

cident, is a paradigm of the novel, where plot is

cruelly subordinate to style. Indeed, Queneau

may have rediscovered what Leo Spitzer identi-

fied as Rabelais’s principle of the gratuitous plot.

The essays and interviews collected in the

1950 volume Sticks, Figures, and Letters (Ba-

tons, chiffres et letters) provide another clue to

the literary affinities of Queneau and Rabelais. In

these journalistic or occasional pieces, especially

those collected under the heading of Preliminar-

ies, Queneau repeatedly addresses the widening

gap between written and spoken language and

champions what he calls neo-French, or the spo-

ken language as a medium of literary expression.

In his effort to promote spoken French to the

status of a literary language, he draws a frequent

parallel between himself and Renaissance cham-

pions of the vernacular, such as Rabelais and

Montaigne. For Queneau, spoken French stands

in relation to the literary French of his own time

as the vernacular did to Latin in Rabelais’s time.

Extrapolating from some of the allusions to Pan-

tagruel in Les fleurs bleues, we might say that

Queneau regarded contemporary French authors

as so many Ecoliers Limousins, devoted to the

perpetuation of an unnatural and archaic idiom.

At the same time, Queneau was deeply sen-

sitive to the capacity of language to defy the

linear progress of time and history. The dual

protagonists of Les fleurs bleues—the medieval

Duc d’Auge and the modern Cidrolin—often

exchange vocabulary so that medieval or pseudo-

medieval phrases reappear in a modern context,

while conspicuously modern words frequently in-

trude in medieval conversation. Anachronism

thus represents not only a problem but also a

structure and even a resource of language. Que-

neau also enjoys playing with etymologies and

coining improbable neologisms in the same spirit

as Rabelais. Queneau’s fictional onomastics ex-

plore the implications of cratylism in a way that

may remind us of the discussion of the propriety

of names in the Fourth Book (4BK 37). In all

these ways, Queneau’s work offers a fascinating

meditation on many of the essential problems of

time and language raised by Rabelais’s fictional

narratives.

Readings: Noel Arnaud, “Encyclopedie et encyclo-

pedisme chez Rabelais et chez Queneau,” Raymond

Queneau encyclopediste? (Limoges, 1990); Dorothy

Gabe Coleman, “Polyphonic Poets: Rabelais and Que-

neau,” Words of Power (Glasgow, 1987); Marie-Luce

Demonet, “Un philosophe des langues,” Magazine lit-

teraire 319 (1994): 42–45; Monique Manopoulos,

“Carnavalesque et tiers-espace chez Rabelais et Que-

neau,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1994).

Eric MacPhail

QUINTILIAN First-century Roman rhetori-

cian and educationalist whose twelve books of

Institutiones oratoriae were very popular during

the Renaissance. After the discovery of the com-

plete manuscript in 1416, it was studied by Ital-

ian humanists like Lorenzo Valla, and the editio

princeps was published in Rome in 1470. In

France many editions and commentaries were is-

sued in the 1530s and 1540s (Pierre Galland,

1538; several other editions; and Peter Ramus’s

commentary, 1549). Quintilian appealed to the

humanists not just as a theorist of rhetoric but

also as a grammarian concerned with language

and literature. He was a stylist advocating the use

Quintilian 201

of more models than just Cicero in the process

of creative writing, a moralist who defined the

perfect orator as vir bonus dicendi peritus (a

good man skilled at speaking), and one whose

theories of education embraced the encyclopedia

of learning and followed the development of the

whole man from childhood to maturity.

Rabelais mentions Quintilian only twice: in

Gargantua’s letter to his son about education

(P 8), he recommends starting the study of lan-

guages with Greek “comme le veult Quintilien”

(“as Quintilian wishes”), and he includes him

among several authors of good latinity (P 10),

although Pantagruel’s Latin is to be based pri-

marily on Cicero. Quintilian’s influence is also

seen in Rabelais’s many speeches and letters

within the fiction, in his comic encomia, in set

rhetorical themes, and in the emphasis on ges-

ture. It is often not possible to distinguish be-

tween the influence of Cicero and that of Quin-

tilian, but it is the “colors of Ciceronian rhetoric”

(“couleurs de rhetorique ciceronienne”) which

dominate.

Readings: Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text

(Oxford, 1979); Guy Demerson, “Tradition rhetorique

et creation litteraire chez Rabelais,” Humanisme et fa-

cetie (Orleans: Paradigme, 1994).

Peter Sharratt

R

RAMINAGROBIS (3BK 21–23) In his quest

to decide whether or not he should marry, Pan-

urge goes with Pantagruel to Villaumere (Ville

au Maire) to consult Raminagrobis, an old poet

who is close to death and is thus supposed to

have the gift of prophecy. We learn that Ram-

inagrobis’s second wife “was the magnificent

Pock-face, who gave birth to the beautiful Ba-

zoche” (“en secondes nopces espousa la Grande

Guorre, dont nasquit la belle Bazosche” [GP 298;

3BK 21]), and that Panurge offers him a gold

ring set with a sapphire, as well as a white cock.

The full force of these allusions has not been

satisfactorily explained. In reply to Panurge’s

question, Raminagrobis writes out a rondeau

with the refrain, “Maybe you’ll take her, maybe

you won’t” (“Prenez la, ne la prenez pas” [GP

298; 3BK 21]), which contains a series of con-

tradictory injunctions with erotic undertones.

Raminagrobis asks them to leave so that he can

die in peace. That very day, he has already

chased out of his house “a whole horde of vil-

lainous creatures, foul and filthy beasts, a dis-

gusting motley, monkish crowd, in black and

brown and white and gray” (“un tas de villaines,

immondes et pestilentes bestes, noires, guarres,

fauves, blanches, cendrees, grivolees” [GP 299;

3BK 21]), which Panurge identifies with the

mendicant friars and other monks with their dis-

tinctive habits. As a result, he considers Ramin-

agrobis a heretic.

The author of the poem was the Rhetoriqueur

Guillaume Cretin (although it is Rabelais who

repeats the whole line as the refrain, not just the

first two words) and earlier critics followed

Etienne Pasquier in identifying Raminagrobis

with him. Later, and especially since the appear-

ance of Abel Lefranc’s Oeuvres de Francois Ra-

belais, it became customary to identify him with

Jean Lemaire de Belges, of La Ville-au-Maire,

who in chapter 30 is said to be showing off

(“faire du grobis”) and who speaks copiously of

“La Grande Guorre.” Rabelais could also have

had in mind the name of Ramus, a controversial

public figure in Paris from 1543 onward (Sharratt

1982). Rabelais’s description—“sophist, quib-

bler, hair-splitter, and fool”—admirably fits Ra-

mus’s public persona; he was already suspected

of being a Lutheran, as a logician he dealt in

disjunctives, and the darkness of his skin earned

him the nickname “Marrabecus,” which corre-

sponds to the description of Raminagrobis as

“marrabais or Marrano (a Christianized Jew or

Moor).” The name of Guillaume du Bellay,

seigneur de Langey, has also been associated

with Raminagrobis because of the exemplary se-

renity of his death in 1543, and parallels have

been made with Erasmus’s Funus (The Funeral)

and the sickbed scene in Farce de Maistre Path-

elin. Duval has stressed the central role of Ram-

inagrobis among the authorities consulted and the

various forms of divination, linking the incident

with that of the Dive Bouteille.

The name Raminagrobis, which existed before

Rabelais and also appears later (for example, in

La Fontaine), means “a large cat” and is thus

associated with divination. Its primary connota-

tions, however, are of hypocrisy which Rabelais

underlines in the Pantagrueline Prognostication

of 1533. As Duval suggests, Raminagrobis is act-

ing a role. Identification and even allusion may

contribute to an understanding of these chapters,

but the true function of this open-ended incident

is to be found in the apparent digressions and the

ambivalent position of both Raminagrobis and

Panurge.



Edwin M. Duval, “De la dive bouteille a la quete du

Tiers Livre,” Rabelais pour le XXIe siecle, ed. Michel

Reading, Portrayal of 203

Simonin (Geneva: Droz, 1998); Peter Sharratt, “Ra-

belais, Ramus and Raminagrobis,” RHLF 82 (1982):

263–69; Andre Tournon, “En sens agile”: les acro-

baties de l’esprit selon Rabelais (Paris: Champion,

1995).

Peter Sharratt

RAMUS, PETER (1515–72) Peter Ramus

(Pierre de La Ramee), philosopher, teacher and

educationalist, who set about the reorganization

of the seven arts of the encyclopedia, based on a

new theory of method. Ramus propounded a hu-

manist, rhetorically orientated reform of logic

based on a tendentious rejection of Aristotle; his

Dialecticae partitiones and Aristotelicae Ani-

madversiones of 1543 formed the basis of many

reeditions and reworkings in Latin, with one im-

portant French edition (La Dialectique, 1555).

After being banned from teaching philosophy be-

cause of such subversiveness, he turned first to

the study of rhetoric in association with his col-

league Talaeus (Omer Talon), indulging in a sim-

ilar attack on Cicero (Brutinae Quaestiones,

1547) and Quintilian (Rhetoricae Distinctiones

in Quintilianum, 1549), and then to further works

on mathematics, ethics, and theology.

Ramus and Rabelais had much in common: a

hatred of scholasticism, a belief in the value of

learning, an encyclopedic range and a desire for

pedagogic reform. There is no record, however,

of personal contact. Rabelais’s first two books

appeared while Ramus was still a student at the

College de Navarre in Paris. By the time of the

Third Book, Ramus was a public figure and the

best-known logician in Paris, and Defaux has ar-

gued that his works on logic, with their emphasis

on the supremacy of reason, are a direct source

of inspiration of this book. He may also be al-

luded to in the multi-faceted “maıtre Ramina-

grobis.” In 1551 he published his Pro philoso-

phica Parisiensis academiae disciplina oratio,

defending his own pedagogical practice of teach-

ing philosophy and literature together in a short-

ened arts-course, and was appointed Professor of

Philosophy and Eloquence at the College Royal.

His colleague Pierre Galland replied in his Pro

schola Parisiensi contra novam academiam Petri

Rami oratio, showing his disapproval both of this

appointment and of what he saw as Ramus’s cha-

otically poetic approach to learning, likening his

works to “the vernacular books of the ridiculous

Pantagruel.” Rabelais was provoked to respond

and in the second prologue to the Fourth Book

ridiculed them both. In a digression from the

story of Aesop’s woodman (here, Couillatris),

Jupiter asks what is to be done with both profes-

sors and their hangers-on and partisans who are

disturbing the whole university. Galland is a fox

and Ramus a dog “mesdisant, mesescrivant et

abayant contre les antiques philosophes et ora-

teurs (slandering, libeling, and howling at the an-

cient philosophers and orators).” Together they

are responsible for “feu de faction, simulte, sec-

tes couillonniques et partialite” (“the fire of fac-

tionalism, enmity, ballocky sects, and divisive-

ness”), an early reference to Ramism and the

Ramist controversies. Jupiter cannot decide be-

tween them, and Priapus suggests that these two

self-seeking Peters should be immortalized by

petrification. Rabelais, too, reserves judgment,

siding neither with the Aristotelian nor the Pla-

tonist; a playful juggler with logic himself, he is

not concerned with the debate on method which

was then in vogue and is interested only in the

comic possibilities of the public, controversial

figure and his reputation. For Duval this incident

has an “emblematic function” in the structure of

the Fourth Book, its irreconcilable antagonism

being typical of all such conflicts in this book

and even beyond.


rieur au prophete. Etudes sur Pantagruel, Gargantua,

Le Quart Livre (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Edwin M. Du-

val, The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre de Panta-

gruel (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Edwin M. Duval, The De-

sign of Rabelais’s Quart Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva:

Droz, 1998); Kees Meerhoff, Rhetorique et poetique

au XVIe siecle en France: Du Bellay, Ramus et les

autres (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986); Peter Sharratt, “Ra-

mus 2000,” Rhetorica 18 (2000): 399–455.

Peter Sharratt

READING, PORTRAYAL OF Reading in

Rabelais is a complex topic, in part because the

author of the Chroniques lived during the period

of transition from medieval manuscript to early-

modern print, described forty years ago by Mar-

shall McLuhan in his Gutenberg Galaxy (1962:

149). The first two books, Pantagruel (1532) and

Gargantua (1534), are filled with discussions of

204 Reading, Portrayal of

reading to and by characters, as well as saluta-

tions, exhortations, and asides to Rabelais’s own

readers by the fictional narrator, Alcofrybas.

Educational reading or studying is found in the

first two books. Frequently, the author links the

two verbs “estudier” and “profiter”: some study

yields profit, while some does not. Although

Pantagruel more often shows the title character

profiting or benefiting from his intellectual en-

deavors, Gargantua is more skeptical about the

benefits of study, particularly at the earlier

“Gothic” time described there.

The famous letter from Gargantua to his son

in chapter 8 of Pantagruel stresses the positive

benefit to be derived from educational reading or

studying and focuses on the importance of imi-

tating teachers and other learned role models. But

the early chapters of Gargantua (14, 15, 21)

show the lack of profit associated with passive

medieval reading, and particularly the habit of

being read to. Surprisingly, at the very end of the

book, in the Abbey of Theleme, which might be

viewed as an ideal educational establishment,

there is very little discussion of reading, and the

study of Latin and Greek seems to have disap-

peared. Frere Jean mocks those monks who

spend their lives in study and reading (52, 56,

57).

A second aspect of reading in Rabelais is ad-

vised by Alcofrybas (the narrator) on how to

read his book. Frequently, this description of

reading is grounded in the pedagogy of the works

themselves. The prologue to Pantagruel advises

the reader to believe whatever he or she reads

there and not to challenge the author. This is a

didactic view of the writer/reader relationship,

typical of the ideas on education expressed in

Rabelais’s first book. Closely related to this di-

dactic view of reading, which outlines a passive

role for the reader, are the analogy in the pro-

logue between reading and medical cure (for

toothache, childbirth); and the emphasis on belief

by the reader, with comparisons between reading

the Chroniques and reading the Bible. In 1532,

Rabelais appears skeptical about the value of ac-

tive, interpretive reading (see the “Conclusion,”

P 34, with its advice to be a good Pantagrueliste).

The prologue to Gargantua, however, with its

famous “turning point,” provides a much more

complex picture of the reading process and al-

ternates between reader-centered and author-

centered views of reading. Although the Sileni

and marrowbone analogies imply that the reader

should simply locate meanings that the author

has placed there, the discussions of Homer and

Ovid suggest, and then reject, the idea that the

reader himself may create meaning in the text.

Finally, the very end of Gargantua (G 58), with

its interpretation of the “Enigme” or Enigmatic

Prophecy, provides two opposing views of read-

ing. While Gargantua looks for a religious inter-

pretation, Frere Jean compares the reading proc-

ess to a tennis game, in which the players shift

sides, as the equilibrium between reader and

writer is maintained, although the adversarial but

playful relationship never completely disappears.

The truce between reader and writer reached

at the end of Gargantua is broken in the Third

Book, with its abandonment of certainty of in-

terpretation; and again, more seriously, in the

Fourth Book with, for example, its attacks on

the Decretals and the oppressive way in which

they and other holy books are used (4BK 49, 51–

53).

Although Rabelais at times approaches a

“reader-centered” view of the reading process, he

is not able to come to a two-way communication-

based model for reading, at least in Pantagruel

and Gargantua. He sees scriptural, evangelical

reading as the model for “good” reading, and

thus he still offers an author-centered, medieval

hermeneutic. Most reading in the first half of the

sixteenth century would still have been of man-

uscripts or of early books printed in the “Gothic”

style (like the early editions of Pantagrue1 and

Gargantua themselves).

Rabelais’s view of writing, however, comes

closer to a modern, language- and text-centered

view of communication and implies a more ac-

tive role for his own readers. Here we see Ra-

belais’s exploitation of the typographic book, ref-

erences to printing, and use of visual style

(Rawles 1997: 9). The tension between descrip-

tions of reading and of writing in Rabelais’s

work shows him to be a transitional figure in

early modern views of communication, as Mar-

shall McLuhan demonstrated forty years ago. But

in addition, recent attention to reading by schol-

ars of print, publication, and the physical book

gives a more concrete meaning to the subject of

Reception and Influence in France 205

reading in Rabelais and suggests a new direction

for research by Rabelais scholars.

Readings: Cathleen M. Bauschatz, “ ‘Une descrip-

tion du jeu de paulme soubz obscures parolles’: The

Portrayal of Reading in Pantagruel and Gargantua,”

ER 22 (1988): 57–76; Cathleen M. Bauschatz, “From

‘estudier et profiter’ to ‘instruire et plaire’: Didacti-

cism in Rabelais’s Pantagruel and Gargantua,” MLS

19.1 (1989): 37–49; Barry Lydgate, “Printing, Narra-

tive and the Genesis of the Rabelaisian Novel,” RR

71.4 (1980): 345–73; Marshall McLuhan, The Guten-

berg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,

1962); Stephen Rawles, “What Did Rabelais Really

Know about Printing and Publishing?” Editer et trad-

uire Rabelais a travers les ages, ed. Paul J. Smith

(Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi [Faux Titre], 1997).


RECEPTION AND INFLUENCE IN

FRANCE The great number of editions of Ra-

belais’s fictional works (the New Rabelais Bib-

liography lists ninety-three editions published in

or before 1626) indicates that he was widely read

in the sixteenth century. As is demonstrated by

Marcel De Greve, Rabelais’s influence on his

contemporaries was profound, varied, and im-

mediate. His works figured on Indexes from

1549 on. Vehement accusations of heresy and

lucianism (imitation of Lucian associated with

freethinking and even atheism by detractors)

came from Catholic authors like Gabriel Du Puy-

Herbaut, Francois Le Picart, and Guillaume Pos-

tel as well as from Protestant circles (Calvin, On

Scandals, 1550). Rabelais riposted to them in his

novels, especially in his Fourth Book. In the Old

Prologue of 1548, talking about a drunken mag-

pie, called “la pie de Behuart,” he made a pun

on the names of Le Picart and Du Puy-Herbaut,

while elsewhere in the Fourth Book he placed

adversaries among the monstrous progeniture of

Antiphysie (Anti-Nature): “the maniacal Pistols

[Postel], the demoniacal Calvins, impostors of

Geneva, the rabid Putherbeuses [Du Puy-

Herbaut]” (ch. 32). Some imitations like Francois

Habert’s Songe de Pantagruel (1542) and the

anonymous, so-called para-rabelaisian editions

(the Disciple de Pantagruel, 1538, the fictitious

Fifth Book, 1549) are essential for Rabelais’s fic-

tion because he reacted to them by rewriting them.

Among his sixteenth-century readers we find

authors as diverse as Pierre de Ronsard, young

Theodore Beza, whose macaronic Passavant

(1553) is full of Rabelaisian reminiscences, the

Protestant Henri Estienne, who rejected his ideas

but admired his style, Guillaume Bouchet, and

Montaigne, whose qualification “livres simple-

ment plaisans” is mitigated. Narratives by Noel

du Fail, Barthelemy Aneau (Alector, 1560), Ni-

colas de Cholieres, Guillaume des Autelz, Be-

roalde de Verville (Le Moyen de parvenir, 1610),

and Nicolas Horry (Rabelais ressuscite, 1611)

are all influenced by Rabelais. In the sixteenth

and seventeenth centuries, Rabelais’s vehement,

grotesque style was much imitated in satirical,

mostly Protestant writing like the anonymous Sa-

tyre menippee (1593) and in works by Agrippa

d’Aubigne and Marnix de Saint-Aldegonde. The

virulent Rabelais reforme (1619) by the Jesuit

Francois Garasse attacked the Protestant Pierre

Du Moulin violently by relegating him to the de-

testable followers of Rabelais. Francois Desprez

composed his Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel

(1565), a strange and influential book without

words, illustrated with grotesque gravures, which

seem to be more inspired by Hieronymus Bosch

and Pieter Bruegel than by Rabelais. Moreover,

there rapidly was born a legend around Rabelais

as a rogue and a jester: like Francis Villon and

Clement Marot, he increasingly became a pop-

ular figure in numerous early modern collections

of anecdotes and jokes.

From the 1620s on, Rabelais’s characters were

often staged in royal masquerades (Naissance de

Pantagruel, 1622), ballets (Ballet des andouilles

[1628], Boufonnerie rabelesique [1638]) and

other festivities. Rabelais continued to be read

and admired by libertine authors like Gassendi,

Naude, Guy Patin, Cyrano de Bergerac, Saint-

Amant, and Scarron. However, the age of clas-

sicism tended to disapprove of Rabelais’s extrav-

agances, as is seen in the statement of La

Bruyere: “a monstrous assemblage of a delicate

and ingenious morality and a filthy corruption.”

But for the great authors of classicism, Rabelais

is simply unavoidable: La Fontaine’s Fables and

Contes are full of Rabelaisian borrowings, Mo-

liere quotes him in his comedies, and Racine al-

ludes to him in his only comedy Les Plaideurs

(1668). The seventeenth century marked the be-

ginning of a linguistic interest in the language of

206 Reformation

Rabelais, as is visible in Randle Cotgrave’s

French-English Dictionary (1611) and the lexical

works by Gilles Menage and Furetiere. This in-

terest goes with the great editions of Rabelais’s

works, published in Amsterdam, meant for the

French market: the first attempt, including a lex-

ical commentary and a life of Rabelais, was is-

sued by the Elzevier printing house (1663, sev-

eral [pirated] re-editions), which in 1711 was to

be followed by the monumental Amsterdam edi-

tion in five tomes by the French fugitive Jacob

Le Duchat.

Rabelais continued to be read in the Age of

Enlightenment by authors as varied as Beaumar-

chais, Diderot, Andre Chenier, and of course

Voltaire, although his famous judgment remains

strongly influenced by classicist ideas on biense-

ance: “It is sorry that a man who has so much

wit made so miserable a use of it.” This preoc-

cupation with bienseance is especially visible

from the numerous editions of Rabelais in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, being

“abridged, disciplined, bowdlerised, purged, an-

thologized, all in the name of decency, and under

such labels as Le Rabelais moderne, Le Rabelais

populaire or Le Rabelais classique” (Richard

Cooper). Andre Grety’s opera-comique entitled

Panurge dans l’Ile des Lanternes (1785) had an

enormous success: 248 representations at the

Opera in Paris until 1824.

In the age of Romanticism, Rabelais became,

with Shakespeare and Cervantes, icons of lit-

erary genius: Chateaubriand, Hugo, Michelet,

Sainte-Beuve, Nodier, and Gautier all admired

him. Balzac’s Contes drolatiques have a strong

Rabelaisian flavor; Flaubert read Rabelais while

composing his Madame Bovary; and in his illus-

trations of Rabelais’s works, Gustave Dore ex-

pressed his gloomy Gothic vision of Rabelais.

In the twentieth century, Rabelais continues to

symbolize creative liberty, although for the nov-

elist Louis-Ferdinand Celine Rabelais did not go

far enough (“Rabelais, il a rate son coup”).

Among his adepts are Alfred Jarry (Ubu Roi,

1896), Michel de Ghelderode (Pantagleize,

1930), Georges Perec (La vie mode d’emploi,

1978), and Valere Novarina. Jean-Louis Barrault

staged him in a speech-making spectacle, which

coincided with the student protests of May 1968,

followed by representations in New York. Bar-

rault’s total theater gave new impulses to Rabe-

lais’s life on stage. The nouveau romancier

Michel Butor wrote some influential critical es-

says on Rabelais (Rabelais ou c’etait pour rire,

1972). Another Minuit-novelist, Francois Bon,

edited his works, wrote an essay (La folie Ra-

belais, 1992), and worked allusions to Rabelais

into his novels. Michel Radon wrote a biograph-

ical novel on Rabelais (Le roman de Rabelais,

1994). However, there is (as there has ever been)

not just a literary but also a more legendary side

of Rabelais’s reputation. Dictionaries (be it dic-

tionaries of etymologies, proverbs, or citations),

touristic and culinary guide books, as well as the

Internet search engines show that at least his leg-

end is still very much alive in the French lan-

guage and culture.

Readings: Jacques Boulenger, Rabelais a travers

les ages (Paris: Le Divan, 1925); Richard Cooper, “Le

veritable Rabelais deforme,” Editer et traduire Rabe-

lais a travers les ages, ed. Paul J. Smith (Amsterdam:

Rodopi, 1997); Marcel De Greve, L’interpretation de

Rabelais au XVIe siecle (Geneva: Droz, 1961); Guy

Demerson, Rabelais (Paris: Fayard, 1991); Donald M.

Frame, Francois Rabelais. A Study (New York: Har-

court Brace Jovanovich, 1977); Stephen Rawles and

M. A. Screech, A New Rabelais Bibliography: Edi-

tions of Rabelais before 1626 (Geneva: Droz, 1987);

L. Sainean, L’influence et la reputation de Rabelais

(Paris: Gamber, 1930).

Paul J. Smith

REFORMATION Although Rabelais had lit-

tle liking for John Calvin, Rabelais, like Calvin,

ended his days a virtual refugee. Rabelais had

fled to the city of Metz shortly after the publi-

cation of his controversial Third Book in 1546,

the same year that printer Etienne Dolet was

burned at the stake. Rabelais feared that his

sometimes audacious writings, reflective to some

degree of the spirit of free inquiry typical of both

humanism and the Reformation—both of

which advocated a return to the sources (ad fon-

tes) and the exercise of critical discernment on

those documents—might result in retaliation

from the Sorbonne or even the crown. The Fac-

ulty of Theology banned Rabelais’s Fourth

Book as well in 1552, and the historical record

yields few clues about the embattled author’s

whereabouts thereafter.

Religion 207

Rabelais, like his protectress Marguerite de

Navarre, was an evangelical rather than a Prot-

estant (the distinction being that evangelicals did

not wish to leave the Catholic Church, but rather

wanted to reform it from within by applying cer-

tain Protestant criteria, such as reliance on Scrip-

ture alone for revelation rather than on the two-

tiered Catholic system of authority, based on

Scripture twinned with tradition). Yet it is cer-

tainly possible to find proto-Reformed elements

in his oeuvre. To that extent, his work could be

read as suspicious and potentially subversive.

Pantagruel, with its letter from Gargantua to

his son, already gestured in the direction of evan-

gelism by criticizing contemporary techniques of

textual criticism (as well as the legal profession),

thereby undermining accepted authorities. Partic-

ularly in Gargantua, which was published in

1534, probably just prior to the Affaire des Plac-

ards, Rabelais clearly and cogently argued the

case for evangelical doctrine with its advocacy

of communal, public confession rather than pri-

vate confession, mediation through Christ alone

rather than priestly intercession, and salvation

through Christ rather than one’s own “works of

righteousness,” as stipulated by Catholic theol-

ogy. Rabelais also attacked clerical corruption,

the distortions of the Sorbonne’s scholastic ap-

proach to texts, and religious superstition in Gar-

gantua. While in the Third Book Rabelais pru-

dently refrained from further direct religious

satire, he continued, albeit less explicitly, to de-

stabilize contemporary systems of knowing and

world-views through his characterization of Pan-

urge, a skeptic never satisfied with any answer

who repeatedly turned systems of knowledge up-

side down. Finally, the Parlement roundly de-

nounced the Fourth Book for its satire concern-

ing Protestants (Papefigues) and Catholics

(Papimanes), as well as its denigration of papal

politics and clerical ambition.

To examine a straightforward illustration of

the effects of evangelism, we might note that Ra-

belais caused Pantagruel, who was moved by

his father’s famed humanist letter and program

for Christian humanist education, to exemplify

the change of heart attendant upon the Christian

conversion process. Upon his encounter with

Panurge, Pantagruel put his words into action

(evoking Protestant plain style, or stylus rudus,

speech scaffolded on the truth of Scripture rather

than adorned with rhetoric for purely aesthetic

purposes). He practiced biblical precepts (“Re-

membering well the words of his father’s letter,

Pantagruel one day decided it was time to test

his knowledge” [GP 105, P 10]), and did not un-

derstand what Panurge was saying until it had

been rendered in the three “biblical” languages—

Hebrew, Greek, and Latin—and then translated

into his own native dialect (“I understand . . . or

at least I seem to, because it’s the language we

speak in Utopia” [P 9, GP 104]). In this way, he

endorsed the Protestant request that Scripture be

rendered accessible to everyman by translation

into the vernacular.

But Rabelais never entirely plays by the rules

of any game, and even more so where his ma-

nipulation of rhetoric and tropes of the Refor-

mation is concerned. The Catholic hierarchy

need not have been so concerned that any sort of

unified, monolithic endorsement of proto-

Protestant dogma might emerge from Rabelais’s

work. When Luther, Calvin, and other Protes-

tants called for the Bible to be translated into the

vernacular, the unanticipated consequence was a

Babel of language unleashed, a plethora of per-

spectives and interpretative possibilities that

complicate a formerly fairly orderly intellectual

universe (see Interpretations). This phenome-

non is especially pronounced in Rabelais: mul-

tiple meanings result, suggesting a linguistic var-

iant of glossolalia, an impression only reinforced

by Rabelais’s stylistic penchant for neologism.

The stabilizing of any spiritual authority or the

institutionalizing of spirituality, Rabelais (the

former mystic Franciscan) seems to argue, is al-

ways to be mistrusted.



ford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Gerard Defaux, Panta-

gruel et les sophistes. Contribution a l’histoire de

l’humanisme chretien au XVIe siecle (The Hague: Ni-

jhoff, 1973); Jan Miernowski, “Literature and Meta-

physics: Rabelais and the Poetics of Misunderstand-

ing,” ER 35: 131–51; Michael Screech, Rabelais.

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979).

Catharine Randall

RELIGION A central preoccupation of Rabe-

lais and his contemporaries that left its mark on

208 Religion

both literature and society. Perhaps no other topic

in Rabelais studies has provoked more scholarly

bickering and critical wrangling than Rabelais’s

atttitudes about religion. No small wonder, for

Rabelais himself lived in a time when people

were on tenterhooks about the topic; the criti-

cisms that the schismatic Martin Luther and the

more moderate evangelism movement had lev-

eled against the Catholic Church had institutions

like the Sorbonne and papacy on their guard.

During such times of censure and summary ex-

ecutions, positions on religion were not ex-

pressed with any degree of frankness. Moreover,

Rabelais’s often ambiguous humor does not help

matters because determining the tone of the

laughter, as well as who or what is the true butt

of the jokes, can be a complicated ordeal indeed.

In all of Rabelais’s work, religious expression

runs the gamut and takes on the forms appropri-

ate (or amusingly inappropriate) for the charac-

ters and situations. Consequently, in the matter

of religion, Rabelais has been all things to all

people. However, a selective review of the pre-

dominant positions can elucidate the contentious

issues in Rabelais’s text.

In 1922, Abel Lefranc wrote a preface to Pan-

tagruel that, because of the author’s stature and

the radicality of his interpretation, would rock the

boat of Rabelais studies for years to come. For

Lefranc, Rabelais was a rebellious atheist who

leveled scathing criticisms against religion from

the safe haven that his protectors offered him. As

Rabelais’s giants romped in their imaginary

world, they toppled institutions and squashed hy-

pocritical men underfoot. The Renaissance friar

Rabelais was a man before his time, maneuvering

in a world that his personal genius had outpaced.

Intimately tied to the ideology of his works, Ra-

belais was not above the sardonic laughter of the

biting social critic. In the Problem of Unbelief in

the Sixteenth Century: the Religion of Rabelais

(1942), Lucien Febvre squared off against this

view, making a plea for placing the sixteenth

century friar back in his time. He portrayed Ra-

belais as a champion of a simple, unadorned

Gospel and an adherent of the evangelism move-

ment of the stripe of Lefevre d’Etaples, Guil-

laume Briconnet and Desiderius Erasmus. Feb-

vre’s attachment to history was unwavering, and

his Rabelais lived in a world circumscribed by

environment, with friends like Jean and Guil-

laume du Bellay and enemies like Guillaume

Postel and Noel Beda. Febvre’s Rabelais en-

gaged in contemporary controversy, owed untold

debt to his source readings, and lived in a time

when life outside the Church was impossible,

even unthinkable. The religious differences of

Rabelais’s generation made for a climate of het-

erodoxy, squabbles, and power plays, particu-

larly for the period when the Council of Trent

had not yet reached any doctrinal decisions.

Some critics even see a parody of Trent in both

the council and the storm of the Fourth Book

(4BK [1548 ed.] 8; 4BK 18–22).

The scholars faithful to the tenets of the War-

burg school took Febvre’s desire to place Rabe-

lais in context to heart. Their commitment to Ra-

belais’s sources was tempered by a desire to

explore the literary flair with which Rabelais

transformed his raw material. Michael Screech’s

Rabelais, for example, is resolutely an Erasmian

evangelical Christian whose generous nature,

Christian skepticism, and unshaken confidence

in revealed wisdom leave their mark on the text.

Instead of a waspish critic with no patience for

the ignorant, we see a Rabelais who uses humor

to tolerate fools with Christian indulgence re-

served for the wayward. The focus is on close

reading to capture the spirit of the letter of Ra-

belais. We could add that Rabelais often uses his

characters to take any number of sides in his par-

odies of contemporary debates. This is the case

in the discussion surrounding the foundation of

the Abbey of Theleme (G 50); the debate be-

tween Panurge and Thaumaste, the English the-

ologian (P 17); the reactions of the main char-

acters to the storm in the Quart livre (4BK 21);

and the encounter with the Papimanes and Pap-

efigues (4BK 45–47 and 48–53).

In light of the nature of Rabelais’s criticisms

of the Church, some critics have drawn Rabelais

closer to the Renaissance writers who had sym-

pathies for what would later become the Refor-

mation movement, like Marguerite de Navarre

and Clement Marot. The ideas of evangelicals

and early Reformers do overlap in some respects

(such as mockery of depraved clergy, critique of

papal indulgences, distrust of stale theological

rhetoric, and a marked preference for the Pau-

line scriptures). However, most critics agree that

Religion 209

Rabelais was no “lutherien” in the strictest sense,

although in his time the word was rather indis-

criminately employed to denote all of the “new”

religious views. Nor did Rabelais’s portrayal of

divination (see Prophecy) in the Third Book

(10–25) show any disquieting predilection for the

darker sciences, but rather, as Jean Ceard has

noted, a playful fascination and a condemnation

of future-telling astrologie judiciaire (“judicial

astrology”). The same must be said for the var-

ious prognostications Rabelais authored, the

search for the oracle of the dive bouteille (3BK

47) (see Bacbuc), and his depiction of Her

Trippa (3BK 25) and all manner of “devils” and

“devilments.” On the other hand, Rabelais’s

“hermeticism” or “mysticism” still inspires de-

bate over what the “plus hault sens” (higher

meaning) might be. Those scholars who empha-

size Rabelais’s materialism contest its existence,

but most readers still wonder where the “sub-

stantificque mouelle” (“substantive marrow” [G

prol.]) or “quinte essence” (“fifth essence” [G, P,

title page]) can be found in Rabelais’s text and

how to extract them. It seems that Rabelais’s re-

ligious expression evolved over time. The water-

shed moment shows itself in the Third Book,

which invites Marguerite de Navarre’s “esprit

abstraict, ravy, et ecstatic” (“abstract, rapt, and

ecstatic spirit”) to descend to earth and enjoy a

more soulful laughter than found in the previous

books. Since the coexistence of the concrete and

the profound relates directly to Rabelais’s relig-

ious expression, it is worthwhile to suggest some

ways in which religion comes to the fore.

Religion, and particularly biblical allusions,

burst forth in Rabelais’s language play. The most

famous of these must be Frere Jean’s pun on

the “service divin” (“divine service”) and the

“service du vin” (“wine service”) (G 25). Here

the wine in the holy chalice (blood of Christ) and

the wine in the table glass (Bacchic celebration)

are assimilated by an “apophthegme monachal”

or monacal precept that seems, in our view, more

like a kind of linguistic transubstantiation. Par-

odies or allusive borrowings from the Vulgate

and Latin liturgy support this throughout the text,

such as echoing Christ’s words on the cross (“I

thirst”) when asking for wine. Such allusions also

turn raunchy, as when the Psalm Ad te levavi (I

lifted up unto Thee) is used to refer to the male

anatomy. Talk of the sacrament of marriage be-

tween Panurge and Pantagruel in the Tiers livre

leaves ample opportunity for easy jokes and

more profound probing of scriptural ambiguities.

Rabalais’s characters and their actions can

stage religious questions. Frere Jean, the monk

who uses the holy cross as a battering ram to

protect the little vineyard of the abbey of Seuille,

is not the contemplative cleric we expect but

springs into action when needed. Moreover, with

a kind of kinetic confidence, he makes do with

what the Lord provides (G 25). At each group

interaction, such as during the storm at sea in

the Fourth Book (18–24), each character enters

into dialogue about deep religious questions with

his own brand of wisdom. Frere Jean has the mo-

nopoly on the practical, Panurge dabbles with

folly of all sorts (Christian and otherwise), and

Pantagruel provides the true measure of the

Christian prince.

Rabelais pokes fun at religious institutions that

he considered awry and proposes utopian new

ones. The most scathing attacks take aim at the

Sorbonne’s Faculty of Theology. The most

amusing of these jabs is the theft of the bells of

Notre Dame (G 16–18). The jargon-filled ha-

rangue of Janotus de Bragmardo makes this

windbag’s attempt to see them returned into a

parody of academic vanity. The sorbonagres, a

pejorative term for Gargantua’s sophist precep-

tors, wreak havoc on the young giant (G 20–22):

their vain daily routines, set like monastic clock-

work, actually seem to distance the young giant

from his faith. Frere Jean, in the abbey of Seuille

he so bravely defended, sees lazy, fearful monks

more preoccupied with their bellies and their

own hides than the cause of Christ. The “battling

Benedictine” will have no part of that lifestyle

when Gargantua founds an abbey to recognize

his valor in the war with Picrochole. The monk

becomes a reformer in his own right when he sets

the rules of order of an anti-monastery, the Ab-

bey of Theleme (G 50–56), a utopian “anti-

institution” that cuts a sharp contrast with mo-

nastic isolation and empty routine. The reader of

subsequent editions can see the textual variants

as an indicator of Rabelais’s potentially offensive

wording in theological matters.

The 1533–34 editions of Pantagruel seem to

210 Renaissance

be more aggressive toward the Sorbonne. Critics

have seen the systematic replacement of theolo-

gien with sophiste in the 1540 and 1542 editions

of Gargantua and Pantagruel as either a biting

comment that adds insult to injury or a meaning-

ful concession to the threat of censorship. How-

ever enlightening, noting a few ways Rabelais

expresses thoughts on religion drives home the

fact these works are more than the sum of their

parts. Who was Rabelais’s God? Mikhail Bakh-

tin claimed that He dwelt in the religion of the

people, a popular piety steeped in folk culture

and carnavalesque celebration. At the center of

this faith was laughter. Indeed, if Bakhtin did not

take pains to remind us that Rabelais, following

Aristotle, asserted “laughter is characteristic of

humankind” (“le rire est le propre de l’homme”),

we could be startled at the Russian critic’s quasi-

deification of the most human of emotions. At

the very least, laughter, as man’s exclusive prop-

erty, sits at the heart of Rabelais’s humanism.

Perhaps it offers “redemption” as well—for even

if laughter is no Messiah in Rabelais, while read-

ing his text we cannot help but think that it must

be God’s greatest gift.

Readings: (Most major studies of Rabelais in the

general bibliography address his religious thought and

cannot all be cited here.) Jean Ceard, La nature et les

prodiges, L’insolite au 16e siecle (Geneva: Droz, 1977);

Reuben C. Cholakian, “A Re-Examination of the Tem-

pest Scene in the Quart Livre,” FS 21.2 (April 1967):

104; Richard Cooper, “Rabelais et l’Eglise,” Rabelais

en son demi-millenaire: actes du colloque interna-

tional de Tours (24–29 septembre 1984) (Geneva:

Droz, 1988); Gerard Defaux, Pantagruel et les soph-

istes. Contribution a l’histoire de l’humanisme chre-

tien au XVIe siecle (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973); Lucien

Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Cen-

tury, The Religion of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb

(1942; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1982); Robert Griffin, “The Devil and Panurge,” SF

16.46 (1972): 329–36; Paul Imbs, “Le diable dans

l’œuvre de Rabelais: Etude de vocabulaire,” Melanges

de linguistique francaise offerts a M. Charles Bruneau

(Geneva: Droz, 1954); Eva Kushner, “Was Picrochole

Free? Rabelais between Luther and Erasmus,” CLS

14.4 (1977): 306–20; Abel Lefranc, ed., Pantagruel,

vols. 3–4, Oeuvres de Francois Rabelais (Paris:

Champion, 1912–27); Claude A. Mayer, “The Genesis

of a Rabelaisian Character: Menippus and Frere Jean,”

FS 6 (1952): 219–29; Lynette Muir, “The Abbey and

the City: Two Aspects of the Christian Community,”

AJFS 14: 32–38; Francois Rigolot, “ ‘Enigme’ et ‘Pro-

phetie’: Les langages de l’hermetisme chez Rabelais,”

Oeuvres et critiques 11.1 (1986): 37–47; Michael A.

Screech, The Rabelaisian Marriage: Aspects of Ra-

belais’s Religion, Ethics and Comic Philosophy (Lon-

don: Arnold, 1958); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais and


tion, Dissent (Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1992); Florence

Weinberg, The Wine and the Will: Rabelais’s Bacchic

Christianity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,

1972).

Amy C. Graves

RENAISSANCE The Renaissance initially

flowered in Italy in the late fourteenth century

(most associate its inception with Petrarch) and

slowly moved northward. In France, the Renais-

sance corresponds almost perfectly to the six-

teenth century. Jules Michelet, the French histo-

rian who coined the term Renaissance, dates its

beginning to 1494 with the arrival of French

troops in Italy and its end in 1592 with the death

of Montaigne. In essence, the period marks the

rediscovery of the ancient authors and their phi-

losophies. Based primarily in philology and its

methods, the humanist movement that accom-

panies the Renaissance looked to Athens and

Rome for models. Confident that the complete

foundation for scientific, moral, and political sys-

tems was already present in the ancients’ writ-

ings, Renaissance scholars poured over classical

texts. Indeed, a certain optimism prevailed during

the early Renaissance. A period of unchallenged

confidence in what the ancients had written of

man and the cosmos, the first thirty years of the

sixteenth century were the “golden age” of the

Renaissance.

As the Renaissance progressed, however, in-

tellectuals registered more dissension, for they

began to realize the impossibility of reconciling

what they read in the ancients with their own

experience. This time of questioning corresponds

to the time when Rabelais penned his novels

(1530–50). A series of crises undermined the

confidence of the “golden age” of rediscovery:

education, cosmology, cosmography, medicine,

science, politics, ethics, religion, and language

are only a few areas where reality did not fit the

Renaissance 211

neatly packaged vision of man and the world that

the ancients had left for posterity. The world had

grown more intricate than it had seemed to the

ancients. New theories and novel forms of in-

quiry had to reflect the unprecedented complexity

that nagged intellectuals by midcentury. Conse-

quently, “variety” reoccurs as a leitmotif in texts

written at that time, and traces of relativism ac-

company all intellectual endeavors. It could be

said that Mannerist and Baroque styles attempted

to express this newly felt complexity. Knowledge

(of man and the world), which had been so stable

for so long, suddenly generated more questions

than it could answer.

As soon as the Renaissance took hold in

France, many of its central values (universal

ethics, unity between the microcosm and the

macrocosm, the predominance of Latin, etc.)

came under attack. The decline of the Renais-

sance, and consequently of the values it stood

for, shows through in the institutions that served

to educate the elite of the time. Numerous trea-

tises written by aristocrats recommended a more

practical education that emphasized mathematics

(ballistic), geography, and history. Likewise, the

rising bourgeoisie expected a more practical ed-

ucation for its children, with a focus on arith-

metic and legal education. This utilitarian ap-

proach to learning favored action over theory.

Experience became the most important factor in

defining knowledge. The “useless subjects”

taught in the humanist colleges had to make way

for a more realistic vision of man and the world.

The individual was now a traveling “actor” with

an avoidable body. If philology proved to be the

cornerstone upon which humanism was built,

philological investigations took on particular

characteristics in France. Most Frenchmen as-

serted the “precellence” or unequaled excellence

of French (Gallic) civilization and insisted on the

relativist relationship between history and its in-

stitutions and, in doing so, helped to develop a

nationalistic sentiment. In fact, historians used

relativism as a weapon against the cultural dom-

ination of Latin (and therefore Italian) culture.

But if relativism became a valuable weapon in

favor of the superiority of French culture, the

demonstration could easily be turned around.

Therein lies the theoretical problem of relativism

during the Renaissance: it is a never-ending proc-

ess and consequently cannot be invoked to create

a cultural order among civilizations. For this rea-

son, many Renaissance thinkers become primar-

ily observers rather than system builders.

There are very few periods in history where

politics and culture become as closely inter-

twined as they did during the Renaissance. Post-

Machiavellian politics had taken liberties with

the distinctions of classical ethics. At the time

when the concepts of “Realpolitik” and “Raison

d’Etat” emerged, virtue and cruelty dominated

contemporary debate. The public body had lost

its identity and replaced it with its own political

logic, which tended to blur conventional ethics.

The past no longer provided a guide for public

action, even if it could furnish valuable examples

for one’s personal life. This crisis between public

and private life led to a new definition of virtue,

or rather to a dual meaning that applied to all

human actions.

The German art historian Jacob Burckhardt

pointed out that the most important discovery of

the Renaissance was not gunpowder, the com-

pass, or the printing press, but the individual. In-

deed, it is during the Renaissance that the indi-

vidual asserts himself as both the source and end

of knowledge. The Renaissance drew a parallel

between the idea of history and the self who at-

tempts to trace his own existence amid a series

of carefully reported incidents. During the Ren-

aissance, the individual viewed himself as a body

flung into turmoil, searching desperately for

points of reference in his own life, either in the

present or at least within the limits of his own

life’s experiences. The central position of the act-

ing subject has much to do with this new form

of self-expression. Literature, for example, wit-

nessed both the birth of the modern hero (Pan-

urge in the case of Rabelais) and an array of new

genres that bestowed a central role to the subject

(the Essais of Montaigne, for example).

Knowledge itself represented a set of personal

experiences in continual motion, which slowly

supplanted the transmitted knowledge of the an-

cients. Practice counted more than ever and rel-

egated theory to second place. Truth became a

series of particular experiences created, lived,

and repeated by the subject. The writing of these

everyday experiences did not simply reaffirm the

subject’s sense of his own importance in the

212 Rhetoric

world; they also placed him on an equal footing

with any other source of authority (God in-

cluded). Providence no longer dictated the sub-

ject’s existence and a new freedom of thought

and consciousness pointed to the horizon.

For all these reasons, the Renaissance repre-

sents a key historical period in which the indi-

vidual slowly abandoned looking toward the

classical past in order to create his own becom-

ing. With his mind fixed on the future, the in-

dividual emerging during the Renaissance would

soon turn inward to find the necessary resources

to write from the perspective of individual hu-

man actions.

Readings: Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the

Renaissance in Italy (London: C. K. Paul & Co.,

1878); Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos

in Renaissance Philosophy (New York, 1963); Phi-

lippe Desan, ed., Humanism in Crisis: The Decline of

the French Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press, 1991); Jules Michelet, “La Renais-

sance,” Renaissance et Reforme, L’histoire de France,

vol. 9 (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1982).

Philippe Desan

RHETORIC Because of its verve, inventive-

ness, and excesses, along with the Bacchic furor

(“I’ve spent more on wine than on oil” [G prol.,

GB 9]) that lends its exuberant stamp to the text,

Rabelais’s work seems at first glance completely

alien to the norms of rhetoric, or the art of per-

suasion through speech. As one of the boisterous

tipplers or “bien ivres” in chapter 5 of Gargan-

tua points out jokingly, however, drunkenness is

indeed the mother of eloquence: “ ‘Is there any-

one who hasn’t been turned into an orator by

having his glass continually refilled?’—as Hor-

ace puts it” (“Facundi calices quem non fecere

disertum?” [GP 17]) (see Propos des bien ivres).

Notwithstanding its aura of spontaneity, the Pan-

tagrueline epic is in fact permeated with a con-

cern for verbal expressiveness and efficiency,

both key traits of humanism that Paul J. Smith

has rightly described as a “rhetorical preoccu-

pation” or “callilogia.” Borrowed from Guil-

laume Bude, this neologism is diametrically op-

posed to the medieval and scholastic preference

for dialectic, which Bude associates with a dis-

like of language or “misologia.”

This rhetorical preoccupation is evident in the

composition of the work, particularly in the ex-

pertly cultivated abundance of the elocutio,

which, as Terence Cave notes, is in keeping with

the recommendations of Erasmus in his De du-

plici copia verborum et rerum (1511). Charac-

terized as a “cornucopia of gaiety” (3BK prol.)

in the Third Book prologue, Rabelais’s text with

its interminable lists at times seems more remi-

niscent of the Danaides’s cask, especially in such

passages as the blazon of Triboullet’s attributes

(3BK 38). This preoccupation with rhetoric also

figures in the paradoxical or satirical eulogies fa-

vored by Panurge, which follow and build upon

the tradition of the Second Sophistry in general

and of Lucian of Samosate in particular (see his

Praise of the Fly). The shortest of these satirical

eulogies, the “eloge des braguettes,” or Praise of

Codpieces [3BK 8]), has been interpreted both

as a derision of Galen’s theory about the gen-

eration of sperm in the testicles (M. A. Screech)

and as a tribute to the biological immortality of

the grotesque body, associated by Mikhail

Bakhtin with popular culture. In a second ex-

ample of this genre, “l’eloge des dettes” or the

Praise of Debts (3BK 3–4), Anna Ogino sees

the expression of a new type of imagination that

is concomitant with, and characteristic of, the

emergence of a market economy in Europe. Fur-

thermore, the entire conclusion of the Third Book

(49–52) constitutes a panegyric of the Panta-

gruelion, a plant with a thousand uses that is

identified with hemp-flax and interpreted in al-

most as many ways, representing for some an

evocation of hasishism, for others the celebration

of human inventiveness, and for still others an

apology for cannabis. This rhetorical focus is

also evident in the sales pitch of the narrator,

who is a parody of the captatio benevolentiae, in

the prologue to Pantagruel, which conforms

point by point to the precepts of rhetoric, both

epideictic and deliberative, particularly in its di-

vision into parts: narration, confirmation, refuta-

tion, and peroration. In keeping with humanistic

efforts to restore rhetoric and its five traditional

parts in their entirety, moreover, Rabelais’s “rhe-

torical preoccupation” extends well beyond the

processes of style alone. In addition to consid-

erations related to the dispositio (arrangement) as

we have seen above, the dispute by signs be-

tween Thaumaste and Panurge (P 19) refers to

Ringing Island 213

the actio (delivery) as well, playing upon the

meaning and propriety of the orator’s gestures as

described by Quintilian.

Rabelais’s work offers more than rhetoric in

action, however, for it also provides a reflection

on rhetoric, echoing the polemics surrounding

Petrus Ramus’s (Pierre de la Ramee) reform of

the curriculum and the attendant restructuring of

the domains of rhetoric and dialectic, as reflected

in the Fourth Book prologue where Pierre Gal-

land and Pierre “Rameau” are petrified by Jupiter

for their philautia or self-love. For example, the

Rabelaisian text self-reflectively evokes the myth

of a French Hercules who uses speech to enchain

his adversaries in the Fourth Book’s dedicatory

epistle to Odet de Coligny and in its reiteration

in the Fifth Book conquest of India by Bacchus

(OC 5BK 38–39; GP 5BK 39–40). Furthermore,

the Gallic doctor’s designation of his prologue to

Gargantua as a “prelude,” a term previously re-

served for music, seems to refer to Aristotle’s

Rhetoric (3.14); and the Fourth Book harbors nu-

merous technical terms belonging to rhetorical

nomenclature, whose meaning is elucidated in

the Briefve Declaration (for example, “proso-

popoeia,” “period,” and “solecism”). This self-

reflective tendency often announces explicitly

and facetiously the very processes used, as we

see in Epistemon’s response to Panurge about

the latter’s plan to give his future wife a monk

as her fool or “fou”: “Nay, teur, [ . . . ] through

the figure of tmesis” (5BK 28), retorts Epistemon

obscenely, referring to the rhetorical process of

separating a word in two parts. Throughout, how-

ever, in Rabelais’s rhetoric in action and in his

self-reflective tendencies, eloquence is never en-

visioned as an ossified technique to be called

upon at will. Instead, it is invariably represented

as a dynamic process in which offenses against

good taste, decency, and rules emerge as a po-

tential rhetorical figure in their own right, follow-

ing the example of Frere Jean who legitimizes

his own use of swear words by invoking the

model of Cicero: “That was just verbal decora-

tion,” he says, “just Ciceronian rhetoric” (G 39).

Readings: Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text.


ford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Guy Demerson, “Tra-

dition rhetorique et creation litteraire chez Rabelais,”

Etudes de lettres 2 (1984): 3–23; Anna Ogino, Les

eloges paradoxaux dans le Tiers et le Quart livres de

Rabelais. Enquete sur le comique et le cosmique a la

Renaissance (Tokyo: Tosho, 1989); Paul J. Smith,

“Fable esopique et dispositio epidictique. Pour une ap-

proche rhetorique du Pantagruel,” Rabelais pour le

XXIe siecle, actes du colloque du Centre d’etudes su-

perieures de la Renaissance (Chinon-Tours 1994), ed.

Michel Simonin, ER 33 (Geneva: Droz, 1998): 91–

104; Paul J. Smith, “Aspects de la rhetorique rabelais-

ienne,” Neophilologus 67.2 (1983): 175–85.

Claude La Charite

RINGING ISLAND (L’ISLE SONANTE)

Complete editions of Rabelais’s works including

the first four books and the Pantagrueline Prog-

nostication had been in print since 1553, but it

was only in 1562 that Ringing Island (L’Isle son-

ante, par M. Francoys Rabelais, qui n’a point

encores este imprimee, ne mise en lumiere: en

laquelle est continuee la navigation faicte par

Pantagruel, Panurge et autres ses officiers) first

appeared, in an edition providing no indication

of the place of publication or editor. This enig-

matic publication, a satire of the papacy and the

Church, has been the object of much speculation

regarding both its authorship and the circum-

stances of its appearance during a time of relig-

ious unrest. Is it a posthumous Rabelaisian text

or a Protestant pamphlet? Is the person behind

this publication someone close to Rabelais bent

on perpetuating his memory? Or is it someone

close to the Reformation who is appropriating

the name of a famous author, listed in the papal

Index of prohibited books published by Paul IV?

The material evidence is minimal: the watermark

is suggestive of paper originating in Touraine or

Geneva, indicating that the work might have

been printed in La Rochelle or Orleans, with an-

other edition, now lost, published in Geneva. But

the virulent religious criticism does not neces-

sarily imply a Protestant editor: Catherine de’

Medici had instructed France’s representatives at

the 1562 session of the Council of Trent to

stress the importance of fighting clerical abuses

(including the misuse of wealth, neglect of one’s

duties, the cult of images, and indulgences).

This text of Ringing Island is known to us in

two other forms: the Fifth Book of the Heroic

Feats and Sayings of Good Pantagruel (Cin-

quiesme livre des faicts et dicts Heroıques du bon

214 Rondibilis

Pantagruel), published in 1564, and a manuscript

from the sixteenth century, neither of which re-

produces the last chapter, the Island of the Ig-

norant (“Apedeftes”), or the paragraph that pre-

cedes it. The variants between these three texts

attest to the existence of rough drafts that are

difficult to decipher and poorly classified.

The edition of Ringing Island contains two

long episodes—Ringing Island itself (eight chap-

ters) and the “Chats fourrez” or “Furry Lawcats”

(five chapters)—and three short ones: the Islands

of Ferrements (“Toolmaking Island”), Cassade

(“Island of Lying Illusions”), and Apedeftes (“Is-

land of the Ignorant”). Ringing Island, where Ra-

belais plays with equivocal variations on pape-

gaut (literally “parrot,” but pape means “pope”)

and gaut, is the favorite habitat of “clergyhawks,

monkhawks, preacherhawks, abbothawks, bish-

ophawks, cardinalhawks, and popehawks”

(“Clergaux, Monagaux, Prestregaux, Abbegaux,

Evesgaux, Cardingaux et Papegault” [GP 531;

5BK 2]). It has been compared to the Island of

Birds with its godets (feeding dishes) and mar-

gaux (magpies) near Terre-Neuve, evoked by

Jacques Cartier in his travel narratives. The au-

thor criticizes the customs of the papal court, its

institutions (bells, fasting), and the temporal or-

ganization of the Church (monastic institutions,

orders of knighthood, financing of the clergy).

Religious implications also figure as undercur-

rents in the episodes of the Isles of Ferrements

(“Toolmaking,” 5BK 9) and Cassade (“Lying Il-

lusions” 5BK 10). The idea of the Isle of Fer-

rements (iron tools and weapons), where swords

and knives grow on trees, is borrowed from the

Disciple of Pantagruel, an anonymous work pub-

lished in 1538 that clearly left its mark on Ra-

belais’s Fourth Book: equivocal innuendos, mar-

riages between tools which evoke the alliances

of the Fourth Book (4BK 9), and a reflection on

monsters and predestination have been added.

On the Island of Cassade (a gambling term of

Italian derivation that designates trickery) or the

Isle of Lying Illusions, we also discover an attack

against the Church’s attitude toward gambling

and a denunciation of the sale of relics.

The episode of the Chats Fourrez or “Furry

Lawcats” (5BK 11–15), in which the Chats Four-

rez and their archduke Grippeminault are de-

scribed as monsters, signals the corruption and

venality of the justice system, as well as the re-

lentlessness of the judicial system toward nobles

and those who are innocent. Two of the chapters

in this episode are devoted to an enigma or riddle

in the form of a ten-line poem to heroes, a pa-

rodic version of metempsychosis and a play on

“cosson,” a kind of weevil.

The chapter of the Apedeftes or “ignorant

ones,” an attack against the Court of Auditors

(Cours des Comptes) and the Finance Adminis-

tration, should be read within the context of the

radical reorganization of that office in the mid-

sixteenth century. It is completely foreign to the

stylistic characteristics of the rest of the text,

which correspond to the artificial linguistic sys-

tem Rabelais set up in his other works.

The sharpness of the religious and judicial crit-

icism of Ringing Island brings to mind the acer-

bity of the Fourth Book in 1552, a time of direct

confrontation between the Pope and the king of

France. Given the frequent recycling of satiric

texts in the sixteenth century to fit new circum-

stances, one might hypothesize that Ringing Is-

land is a Rabelaisian text contemporaneous with

the Fourth Book, written during the Gallican cri-

sis of the 1550s to denounce a different political

situation.

Since 1564 Ringing Island has constituted the

first part of the Fifth Book. To these chapters,

which we may in all likelihood attribute to Ra-

belais, the editors have added a second group of

episodes containing a sea journey, which they

append to the text as a conclusion to the Panta-

grueline chronicles.

Readings: Alfred Glauser, Le faux Rabelais (Paris:

Nizet, 1975); Mireille Huchon, Rabelais grammarien.

De l’histoire du texte aux problemes d’authenticite,

ER 16 (Geneva: Droz, 1981); G. Mallary Masters,

Rabelaisian Dialectic and the Platonic-Hermetic Tra-

dition (Albany: State University of New York Press,

1969); Ian R. Morrison, Rabelais: Tiers livre, Quart

livre, Ve livre (London: Grant and Cutler, 1994);

George A. Petrossian, “The Problem of the Authentic-

ity of the Cinquiesme Livre de Pantagruel: A Quan-

titative Study,” ER 13 (1976): 1–64.

Mireille Huchon

RONDIBILIS (3BK 31–34) Physician con-

sulted by Panurge in chapters 31–34 of the

Third Book, whose derogatory views on

Ruach 215

women’s anatomy and character, along with

chapters 15 and 22 of Pantagruel, contribute to

Rabelais’s long-standing reputation as an anti-

feminist. Of the five “treatments” for concupis-

cence outlined by the doctor, including wine,

drugs, hard work, study, and copulation, Panurge

opts happily for the last method only to learn that

there is a catch involved. Although marriage,

the only legitimate setting for sex, offers the pos-

sibility of “worthy” offspring, it also carries the

risk of cuckoldry. While Rondibilis’s contention

that all married men either have been, are, will

be, or may be cuckolded is a truism, it hinges

upon a negative appraisal of women. Drawing

upon the ancients, and siding with Plato and Hip-

pocrates against the experimentalist Galen, the

physician characterizes the “feminine organ” as

a voracious and insatiable “animal” (3BK 32),

and the nature of women as “frail, variable, ca-

pricious, inconstant, and imperfect” (3BK 32)—

thus prone to infidelity.

Because Pantagruel makes an explicit con-

nection between Rondibilis and Rabelais, who

supposedly performed together in a morality play

in Montpellier, scholars such as Abel Lefranc of-

ten equate the fictional physician’s opinions with

those of the author himself, thereby interpreting

the episode as a negative contribution to the

Querelle des femmes or Woman Question, a

long-standing debate between idealizers and de-

tractors of women revived by La Broderie in

1542. However, Rondibilis’s preference for Plato

over Galen, though approved by Pantagruel, ar-

guably distances him from Rabelais. Overall,

moreover, the doctor’s own mercenary nature,

Panurge’s scorn for his advice, and Rabelais’s

positive portrayal of women at Theleme suggest

that Rondibilis’s opinion, while representing a

frequently held view in the Renaissance, should

not be considered identical to that of the author.


cine, ER 12 (Geneva: Droz, 1976); Donald Frame, Ra-

belais. A Study (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanov-

ich, 1977); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London:

Duckworth, 1979).


RONSARD, PIERRE DE (1524–85) Prolific

poet and leading member of the Pleiade who

wrote in a wide range of genres. His work in-

cludes lyric sonnet sequences, odes after Pindar

and Horace, mythological hymns, elegies, ec-

logues and an unfinished epic. Ronsard encour-

aged the introduction of classical and Italian

models into French poetry, and his work is often

heavily allusive in both theme and form. Ronsard

includes an epitaph for Rabelais (“Epithafe de

Francois Rabelais”) in his 1554 collection, Le

Bocage, published the year following the older

writer’s death. Part encomium, part burlesque,

the poem begins with a Bacchic vine sprouting

out of Rabelais’s decomposing paunch. Retro-

spective intoxication ensues before death enters

to sober up the proceedings and the epitaph ends

by urging the reader to scatter food and drink,

not flowers, upon Rabelais’s grave. Taken as a

whole, it confirms Rabelais’s reputation as a bon

vivant without telling us too much about what

Ronsard thought of him. Aside from this one in-

stance, direct influence by Rabelais on Ronsard

is hard to prove. Ronsard’s principal editor, Paul

Laumonier, lists a number of possible allusions

to Rabelais, the majority of which follow the

same Bacchanalian theme. Ronsard does make

use of Alcibiades’s comparison between Socrates

and Silenus in “La Lyre, A Jean Belot” (1569),

and it seems likely that he would have known

Rabelais’s version in the prologue to Gargantua.

Yet despite this paucity of textual debt an intrigu-

ing overlap remains. Although belonging to a

younger generation with very different aspira-

tions, Ronsard’s literary debut in 1549–50 falls

between the 1548 and 1552 editions of Rabe-

lais’s Fourth Book. Their contemporaries could

have enjoyed Ronsard’s Pindaric odes or his first

sonnet sequence, Les Amours, alongside the epic

voyage of Panurge and Pantagruel. If for a brief

time only, Rabelais and Ronsard rub shoulders

in the literary marketplace.

Readings: Raymond Lebegue, “Ronsard lecteur de

Rabelais,” BHR 16 (1954): 82–85; Marcel de Greve,

L’interpretation de Rabelais au XVIe siecle (Geneva:

Droz, 1961) 99–103.

Andrea Walkden

RUACH The Hebrew word for breath, ruach,

is defined as “vent ou esprit” in the Briefve De-

claration. Rabelais, who had studied Hebrew be-

fore he wrote the Fourth Book, doubtless knew

the connotations of Ruach in the Old Testament,

216 Ruach

where it can mean the breath of the nostrils,

moral character, prophetic furor (as “the spirit

[ruach] of the Lord will rush upon you, and you

will join them in their prophetic state.” [1 Sam.

10.6]), or the creative principle (“The earth was

a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the

abyss, while a mighty wind [ruach] swept over

the waters” [Gen. 1.2]). Rabelais exploits the

gamut of connotations of “vent” and “esprit” in

chapters 43–44.

These chapters are devoted to the “Isle de

Ruach,” following eight chapters on the carnal

Andouilles. By contrast, the inhabitants of Ruach

“live just on wind. They drink nothing, eat noth-

ing—only wind” (GP 471; 4BK 43). Their

houses are weathervanes; the poor nourish them-

selves with fans, while the rich have windmills.

Pantagruel admires them, praising their “form

of government and way of life” (4BK 44).

If the Andouilles can be identified as Luther-

ans who believe in the real presence in the Eu-

charist of the natural body and blood of Christ,

and whose detractors called them “Fleischfres-

ser” or cannibals, the Ruachians, “who live just

on wind,” could be their next-door neighbors, the

Dutch. From the thirteenth century, the land they

inhabit was kept free of water by means of wind-

mills, which were principally used to dry out the

land and to pump the brackish water into canals,

enabling human life to exist in the Low Coun-

tries. In addition, the religious tradition of Hol-

land had long been spiritual in tendency: Thomas

a Kempis (1379–1471) had preached simple

Christianity in imitation of Christ. While he and

his followers did not reject transubstantiation,

they believed that the presence of Christ could

be approached in the spirit outside the sacrament.

The sixteenth-century reformers in Holland were

called the Sacramentisten, designating those who

believed that the body of Christ was only spiri-

tually present. This belief constituted the greatest

difference between them and the Lutherans. Cor-

nelius Hoen, a contemporary of Martin Luther,

argued that Christ’s words, “Take, eat, this is my

body,” etc., should be understood symbolically,

as are his declarations “I am the way, the truth,

and the life,” and “I am the vine and you the

branches.” Luther violently denounced Hoen and

his spiritualizing interpretation in his treatise

“This Is My Body.”

Bringuenarilles, the “broken-nosed” giant

who devours the windmills of the Ruachians and

ultimately comes to grief, might be, like Quar-

esmeprenant, an incarnation of Charles V, who

persecuted the Reformers in Holland but who ul-

timately “breaks his nose” on their stubborn re-

sistance.

Readings: Jean-Jacques Altmeyer, Les precurseurs

de la Reforme aux Pays-Bas, vol. 1 (The Hague: W.-

P. van Stockum, 1886); Karl Brandi, The Emperor

Charles V (London: Macmillan, 1902); Alastair Duke,

Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries (Lon-

don: Hamledon, 1990); Edwin M. Duval, “La messe,

la cene et le voyage sans fin du Quart Livre,” ER 21

(1988): 131–141; Florence Weinberg, “L’isle de

Ruach,” Rabelais et les lecons du rire (Orleans: Par-

adigme, 2000): 195–205.


S

SAINT-GELAIS, MELLIN (OR MERLIN)

DE (1487/1491–1558) Court poet and one of

the first to use the sonnet in France. As a young

man, he received an excellent humanist educa-

tion including Greek and Latin. After attending

the University of Poitiers, Saint-Gelais spent ten

years in Italy developing a deep admiration for

Italian culture and poetry. In 1518, Saint-Gelais

returned to France where his noble lineage, his

reputation as a poet, and his charm assured him

a place at court. Nevertheless, his poverty con-

vinced him to enter holy orders before being ap-

pointed almoner to the king in 1525. Francis re-

warded his service by naming Saint-Gelais abbot

of La Fresnade (1531) and of Reclus (1532).

Saint-Gelais also served as keeper of the royal

library at Blois between 1536 and 1544. None of

these offices kept the poet from the court where

he organized entertainments for Francis and for

his successor, Henry II.

The poetry of Saint-Gelais, who was a great

friend of Clement Marot, consists of light and

graceful verse—mostly rondeaux and chansons—

as well as witty epigrams. He epitomized the

style attacked by the Pleiade. A quarrel with

Pierre de Ronsard was eventually resolved but

not before most writers of the day had taken

sides. Among Saint-Gelais’s strongest supporters

was his old friend Rabelais whom Saint-Gelais

had probably met in the early days at Poitiers.

Rabelais pays tribute to their friendship in the

prologue to the Fifth Book, where he lists Saint-

Gelais among his model authors, and at the very

end of Gargantua. During the excavation of the

foundation for Theleme, a tablet is unearthed

bearing an “Enigmatic Prophecy” in the style of

“Merlin the prophet.” The riddle is a long poem

by Saint-Gelais to which Rabelais has added two

lines at the beginning and ten at the end. The

poem seems to oppose the optimism of Theleme

when Gargantua interprets it as an allegory of

the religious troubles facing France. Frere Jean

refuses this dark explanation and insists that it

describes a game of tennis.

In his introduction to the English translation,

LeClercq claims that Raminagrobis is “undoubt-

edly Melain de Saint-Gelais,” but there seems to

be little basis for this identification.

Readings: Henri Joseph Molinier, Mellin de Saint-

Gelais (Geneva: Slatkine, 1968); Jean-Yves Pouilloux,

Rabelais: rire est le propre de l’homme (Paris: Galli-

mard, 1993); Elizabeth Zegura and Marcel Tetel, Ra-

belais Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1993).

Megan Conway

SAINT-VICTOR, LIBRARY OF (P 7) The

subject of chapter 7 of Pantagruel must have

been a favorite passage of evangelical humanist

readers, but it is incomprehensible to most read-

ers today. Sandwiched between the obvious sat-

ire of the Ecolier Limousin (6) and the serious

humanist message of Gargantua’s letter on ed-

ucation (8), we find a list of 139 (in the 1542

edition) mostly imaginary books in the real Par-

isian library of the monastery of Saint-Victor.

These titles, in French or (usually bad) Latin, are

in no kind of order; some are simply amusing,

while others attack a wide spectrum of satirical

targets.

Most obviously, the large number of “On the

Something of Something” titles, juxtaposing con-

crete and abstract, are mocking many late me-

dieval devotional or educational works with such

titles; L’esperon de fromaige, for instance, recalls

the Esperon de discipline by Rabelais’s friend

Antoine du Saix. Rabelais increases the humor

here by juxtaposing the spur of cheese (wine) to

L’aguillon de vin (cheese). The list’s first two

titles are Bigua salutis (the chariot of salvation)

and Bregueta iuris (the codpiece of the law), sug-

218 Saints, Imaginary

gesting that theology and law will be the main

targets. There is certainly some joking about

both, often so complex that a detailed explana-

tion would occupy several pages. Beda de optim-

itate triparum implies that the celebrated (and by

evangelical humanists, execrated) Sorbonne the-

ologian has a fat paunch, is greedy, and comes

from a lower-class background—tripe is

working-class or peasant food. Preclarissimi

iuris utriusque doctoris Maistre Pilloti Racque-

denari de bobelinandis glosse Accursiane ba-

guenaudis repetitio enucidiluculidissima (OC

1264 n.28) pokes fun at medieval law, the cele-

brated commentator Accursius, glosses (the hu-

manists’ motto was “Keep the texts and scrap the

glosses”), and convoluted titles in “kitchen”

Latin. Note that this absurd adjective contains the

syllable cul, meaning “ass,” or backside.

Some titles alert us to real books that are no

longer read today. Merlinus Coccaius de patria

diabolorum refers to Teofilo Folengo, a maca-

ronic poet whose Baldus is one of Rabelais’s

most important sources; Campi clysteriorum per

§. C. is the genuine title of a medical work by

the Lyonnais doctor Symphorien Champier.

There are a few references to what may be the

century’s funniest book, the Epistles of Obscure

Men, which was sarcastically dedicated to Or-

twin Gratius (a German humanist [1475–1542]).

Ars honeste pettandi in societate per M. Or-

tuinum reminds us of the gross portrait of him in

the book (as well as delighting by its oxymoron:

how does one fart “honorably”?).

This chapter is entirely typical of Rabelais. It

expends enormous energy, inventiveness, and er-

udition on a subject that will never be mentioned

again. It forces the reader to jump from one lan-

guage to another and from subject to subject: the-

ology, law, medicine, even social mores (Le cul-

pele des vesves probably refers to women’s, and

especially loose women’s, habit of shaving their

pubic hair [but see OC 1265 n.16]). Most im-

portantly, it is at the same time hilariously funny

and (sometimes) profoundly serious, so that we

must constantly be alert for what is, or is not,

being implied.

Readings: Barbara C. Bowen, “Rabelais and the Li-

brary of Saint-Victor,” Lapidary Inscriptions: Renais-

sance Essays for Donald A. Stone, Jr., ed. Barbara C.

Bowen and Jerry C. Nash (Lexington, KY: French Fo-

rum, 1991); Christophe Clavel, “Rabelais et la creativ-

ite neologique: Quelques remarques sur l’absurdite

d’un monstre linguistique,” ER 39 (Geneva: Droz,

2000): 59–85; Paul Lacroix, Catalogue de la Biblio-

theque de l’Abbaye de Saint-Victor au seizieme siecle

(Paris: Techener, 1862).

Barbara C. Bowen

SAINTS, IMAGINARY Following the medi-

eval tradition (Eustache Deschamps, Jean Moli-

net, the Sermons joyeux, the sotties or fools’

plays, etc.), Rabelais allows a multitude of imag-

inary saints into his works. Although it is some-

times difficult to determine whether a given saint

is an imaginary one or just an official saint whose

name has been distorted beyond recognition, it is

obvious that the humanist who has an excellent

knowledge of his Medium Aevum revels in evok-

ing them. Of the about 120 occurrences of offi-

cial and imaginary saints mentioned in the five

books (with only eight occurrences of female

saints, and rare mentions of the Virgin Mary),

there are no fewer than twenty-one occurrences

of imaginary saints (for a total of seventeen dif-

ferent imaginary saints; cf. Merceron 2002). Dur-

ing the episode of the great bells of Notre-Dame,

the Parisians after having been “piss-drenched”

by the good giant Gargantua break into a series

of repudiations and cursing. They inextricably

mix official saints such as Fiacre, Treignant

[a.k.a. Ringan or Ninian], and Thibaut, the patron

saint of the cuckolds, with the dubious Saint

Quenet, Saint Foutin, and imaginary ones (G 16

in the 1535 edition and G 17 in the 1542 edition

in which only Mamye has been maintained).

Saint Andouille (the penis) and Saint Foutin (cf.

Old French foutre “to fuck”; but also a possible

intentional distortion of Saint Pothin of Lyon’s

name) are both mentioned here as a pleasant al-

lusion to the giant mentule (“john-thomas,” phal-

lus) of Gargantua. Additionally called vit

(“prick”), the Gargantua’s appendix also tran-

spires in the Saint Vit (�Guy) of the 1535 edi-

tion. Saint Quenet seems to be a diminutive form

of con (“cunt”). Saint Guodegrin (maybe from

Saint Chrodegand, bishop of Metz) is a reversed

pun on grand godet (“great drinking cup” [G 16

in the 1535 edition]). The female Saint Mamye

(m’amye [“my friend”] or ma mie [“my half”])

is an inviting “Saint Girl Friend,” while the fe-

Saints, Real 219

male Saint Nytouche (“don’t touch it”) is a kind

of prudish “Saint Hands-Off” (G 27). Born from

the bursting bellies of women who overate nefles

(“medlars”), Saint Pansard or Saint Fatpaunch

(from panes, meaning “big belly”) is a facetious

saint who personifies the Big Belly of the Car-

nival giant, who was already mentioned by Gau-

thier of Coincy in 1218. The king Saint Panigon

(Italian panicone, “Guzzler”) represents the

model of a debonair monarch who reigns on a

sort of land of Cokaigne, the rich and fertile Is-

land of Cheli (4BK 10). Other imaginary or du-

bious saints partake in the realms of bawdiness

and scatology, such as Saint Balleran (ms. BNF,

5BK 32 bis) or Saint Bal(l)etrou (Saint Shake-

hole): “ ‘A turd for them, a turd!’ exclaims Pan-

urge. ‘My codpiece alone will sweep all the men

down, and Saint Balletrou that lies inside will

brush out all the women’ ” (P 26; see also “the

feast of St Baletrou” [5BK 15], replaced by Saint

Hurluburlu in the 1564 edition). Saint Adauras

(Lat. Ad auras “to the winds”) is the imaginary

patron saint of those who are hanged (P 17).

Saint Fredon (Saint Quaver) and Saint Fredonne

(Saint Quaveress) are imaginary characters in-

vented by Panurge (OC 5BK 27; GP 5B 28) in

response to Friar Fredon’s monosyllabic replies

(a fredon is a type of quaver, or musical trill).

Rabelais by no means invented all of these imag-

inary saints. Several came from the medieval tra-

dition, and we know that he borrowed Saint Al-

ipentin (“By St Alipentin, what a sweet scent!

Devil take this turnip-eater, how he stinks!” [P

6]), as well as the burlesque martyrdom of Saint

Guodegrin, who was “killed by cooked apples,”

from the Vie de Saint Christophe, a Mystery Play

by Maistre Chevalet (Grenoble, 1530). However,

he used them with a playful efficiency that al-

ways added new layers of semantic complexity

to his texts.

Readings: Donald Attwater with Catherine Rachel

John, The Penguin Dictionary of Saints (London: Pen-

guin Books, 1995); Henri Clouzot, “Saint Guodegrin,”

RER 8 (1910): 361–63; H. Folet, “Rabelais et les

saints preposes aux maladies,” RER 4 (1906): 199–

216; Claude Gaignebet, A plus haut sens. L’esoterisme

spirituel et charnel de Rabelais, 2 vols. (Paris: Mai-

sonneuve et Larose, 1986); Raymond Mauny, “Rabe-

lais et les Saints,” BAARD 12.8 (1969): 239–43;

Jacques E. Merceron, Dictionnaire des saints imagi-

naires et facetieux (Paris: Seuil, 2002).

Jacques E. Merceron

SAINTS, REAL Men or women who, after

death, receive an official, public, and universal

cult (cult of dulia) from the Catholic Church and

from the faithful, based on the very high degree

of Christian perfection they attained during their

lives. Rabelais’s writings and ideas on saints and

the cult of saints are set within the context of a

polemical debate that, despite its undoubtedly

very contemporary overtones, is also deeply

rooted in the medieval tradition. Already, high

prelates such as Cardinal Bessarion had pru-

dently raised doubts about the reliability of some

of the old Saints’ Lives. Erasmus (1466?–1536)

had made some ironic comments about “super-

stitious” devotions toward saints in his In Praise

of Folly (1511) (chap. 50–51). However, it is

during Rabelais’s own time that reformists be-

came increasingly more determined and daring

in their denunciation of the cult of saints and its

use by the papacy. For example, Martin Luther

(1483–1546) ridiculed the astronomical number

of canonizations. Furthermore, the debate about

saints took an even sharper focus towards 1534–

35: in October 1534, the Affair of the Placards

started when “bills and libels defaming God and

His saints” (Belleforest), as well as the holy

mass, were posted on the French king’s own

apartments during the night. Later, the Sorbonne

theologians sharply criticized the position of Me-

lanchthon, a Lutheran philosopher (1497–1560),

when he was solicited, on June 23, 1535, by

King Francis I, to debate the Paris University

theologians. Among other things, Melanchthon

denounced the excesses and abuses brought

about by the belief in the healing power of saints.

This represented, he contended, a way for greedy

priests to profiteer (the fourth of the twelve ar-

ticles addressed to the king). It is against this

backdrop of heightened tensions between the

Sorbonne on the one hand, and the evangelists

and the reformists on the other hand, that the

publication of Gargantua took place, probably

in 1535. John Calvin (1509–64), for his part,

later warned in his Treatise on Relics (Traite des

Reliques [1543]) that the veneration of relics,

even when they were authentic, “rarely goes

220 Saints, Real

without superstition” and can even border on

idolatry. Reformists Pierre Viret (1511–71), in

his Treatise on True and False Religion (Traicte

de la Vraye et Fausse Religion [1560]) and Henri

Estienne (1531–98) in his Apology for Herodotus

(Apologie pour Herodote [chap. 38, 1566]), de-

bunked idolatry and superstition, focusing partic-

ularly on imaginary saints possessing supposed

healing powers.

When considering Rabelais’s position in this

debate, it is worth mentioning from the onset that

in his works the humanist almost never speaks

about the saints themselves. On the other hand,

he repeatedly comes back to the subject of the

official cult of saints as promoted by the

Church’s hierarchy, as well as the subject of pop-

ular devotions and rituals. Saint Paul, a rallying

figure for the evangelists, is one of the few saints

presented in a positive narrative context. Aside

from that, Rabelais uses the hagiographic mate-

rial on two distinct levels: a rhetorical and “po-

etic” level and an ideological level. The first

level essentially concerns verbal nimbleness and

playfulness. Rabelais spices up the discourse of

his characters through a multitude of brief utter-

ances that aim to reproduce the flavor of the oral

language of the time: invocations to the saints

(“By St Fiacre of Brie” [P 11]; “By St Thibault,

he said, you speak the truth” [P 13]), swearing

(“By St Anthony’s belly” [P 11]; “By St Ar-

nauld’s head” [3BK 42]), curses and maledic-

tions (“May St Anthony’s fire [ergotism] burn

the bum-gut of the goldsmith” [G 13]), familiar

and facetious expressions such as the one in

which a monk or prelate of the Antonians’ Order

is nicknamed commandeur jambonnier de sainct

Antoine, an allusion to their real and emblematic

pigs (“a Master-mendicant of the Order of St An-

thony” [G 17]).

Rabelais seems to derive an almost inebriating

pleasure from hurling his burlesque litanies (G

16 in the 1535 edition; G 27). One of his favorite

comic patterns consists of setting up zany, in-

congruous unions between the realm of saint-

hood and other areas such as wine, sex, and sca-

tology. For example, the pun on service divin—

service du vin (divine service—wine service [G

27]) runs through many hagiographical occur-

rences, such as in the genealogical juxtaposition

of pardoners carrying relics and wine harvesters

carrying grape baskets (G 1). In the mouth of

Rabelais’s characters, saints and wines have a cu-

rious tendency to mix and swirl around: “By St

Quenet’s guts, let’s talk of drink” (G 5), “by St

James’ belly, what shall we drink?” (G 27). Balls

and farts also pair nicely with sacred figures:

“Friar Screwball trussed himself up to the bal-

locks, and lifted the said petitioner Dodin on to

his back, like a pretty little St Christopher” (3BK

23); “By the burden of St Christopher, I’d as

soon undertake to get a fart out of a dead don-

key” (3BK 36).

On the ideological level, it should be noted

that far from denouncing the saints, Rabelais

mainly takes aim at their official cult and at the

popular and superstitious devotions that are fos-

tered by the Sorbonne’s caphards (“hypocrites”)

and by other members of the Catholic hierarchy.

Rabelais also lashes out against the mendicant

friars, those “peddlers of rogatons [relics]” who,

being skilled at enticing more gapers at a cross-

road than “a good preacher of the Gospels,” are

nonetheless not worth more than those quacks

that perform on a stage (G 17). He also scoffs at

people who insist on resorting to saints for curing

illnesses or even for special protection. Garga-

melle, for example, despite being in the throes

of childbirth declares, “I much prefer to listen to

some excerpts from the Scriptures and I feel

much better for it than listening to the Life of St

Margaret or some other pack of lies” (G 5 in the

1535 edition; removed from G 6 in the 1542 edi-

tion). As an evangelist and a humanist physician,

Rabelais, as well as Paracelsus (1493–1541),

never tires of attacking the notion common

among ordinary people that if a saint is angered

by the neglect of his or her cult, or for any other

reason, the saint may resort to vengeance and

exercise a harmful influence on people’s daily

lives (harvests, human and cattle illnesses, etc.).

Such a conception was already seen in some of

Gregory of Tours’ Miracles of Saint Martin and

in some narratives of Jacobus of Voragina’s

Golden Legend.

Rabelais also launches a frontal and forceful

assault against the notion of the mal de saint (the

“saint’s illness”). According to this common

idea, which was probably cultivated by popular

preachers among the laity, the same saint that is

perceived as specializing in the cure of a partic-

Salmigondin 221

ular illness can inflict that same illness in human

beings and animals. This idea, Rabelais insists,

is blasphemous, scandalous, and steeped in pa-

ganism: “Oh,” said Grandgousier, “you poor

creatures. Do you imagine that the plague comes

from St Sebastian?” “Yes, of course,” replied

Wearybones, “our preachers assure us that it

does.” [ . . . ] Do they blaspheme God’s holy

saints in this fashion, making them seem like

devils who do men nothing but harm? [ . . . ]

There was a canting liar preaching at Cinais to

the same tune, that St Anthony sent fire into

men’s legs, and St Eutropius sent the dropsy, and

St Gildas sent madness, and St Genou the gout”

(G 45).

Rabelais is much harsher on blasphemous

preachers, who are liable to be brought before

justice, than on simple pilgrims who are char-

acterized as “poor and simple people.” Rabelais

immediately offers them an alternative to their

superstitious practices. Rejecting pilgrimages as

nothing but “otiose and useless trips,” Rabelais,

speaking through Grandgousier’s voice, replies

to the pilgrims, “Live as the good apostle St. Paul

directs you. If you do so you’ll have the protec-

tion (la garde) of God, of the angels and of the

saints with you, and no plague or evil will bring

you harm” (G 45; cf. also 4BK 46). In contrast

to the protection of saints for those living a truly

evangelical life, he is forceful in his denunciation

of a religion that is based more on superstitious

fear (and greed) than on true Christian caritas or

charity.

Luckily for the reader, Rabelais’s discourse on

saints often takes a more burlesque form. For ex-

ample, he speaks of the saints de glace, the “frost

saints” (generally Saints Mark, Eutropius, Philip,

and George) who, according to the peasants,

threaten the vine-shoots from the end of April to

mid-May. He attributes to a certain Tinteville,

bishop of Auxerre, an amazing project of calen-

dar reform. “So he came to the conclusion that

the aforementioned saints were St Hailers, St

Freezers, and St Spoilers of the vine-buds.

Therefore he decided to transfer their feasts into

the winter, between Christmas and Typhany”

(3BK 33). The bishop then intends to replace

them in their original winter slots by shoot-

warming saints from the July–August “dog-days”

period!

Many other practices related to saints receive

brief mentions in Rabelais’s works, often in hu-

morous or satirical contexts: oaths on the parish

saints (G 17) and relics (“by the backbone of St

Fiacre of Brie” [3BK 47]; “By St Rigomer’s

arm” [4BK 39]); invocations and vows addressed

to saints in case of mortal danger (to Barbara,

George, and the imaginary Nytouche! [G 27]; to

Michael and Nicholas [4BK 19]); mock fighting

plays of saints against dragons (Clement of Metz

against the Graouli monster [4BK 59]); chil-

dren’s games (“Saint Cosma, I come to worship

you” and “At Saint Founded” [G 22]), etc. Fi-

nally, according to Claude Gaignebet, although

not directly mentioned, three saints play an un-

derlying role in Rabelais’s works. These three

have a role in defining his heroes by sharing the

same birth dates: Saint Blasius, patron saint of

the throat, breath, and winds, on February 3,

birth date of Gargantua (G 4); Saint James the

Greater and Saint Christopher, dog-days saints

celebrated on July 25, birth date of the “thirsty”

Pantagruel (G 2, Fanfreluches, vv. 73–74; P 2).

Readings: Donald Attwater and Catherine Rachel

John, The Penguin Dictionary of Saints (London: Pen-

guin Books, 1995); Henri Clouzot, “Saint Guodegrin,”

RER 8 (1910): 361–63; H. Folet, “Rabelais et les

saints preposes aux maladies,” RER 4 (1906): 199–

216; Claude Gaignebet, A plus haut sens. L’esoterisme

spirituel et charnel de Rabelais, 2 vols. (Paris: Mai-

sonneuve et Larose, 1986); Raymond Mauny, “Rabe-

lais et les saints,” BAARD 2.8 (1969): 239–43; Jacques

E. Merceron, Dictionnaire des saints imaginaires et

facetieux (Paris: Seuil, 2002).

Jacques E. Merceron

SALMIGONDIN Name of the Castellany (the

extent of land and jurisdiction appertaining to a

castle) that is given first to Alcofrybas (P 32)

and, after the anagrammatic narrator’s disap-

pearance, to Panurge (3BK 2), which has gen-

erally been interpreted as an oversight by Rabe-

lais. Considering that “salmigondis” is a type of

ragout, a hotchpotch of leftover meats, one could

also see a design behind the property’s reassign-

ment. Reminiscent of the farce and the coq-a-

l’ane, such an eclectic mixture fits well in the

overall culinary poetics of the first two books.

The elimination of the farceur Alcofrybas, first

warden of the evocatively named Castellany, in

222 Satin/Ouy-Dire

favor of the more serious “medical doctor Fran-

cois Rabelais” on the title page, indicates a

change in orientation, away from the realm of

farce and non sequitur to a more serious type of

satirical mixture. Putting Panurge in charge of

the “Salmigondin” underscores this change as the

trickster’s diminishing status in the Third and

Fourth Books parallels the fate of the farce. We

see the culmination of this decline in the Papi-

manes episode, where Homenaz’s farce gives

Epistemon diarrhea (4BK 51), as well as in Pan-

urge’s similar ridiculous reaction in that book’s

final scene (4BK 67).

Moreover, wasting the income from this new

property promptly leads Panurge to the Praise of

Debts (3BK 3–4), the first demonstration of his

verbal virtuosity in the Third Book and the first

one that does not meet with Pantagruel’s ap-

plause, ultimately resulting in a reversal of the

mentor/disciple relationship that had cemented

the trickster’s prominent status in Pantagruel.

The term occurs two more times in the Fourth

Book, both times in disturbing, monstrous farces:

first, personified as one of the cooks in Frere

Jean’s culinary army assembled to fight the chit-

terlings (4BK 40), and second, as one of the of-

ferings to Messere Gaster (4BK 59). A symbol

of the generating principle of the first two books’

farce, directed by Alcofrybas and Panurge, the

“salmigondin” thus illustrates the shift in Rabe-

lais’s strategy by turning it into the target of a

more literary satire.

Readings: Francois Dumont, “La donation du Sal-

migondin, Tiers livre II,” Francois Rabelais. Ouvrage

publie pour le quatrieme centenaire de sa mort, 1553–

1953 (Geneva: Droz, 1953); Bernd Renner, “From

Fearsome to Fearful: Panurge’s Satirical Waning,”

Fear and Its Representation in the Middle Ages and

the Renaissance, ed. A. Scott and C. Kosso, ASMAR

6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002).

Bernd Renner

SATIN/OUY-DIRE (HEARSAY) The epi-

sode of Satin (GP 5BK 30–31; OC 29–30) con-

sists of two connected descriptive parts: the first

one is consecrated to the zoological marvels of

the Land of Satin, and the second to the court of

Ouy-Dire (Hearsay) and his followers. The name

“Satin” indicates that the animals of the island

are not real but in fact are a trompe l’oeil because

they are made of satin tapestry. The narrative

point of view is markedly that of the narrator,

who opens most sentences with the phrase

“There I saw.” The narrator begins by giving a

lengthy description of the elephants he sees, full

of learned allusions to Pliny the Elder, Juba,

Pausanias, Philostratos, and Aelian, but without

naming Cardanus’s De subtilitate (1550), which

probably is Rabelais’s main source here. He con-

tinues to describe a rhinoceros, using unspecified,

traditional information from natural history, but

intermingled with a curious allusion to a rhino

(or a rhino’s picture?) shown to him by Hans

Cleberg, a German merchant living in Lyon. The

following description of a flock of thirty-two (!)

unicorns is a grotesque parody of traditional de-

scriptions of this fabulous animal, known as rare,

solitary, and ferocious—very different from the

description of the gentle animal found in the Me-

damothi episode of the Fourth Book. Dozens of

other animals are listed and sometimes described

in more detail. Most of the longer descriptions

(eales, cucrocutes, manticores) are direct trans-

lations from Pliny’s Natural History, while oth-

ers come from popular, carnivalesque sources:

“There I saw Mid-lent on horseback,” “There I

saw two-backed beasts.” In the land of Satin, the

Pantagruelians only find deceiving irrealities,

contenting the eye but not the stomach. Paul J.

Smith, therefore, sees in the name of Satin an

allusion to the Latin adverb satin, which is a

usual contraction for satisne meaning “really” or

“sufficiently” in interrogative sentences.

The second part of the episode portrays the

ruler of the place: the monstrous allegorical fig-

ure of Ouy-Dire or Hearsay. Among his follow-

ers are mentioned great names from ancient and

modern times (Herodotus, Pliny, Marco Polo,

Jacques Cartier, etc.). For most critics since

Verdun-L. Saulnier (Jean Ceard, Daniel Mena-

ger, Paul J. Smith, etc.), the episode deals with

problems of ecphrasis and items such as scien-

tific (ir)reliability and usefulness, direct obser-

vation versus the practice of borrowing from au-

thoritative authors. Some critics argue that the

episode’s style and content are very different

from those of Rabelais’s other books, and

therefore they (Glauser, and recently, Fontaine)

tend to consider this episode as inauthentic.

Readings: Alfred Glauser, Le faux Rabelais ou De

Satire 223

l’inauthenticite du Cinquieme livre (Paris: Nizet,

1975); Verdun-L. Saulnier, Rabelais II. Rabelais dans

son enquete. Etude sur le Quart et le Cinquieme livre

(Paris: SEDES, 1982); the articles of Jean Ceard, Paul

J. Smith, Daniel Menager, and Marie Madeleine Fon-

taine, in Le cinquiesme livre, ed. Franco Giacone (Ge-

neva: Droz, 2001).

Paul J. Smith

SATIRE (SATYRE) As even its spelling sug-

gests, the origin and definition of this genre

caused some confusion in the sixteenth century.

The “printer’s discourse” of the second edition

of the Satyre menippee (1594) summarizes the

diverse influences that had combined throughout

the century to accentuate the inherent hybrid

character of a genre predestined to absorb vari-

ous influences: (1) A poem criticizing someone’s

public or private vices in the tradition of Luci-

lius, Horace, Juvenal, or Persius. (2) Any piece

of writing stuffed with diverse ingredients and

arguments, composed in a mixture of prose and

verse, comparable to a side dish of salted ox-

tongues. Varro referred to it as farce. (3) The

Greek satyr-play featured lewd, half-naked satyrs

on stage, pretending to be semi-gods taking the

liberty to attack and insult anybody in rather ex-

plicit fashion.

All these disparate traditions blend into Ra-

belais’s treatment of satire, with an apparent shift

from the culinary heritage of Roman satura and

the explicit vulgarity of the satyr-play dominant

in Pantagruel to more elaborate and subtle ver-

sions of satire prevalent in the Third and Fourth

Books. The importance of the farce in the first

chronicle (1532) seems largely attributable to the

prominent status of Panurge and Alcofrybas,

who determine the text’s overall orientation. Al-

cofrybas’s vigorous yet comic assertions of truth-

fulness (“to any point short of the stake”) accom-

panying his fantastic tales and Panurge’s verbal

virtuosity and public humiliation of his hypo-

critical and pseudo-erudite victims are all ex-

amples of a rather crude brand of farcical satire,

whose targets are easily discernible.

The Third Book witnesses a more intellectual

brand of satire, which demands the reader’s col-

laboration to unfold its full impact and is

therefore susceptible to a plurality of meanings.

This development had seen its beginnings in

Gargantua, particularly in the prologue and the

Enigmatic Riddle (59), two chapters that deal

explicitly with questions of interpretation. The

disappearance of Alcofrybas and the diminishing

status of Panurge serve as main indicators of the

shifting satirical orientation of the Third and

Fourth Books. Starting with the paradoxical

Praise of Debts (3BK 3–4), a common feature

of Menippean satire, the verbal fireworks that

accompanied Panurge’s earlier farcical exploits

no longer meet with Pantagruel’s approval and

thus become ineffective. In the Fourth Book,

even Frere Jean and Epistemon criticize their

companion’s behavior on multiple occasions, for

example in the episodes of the tempest (18–24),

the whale (33–34), and the Andouilles or Chit-

terlings (35–43). Pantagruel even fails twice to

recognize Panurge. The farce is thus discredited

together with its main representative, who, in the

final scene of the Fourth Book, finds himself in

the same embarrassing position as his former vic-

tims: covered in excrement after a rather harm-

less trick played by Frere Jean. This scene con-

firms Epistemon’s earlier complaint, in the

Papimanes episode, where Homenaz’s farce

gives him diarrhea (51).

The new brand of satire that dominates the

Third and Fourth Books generally follows the

Menippean tradition and revolves around ambi-

guity and the plurality of interpretative possibil-

ities. The Third Book’s central question of Pan-

urge’s marital future illustrates this endeavor.

Panurge desperately looks for an authority that

would provide a reassuring definitive answer to

an inherently ambivalent question. He blindly ig-

nores his personal responsibility to know him-

self, which is spelled out several times, especially

in the Her Trippa episode (25), where Panurge’s

severe criticism of the astrologer’s lack of self-

knowledge actually amounts to involuntary self-

satirization. Throughout the text, we see more lo-

calized illustrations of the text’s elaborate satire:

for example, in the intellectual banquet at the

center of the Third Book (29–36) which not only

replaces the previous predominantly culinary

banquets, but also—thanks to Pantagruel’s ex-

emplary interpretation (35)—provides a model

solution to Trouillogan’s paradoxical advice

and, by extension, Panurge’s dilemma. Similarly,

the Judge Bridoye episode (39–43) hints at var-

224 Scatology

ious, mutually exclusive satirical interpretations,

ranging from the judge’s contemptible use of

dice and his useless accumulation of scholastic

erudition to the criticism of the highest courts

and the entire judicial system. These factors are

even reflected in Pantagruel’s speech in defense

of Bridoye. Moreover, the final verdict remains

a mystery, owing to the giant’s premature de-

parture, which, in true Menippean fashion, puts

the burden of interpretation on the reader.

We see similar strategies in the Fourth Book,

widely considered Rabelais’s most satirical text.

The radically Menippean tendencies are some-

what toned down in favor of a more straightfor-

ward religious satire, particularly in the “Papi-

manes” episode (48–54), strongly influenced by

the 1551 Gallican crisis. Homenaz, like Panurge,

involuntarily satirizes himself, the Decretals, and

his entire cult, thus challenging orthodox author-

ity and dogmatism in true Menippean fashion. It

is therefore not primarily erudition that charac-

terizes the satire but rather the techniques of

composition as well as hermeneutic implications.

Throughout the Fourth Book, the interpretation

of most episodes proves problematic. The farces

of Dindenault and Basche as well as the en-

counters with disturbing monsters, enigmatic

“thawing words,” and strange peoples all call on

the readers’ input, which might be the Menip-

pean satire’s main contribution to the overall ori-

entation of the text, echoing and fulfilling the de-

mands of the most controversially discussed

chapter: the prologue to Gargantua.

Readings: W. Scott Blanchard, Scholars’ Bedlam.

Menippean Satire in the Renaissance (Lewisburg, PA:

Bucknell University Press, 1995); Pascal Debailly, “Le

rire satirique,” BHR 56 (1994): 695–717; Gerard De-

faux, “Rabelais, le Quart Livre et la crise gallicane de

1551: Satire et allegorie,” Rabelais agonistes: du rieur

au prophete (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Bernhard Fabian,

ed., SATVRA. Ein Kompendium moderner Studien zur

Satire (Hildesheim, NY, 1975); John W. Jolliffe, “Sa-

tyre: Satura: SATYROOS,” BHR 18 (1956): 84–95;

Marie T. Jones-Davies, ed., La satire au temps de la

Renaissance (Paris: Touzot, 1986); Claude A. Mayer,

Lucien de Samosate et la Renaissance francaise (Ge-

neva: Slatkine, 1984); Bernd Renner, “Du coq-a-l’ane

a la menippeenne: le melange comme expression lit-

teraire de la satire rabelaisienne” Ph.D diss. Princeton

University, 2000.

Bernd Renner

SCATOLOGY The study of excrement. If Ra-

belais enjoys an enduring popular reputation, it

has most often been attributed to the happy fic-

tion of Maıtre Francois as a “beuveur tresillustre”

(illustrious drunkard), or a “goutteux trespre-

cieux” (beloved victim of gout), and the like. The

Rabelaisian narrator lavishes these epithets on

his intended readers and incarnates them in the

chronicles’ heroes and villains, but early on they

indelibly colored the portrait of the author him-

self. The epicurean, lucianic, juvenalian Rabelais

and the inhabitants of Utopia and France eat as

copiously as they drink, and expel, whenever and

wherever possible, even more abundantly. More-

over, they perform all of these too-human func-

tions using the most unblushing, frank vocabu-

lary then current, setting a benchmark for all

subsequent Western authors from Jonathan Swift

to Antonine Maillet. It could be argued that Ra-

belais invented the excretory or scatological arts

in literature—that is, the representation of piss-

ing, shitting, farting, sneezing, spitting, belching,

and vomiting—or at least brought them to their

fullest flowering.

The most celebrated passages concern the

child Gargantua’s prescient use of the experi-

mental method to arrive at the perfect “torchecul”

or asswipe (G 13); the diluvian showers of piss

used to play a prank on rubbernecking Parisians

(G 17), to humiliate a Haughty Parisian Lady

(P 22), and to massacre invading Dipsodes (P

28); Pantagruel’s and Panurge’s emetic effect

on many whom they encounter (P 6, 19), as well

as their own intestinal difficulties, whether con-

stipation (P 33) or the reverse (4BK 18); and the

windy isle of Ruach, whose inhabitants “do not

shit, do not piss, do not spit” but who, in fair

exchange, “fizzle, fart, and belch copiously”

(4BK 43). Interestingly enough, Rabelais’s atten-

tion to the scatological and to its efficacy as a

literary device seems to have waned in the dec-

ade or so between the publication of Pantagruel

(1532) and Gargantua (1534) and the Tiers livre

(1546), as the declining number of scatological

episodes—though not necessarily references—

Scatology 225

suggests. Because of the comparatively greater

popularity of the first two books in the chroni-

cles, however, the impression of Rabelais as a

joyous and unabashed scatolog persists.

In his marked enthusiasm for “bathroom hu-

mor” he was actually not, it must be noted, ex-

ceptional among contemporaries, nor did he rep-

resent a departure from many of his predecessors.

The scabrous and the scatological were the stock-

in-trade of the vernacular medieval fabliaux, fa-

cetiæ, farce, and mock-epic traditions, so

adroitly exploited by Panurge and Frere Jean

and so evidently appreciated by the indulgent gi-

ant princes they serve. Marguerite de Na-

varre’s relatively circumspect Heptameron,

composed in the 1540s but published posthu-

mously in 1558, includes more than one such in-

cident, as do Noel du Fail’s Propos rustiques

(1547) and Bonaventure Des Periers’s Nouvel-

les recreations et joyeux devis (1558). All of

them are indebted to such earlier collections fea-

turing excremental episodes as the fifteenth-

century Cent nouvelles nouvelles and Giovanni

Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century Decameron.

Moreover, the tradition, already irrevocably as-

sociated with the adjective “Rabelaisian” by cen-

tury’s end, continued unabated in the works of

Etienne Tabourot des Accord, whose Escraignes

dijonnoises (1588) are made up almost exclu-

sively of scatological anecdotes, Cholieres,

Theophile, Sorel, Scarron, and others.

Rhetorical mud- or shit-slinging also has a dis-

tinguished history in the polemical battles of the

Reform years, among Catholics and Protestants

of all stripes, in both Latin and the ascendant

vernaculars. Fixated on the defining ingestive act

that was the mass, even before Rabelais’s death

in 1553, anti-Catholic critics delighted in follow-

ing the Host through the digestive tract, reaching

perhaps an apogee in Conrad Badius’s Christian

Satires of Papal Cuisine (Satyres chrestiennes de

la cuisine papale [1560]). In this vein, both Gar-

gantua (G 30) and Panurge (3BK 25) repeat

versions of the anticlerical soubriquet “maschem-

erde” (shit-eaters) in reference to clerics who

hear confession; and both Gargantua and the

Fourth Book incorporate strategic send-ups of

these doctrinal food-fights in the episodes of the

bakers, or “Fouaciers de Lerne” (G 26�), as well

as adventures on the islands of Tapinois (4BK

29–32), Farouche (4BK 35–42) and of the Gas-

trolatres (4BK 57–62). However much scatolog-

ical discourse was part and parcel of the “gros

rire gras” (big belly laugh) of Gallic humor, it

proved of service—and here Rabelais was as

much beneficiary as innovator—in debating is-

sues of higher importance via recourse to lowly

metaphors.

In discussing what many critics take to be the

more serious “design” of Rabelais’s chronicles,

his predilection for the excremental has often

proved problematic. Mikhail Bakhtin’s highly

influential reading of the carnivalesque in Ra-

belais, which reached European and Western ac-

ademic readers in translation in the late 1960s

and early 1970s, offered one solution to that

problem—or, rather, attempted to show the prob-

lem itself to be something of an historical fiction.

Bakhtin’s work even foregrounded the impor-

tance of the “material bodily lower stratum” in

efforts to interpret the author and his era. Bakh-

tin’s “discovery,” as Samuel Kinser encapsulates

it, is that “it is no longer possible . . . to treat Ra-

belais’s ‘low,’ popular aspects as incidental decor

to an essentially elite masterpiece” (254). Con-

sequently, and in fitting concert with the rise of

microhistory and cultural studies, interest in both

restating and reinstating the scatological in Ra-

belais, together with the obscene and other fea-

tures long thought inconvenient and incidental,

has grown. The resulting labors include such

painstaking fieldwork as Claude Gaignebet’s ex-

haustive studies of scatological folklore and its

survival, as well as Edwin Duval’s and others’

reintegration of the “high matter” of Rabelais’s

evangelical humanism into the “low manner” of

its expression, and vice versa. The scatological,

what was perhaps most popular (or regrettable)

about Rabelais’s works, has come to be taken

most seriously.


World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Boston: MIT Press,



1991); Claude Gaignebet, A plus haut sens.

L’esoterisme spirituel et charnel de Rabelais (Paris:

Maisonneuve et Larose, 1986); Samuel Kinser, Ra-

belais’s Carnival (Berkeley: University of California

226 Scholasticism

Press, 1990); Jeff Persels, “ ‘Straightened in the Bow-

els,’ or Concerning the Rabelaisian Trope of Defeca-

tion,” ER 31 (1996): 101–12.

Jeff Persels

SCHOLASTICISM “The learning of the

schools,” a mode of thought and discourse that

developed in the twelfth century from the recov-

ery of logical works of Aristotle previously un-

known in the West. Adopted by all universities

in Europe, it revolutionized the world of learning

in medieval Europe by investigating things by

their genus, species, differences, properties, and

accidents, and by promoting exhaustive discourse

about them using the nine categories of quantity,

quality, relation, position, place, time, state, ac-

tion, and affections. Applied to the various sci-

ences, its dialectical method of discerning the

true from the false opened up new avenues of

learning and therefore seemed to make the world

less mysterious and chaotic. From its beginning,

however, scholars who preferred the classical ap-

proaches of the trivium and quadrivium opposed

scholasticism. They argued that the structured

methodology of scholasticism precluded the use

of eloquent language and that it substituted “con-

fusing perplexities of causes” for study of the

Bible, its patristic commentators, and classical

authors. Despite such opposition, scholasticism

swept all before it for the next four centuries. In

theology, the scholastics categorized and system-

atized the whole gamut of doctrinal and ethical

questions. Its best and most famous expression

was the Summa theologiae (1266–73) of the Do-

minican theologian Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274),

in which all issues concerning God, creation, and

morality were exhaustively investigated through

logical discourse. A great artist like Dante used

the scholastic method in his political treatise

Monarchia. The brilliant Franciscan Duns Scotus

invested his works with a new vocabulary that

humanists like Erasmus would call barbarous.

In the later Middle Ages, scholasticism in-

creasingly stressed method and structure over

content. Some scholastics such as Jean Gerson

warned that theology was becoming a purely

speculative science that neglected its practical

application to the Christian life. The rival schools

of Realism and Nominalism, each with sub-

schools proposing nuanced variations, quarreled

among themselves. In the print era, they pro-

duced for university classrooms numerous works

of logic, many of them variations of the Summule

of Peter of Spain (Pope John XXI, d. 1277). Edi-

tions of and commentators on the theological

works of Aquinas, William of Ockham, Duns

Scotus, Henry of Ghent, and other scholastics

followed its strict methodology.

Not unaware of inherent problems and possi-

ble abuses in their science, scholastics neverthe-

less defended the value of speculative theology

in the curriculum, while always submitting it to

the ultimate authority of Scripture and tradition.

Contrary to common belief, their quarrel was not

with the humanists’ promotion of the studia hu-

manitatis but with their campaign to eliminate

scholasticism from the curriculum. Against the

humanists’ charges that scholasticism neglected

the Bible and was unable to discover or correct

errors in its text, the scholastics countered that

divine revelation was fixed and closed, and that

the humanists’ philological tampering with the

Vulgate text in use for so many centuries was

not merely dangerous but also blasphemous. This

issue alone accounted for most of the incidents

of censure and criticism exchanged between

scholastics and humanists.

The scholastics believed that their systematic

method of resolving questions according to di-

alectical principles was unquestionably more cer-

tain and valuable in an age of controversy than

the admittedly more elegant but unsystematic ap-

proaches of the Fathers of the Church, whom the

humanists sought to promote and substitute for

medieval scholastic theologians. For both hu-

manists and scholastics, therefore, there was too

much at stake to compromise, and each side

painted the other in caricature. Humanists lam-

pooned scholastics as ignorant buffoons. Rabe-

lais satirized them throughout his works, notably

ascribing ridiculous titles to their books (see P 7,

the fictive catalogue of the library at the Abbey

of Saint-Victor in Paris). Scholastics like the

Parisian theologians Noel Beda and Pierre Cous-

turier equated humanists with blasphemers and

heretics. Ironically, a balance between scholasti-

cism and humanism was best achieved by a man

of unexceptional intellectual standing but of solid

piety and organizational skills: Ignatius Loyola,

whose legacy in Jesuit schools later helped

Science 227

spread both scholastic theology and humanist

teaching methods throughout Europe.

Readings: Marcia Colish, Medieval Foundations of

the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400–1400 (New

Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); James K.

Farge, “Erasmus, the University of Paris, and the Pro-

fession of Theology,” Erasmus of Rotterdam Yearbook

Nineteen (1999): 18–46; Erika Rummel, The

Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and

Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1996); Richard Southern, Scholastic Humanism

and the Unification of Europe 1: Foundations (Oxford

and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995).

James K. Farge

SCIENCE Concluding “Of Cripples” (Essays

3.9), Michel de Montaigne tells how Aesop, on

sale with two other slaves, responded to their

buyers’ inquiries. Hearing his companions extol

how much each “knew this and that,” Aesop

avowed he knew nothing. Montaigne deduces

that the pride of those who attribute to man the

capacity to attain “every thing” causes others to

opine that he is capable of “no thing.” Some have

extreme faith in science where others have the

same in ignorance. True science is related to

doubt, and hence is borne by conscience. The

essay sums up a view that Rabelais had exposed

in Pantagruel (8) where Gargantua writes to his

son, “science without conscience is the ruin of

the soul.” At stake is a method of inquiry whose

user recognizes that truth may be an undiscov-

ered error.

The same letter contains a kernel of Rabelais’s

sense of science. Gargantua has just praised the

young century in which new light shines. Pan-

tagruel is emerging from the recent darkness in

which his father had been raised. “The time was

still in shadows, and still felt the infelicity and

calamity of the Goths, who had led all good lit-

erature to destruction” (P 8). Now that the art of

printing has restored and circulated ancient lan-

guages everyone can become learned. “I see brig-

ands, butchers, adventurers, stable boys of today

wiser than the men of knowledge and preachers

of my time” (P 8). Inspired by what he sees at

the sunset of his own life, he tells his son how

best to acquire wisdom.

The program equates science with cosmogra-

phy, the study of the workings of the whole of

nature. The student must learn languages fault-

lessly: Greek (via Plato), Latin (via Cicero), He-

brew, Chaldaic, and Arabic, respectively. He

must pursue the liberal arts, avoiding astrology

by embracing astronomy, and also immerse him-

self in civil law. He must dedicate himself with

curiosity to nature, “so that there be neither sea,

river, nor spring whose fish you do not know; all

the birds of the air, all the trees, shrubs and sap-

lings of the forests, all the grasses of the earth,

all the metals hidden in the belly of the abysses,

the gems of the entire Orient and the South: may

nothing be unknown to you” (132). He must then

“carefully revisit the works of the Greeks, of

Arab and Latin writers without condemning Tal-

mudists and kabbalists; and, by frequent anato-

mies, acquire a perfect knowledge of the other

world, which is man” (132–133). Every day he

must “visit”—attend, read, dialogue with—the

New Testament and the Letters of the Apostles

in Greek, and then the Old Testament in Hebrew.

“Somme, que je voye un abysme de science”

(“In sum, may I see an abyss of science” [P 8]).

The statement is an illumination, an epiphany,

and a vision: science is an abyss, and an abyss

is science. Implied is that science cannot be re-

duced to an object of itself. It remains a relation

with the unknown, a bottomless chasm in which

we plunge to find new knowledge and from

which we return and enter into over and again.

Science is gained from the fruits of travel, curi-

osity, and application. It is equated with move-

ment into and out of things, and with continual

creation and self-perpetuation. After his epiph-

any, he tells his son: “for now that you are be-

coming a man and getting big, you will need to

emerge from (issir de) this tranquility and repose

of study, and learn chivalry and arms in order to

defend my homeland and to keep secure our

friends in their affairs” (133). He needs to im-

plement everything he gained from living and

learning with his teachers. Here issir is reiterated

for a third time in the letter, ostensibly to indicate

how emergence endows science with a politics

of action.

Human nature, intones Gargantua, perpetuates

itself through the extended family. The Pauline

truth is confirmed in a genealogy that ties

Grandgousier to Gargantua, and Gargantua to

Pantagruel: “What is done by our lineage (issue

228 Shakespeare

de nous) in legitimate marriage” (P 8) alleviates

the burden of original sin. In his long life, Gar-

gantua has delighted in reading Greek masters

(Plutarch, Plato, Pausanias, and Atheneus) “while

waiting for the hour when it will please God by

creation to call and order me to exit from (issir

de) this earth” (P 8). Issir de signals movement

in different directions, beginning from what is

here and now (ici) and leading to what issues

from licit generation from human congress.

Whether in life or death, the human subject

passes into and out of a world under the guidance

of God. When Pantagruel is asked to leave the

tranquil space of study to defend his family and

country, he emerges from the formative matrix

of an abysme de science to protect the right to

procreate and to study and learn of the world.

Emergence leads to action taken in time of emer-

gency.

If science is an abyssal relation with the un-

known, and if it results with an emergence of

humans into and out of the world, it also figures

as a mirror that reflects the good actions of hu-

man agents. Gargantua treats his passing not as

a finality of death, but as a journey “from one

place to another” insofar as he remains a visible

image in and of his son and his doings. In the

knowledge and virtue he invests in Pantagruel,

Gargantua will leave his son “as a mirror repre-

senting the person of me your father” (P 8). The

biblical metaphor is aimed in the direction of

cosmography, a science that will be seen doubly

reflected in the terrestrial sphere and in “the other

world,” that of the human body revealed by anat-

omy.

Spelled out in this crucial chapter is a credo

of science affecting what follows in the other

books. Pantagruel suddenly embraces the un-

known (Panurge) after he had recently shunned

it (in the person of the Ecolier Limousin, or

Limousin student). In Gargantua the eponymous

prince, learning how not to waste an hour of the

day, is portrayed going “into secret places” to do

his daily excretions while his preceptor reads

scripture to him, “exposing . . . difficult and ob-

scure points” (G 23). He endlessly “issues” from

closed spaces into the light of day. He burrows

into rocky crannies and plunges into “abysses

and chasms” (G 23), and he visits the “grassy

places,” the trees and plants of his environs, with

the aid of scientific books. In the Third Book the

colloquists hear and debate the knowledge of an

array of specialists, while in the Fourth Book

they visit the islands comprising an archipelago

of a deformed nature, a world seen as a scatter

of singularities.

In each book the relation with science changes.

Confidence and joy about the world in Panta-

gruel give way to mobilization of knowledge in

Gargantua, while the Third Book affiliates sci-

ence with doubt, and the Fourth Book calls into

question any cohering or redemptive trait asso-

ciated with learning. Great writers are defined by

their sum of different, often conflicting, paradox-

ical creations that call one another into question.

Such, too, is the relation of Rabelais to science

in its passage from a wondrous abyss to action,

doubt, and fear. In all the books science, as Mon-

taigne later confirms, is a companion of con-

science.

Readings: James Bono, The Word of God and the

Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Mod-

ern Science and Medicine (Madison, WI: University

of Wisconsin Press, 1995); John Henry, The Scientific

Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (New

York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); P. L. Jacob, Science

and Literature in the Middle Ages, and at the Period

of the Renaissance (New York: D. Appleton and Co.,

1878); David Lindberg and Robert Westman, Reap-

praisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1990).

Tom Conley

SHAKESPEARE Evidence that Shakespeare

read Rabelais is suggestive, if uncertain. The pe-

dantic Holofernes in Loves Labors Lost seems

related to Pantagruel’s tutor Holoferne, but

when in Two Gentlemen of Verona (1.1.136–

138) and The Tempest (1.1.25–29) a man terrified

of drowning is told he will live to be hanged

(1.1.30–36; 4BK 24), Shakespeare may be dram-

atizing the proverb “he that is born to be hanged

shall never be drowned.” Similarly, although the

phrase “the beast with two backs” (Othello

1.1.117) appears in Rabelais, it is not his inven-

tion. An excited Rosalind in As You Like It asks

a flurry of questions and demands the answer “in

one word” (3.2.327–339). When her friend re-

plies, “You must borrow me Gargantua’s mouth

first,” memories of Rabelais would suit the play’s

Sibyl 229

tendency toward Menippean satire, but the first

audience would probably have recalled the hero

of a lost French chapbook translated circa 1567.

Stronger evidence that Shakespeare enjoyed Ra-

belais’s sexual humor and bravura rhetoric is a

speech by the clown in All’s Well that Ends Well

(1.3.37–45) that resembles Frere Jean’s consol-

ing celebration of cuckoldry (3BK 28; the play’s

cynical Parolles, moreover, is a nastier Pan-

urge).

These and other parallels cannot be true inter-

textual gestures, for few theatergoers can have

read Rabelais before he was partially translated

in 1653. More significant may be the two writers’

ambivalent appreciation of Erasmian folly, car-

nival reversal or festivity, and the utility to wise

kingship of morally problematic and foxy cun-

ning. Shakespeare invents compelling fools for

Twelfth Knight and Lear, but his best Panurge is

Falstaff, cowardly thief and seedy gentleman

trickster with a liking for paradox, taverns, and

satirical performance: a panourgos. Unlike Pan-

urge, he will be disowned by his master in 2

Henry IV with a chilling Lenten rebuke (“I know

thee not, old man,” 5.5.45) that hints at the price

a purified warlike regality pays when uninflected

by mercurial folly. Pantagruel, Shakespeare may

have reflected, loved Panurge all his life—but in

Utopia, not England.



1933); Margaret Jones-Davies, “Paroles intertextuel-

les: Lecture intertextuelle de Parolles,” Collection As-

traea 1 (Actes du colloque All’s Well That Ends Well

[Montpellier, 1985]): 65–80; Cathleen T. McLoughlin,

Shakespeare, Rabelais, and the Comical-Historical

(New York: Peter Lang, 2000); Anne Lake Prescott,

Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England (New Ha-

ven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); B. J. Sokol,

“Holofernes in Rabelais and Shakespeare and some

manuscript verses of Thomas Harriot,” ER 25 (1991):

131–35.

Anne Lake Prescott

SIBYL (3BK 16–18) In the Third Book, chap-

ters 16–18, Panurge follows Pantagruel’s ad-

vice and consults the Sibyl of Panzoult to learn

whether he is fated to be cuckolded if he marries.

The episode fits into a series of consultations that

explore the limits of human knowledge and of

Panurge’s folly. Among the many resonances of

the episode are the place of prophecy in a Chris-

tian view of history, and fifteenth- and sixteenth-

century educated men’s distrust of women who

pretended to knowledge. Panurge and Episte-

mon, who visit the Sibyl together, display the

range of male reactions to such women: Panurge

ranges between ignorant, mystified fear and base-

less optimism, while Epistemon moves from in-

itial misogynistic dismissal of the idea that

women can teach anything worth knowing to an

apparent conviction that the Sibyl of Panzoult is

a worthy companion of Virgil’s Cumaean Sibyl,

who led Aeneas to the Underworld and showed

him his posterity (Aeneid, book 6). The modern

French woman’s abject poverty and decrepitude

and Epistemon’s reactions to her suggest a vari-

ety of lore about witches (old, ugly, solitary,

poor) that circulated among both learned and il-

literate contemporaries of Rabelais. In fact, ex-

cept for her age, the Sibyl of Panzoult more re-

sembles contemporary stereotypes about witches

than she does classical or early Christian descrip-

tions of the Sibyls.

The Sibyls, usually described as ten in num-

ber, were ancient pagan prophetesses who, ac-

cording to certain Fathers of the Church (partic-

ularly Lactantius, a.d. c. 300), were divinely

inspired to predict the coming of Christ and de-

scribe his true divinity. The Erythraean Sibyl was

supposed to have predicted that the earth would

“sweat” at the birth of Christ, a detail Rabelais

copies in describing conditions at the birth of

Pantagruel (P 2). Christological prophecies of the

various Sibyls were recorded in apocryphal

Greek Sibylline Oracles between the second cen-

tury b.c. and the seventh century a.d., and were

polemically invoked by Jewish and Christian the-

ologians. Early Christian writers, notably Lactan-

tius and Augustine, passed them to Latin and

even vernacular writers of the Middle Ages.

Christian infatuation with the Sibyls as prophetic

witnesses of Christ was reinvigorated in the fif-

teenth century, when Neoplatonic philosophers

such as Marsilio Ficino sought confirmation of

Christian truth among supposed pre-Christian pa-

gan writers such as Hermes Trismegistos (the

thrice-great). (In reality, the texts were produced

in the early centuries a.d., and show the influ-

ence of the new religion—hence their seemingly

230 Sileni

marvelous and prophetic confirmation of its doc-

trines.) In Rabelais’s era, Hermes and the ten

Sibyls appeared together in the inlaid pavement

of Siena cathedral (1480s) as prophets of the In-

carnation.

Readings: Peter Dronke, Hermes and the Sibyls:

Continuations and Creations (Inaugural Lecture De-

livered March 9, 1990) (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1990); D. P. Walker, The Ancient The-

ology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the

Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (London: Duck-

worth, 1972).

Walter Stephens

SILENI (G PROL) These grotesquely carved

boxes containing precious substances, immedi-

ately compared to Socrates’s ludicrous appear-

ance and divine wisdom, form the opening meta-

phor of the prologue to Gargantua. Although the

image initially appears to provide a set of instruc-

tions for interpretation, the exhortation to seek

a plus hault sens or higher meaning is compli-

cated by the evocation of problems of authorial

intention and imposition of meanings foreign to

the spirit of the work. In referring to Homer and

the Ovide moralise (a fourteenth-century trans-

lation of the Metamorphoses which presented

Ovid’s tales of seduction as Christian allegories),

the prologue affirms that allegories need not be

deliberately inscribed to be legitimate, but cau-

tions against excessive manipulation of a text in

order to extract a redemptive meaning (see Al-

legory). This questioning of medieval allegoret-

ical practices in favor of individual contempla-

tion (with its inherent risk of misinterpretation)

was closely linked to the intellectual upheaval of

the Reformation. The prologue to Gargantua

emblematizes this massive shift in interpretive

practices.

Moreover, the Sileni image enacts the pro-

logue’s status as the product of reading and in-

terpretation. Rabelais juxtaposes close transla-

tions from Erasmus’s adage Sileni Alcibiadis

with the reinscription of elements of Plato’s Sym-

posium absent from Erasmus, notably a comic

tone and references to drunkenness, thereby as-

serting the work’s humanist credentials and sub-

tly conferring prestige on the prologue’s narra-

tive stance. The tension between the grotesque

and the sublime, and the use of the prologue to

problematize rather than clarify authorial inten-

tion, make the prologue to Gargantua one of the

most frequently annotated passages in Rabelais.

Critical disagreement remains as to whether the

prologue points toward a clear, accessible mean-

ing (whether Christian humanist or comic) or a

plural text that resists unifying interpretations.

Readings: Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Michel Jeanneret, Le

defi des signes (Orleans: Paradigme, 1994); Raymond

La Charite, “Rabelais and the Silenic Text: The Pro-

logue to Gargantua,” Rabelais’s Incomparable Book,

ed. La Charite (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986).

Jennifer Monahan

SKEPTICISM Critical comment on skepti-

cism in the literature of the Renaissance in gen-

eral, and certainly on its influence on the works

of Rabelais, has been bedeviled by a semantic

confusion that should be addressed at the outset

of any such discussion. The trouble lies in the

fact that the word skeptic in English and other

modern European languages has two related but

entirely separate, almost opposing, meanings.

These, according to Webster’s dictionary, are (1)

an adherent of the classical philosophy called

skepticism, and (2) an incredulous person. The

best way to avoid mixing the meanings up is to

capitalize the first of them. The Skeptic believes

that all mental pain and trouble result from

adopting erroneous dogmatic opinion, and that

since all knowledge is based on sensory percep-

tion and all the senses are demonstrably fallible,

there is no certain knowledge. Thus we will

reach ataraxia—a state free from trouble—if we

suspend judgment on all contentious issues. In

order to get through life’s contingencies as agree-

ably as possible, however, the Skeptic will fol-

low undogmatically the general rules of societal

behavior. In order to eradicate dogmatic opinion

in himself and others, he will “oppose appear-

ances to appearances,” using his reason to antir-

ationalistic ends, arguing that snow is black and

that fire freezes, if he finds it expedient to do so.

The skeptic with a small s, on the other hand,

has a visceral hatred of being deceived, and in

order to avoid such displeasure he refuses to ac-

cept assertions he finds unlikely before submit-

ting them to logical and above all sensory veri-

Social Class 231

fication—the opposite, in many ways, of

Skeptical procedure.

Rabelais, toward the end of his life and espe-

cially just after his death, had the reputation of

being a skeptical mocker cast in the mold of Lu-

cian, who was certainly one of his inspirations.

Certain recent critics have taken a directly con-

trary line, seeing him as a “full Christian skep-

tic,” meaning that he used the techniques of

Skeptical argument to further the cause of his

Christianity. In other words, he is said to be a

fideist, fideism being defined as the conviction

that religious truth is accessible only to faith and

not to demonstration by reason, which it is

therefore advantageous to undermine. Neither of

these judgments would appear to be tenable.

Although everyone admits that Rabelais was a

ferocious mocker of certain aspects of popular

superstition, and above all of what he considered

to be unjustifiable religious conservatism, few

critics would now accept the notion that Rabelais

was a fundamentally incredulous man: a died-in-

the-wool skeptic. Such an attitude is hard to rec-

oncile with Christianity in general, for the be-

liever must ring-fence his articles of faith from

the corrosion of his doubt. But there are further,

quite unassailable, grounds for denying the title

of skeptic to this author. His Christianity is un-

orthodox to the extent that it is strongly tinged

with Neoplatonic magic, which suffuses the plot

of the Third Book and is a major element in the

Fourth, to the extent that there—uniquely—he

lays aside his authorial persona to tell his readers

of the effect on him of the prodigies he had wit-

nessed at the deathbed of his patron Guillaume

du Bellay: of the heavenly signs and portents

preceding the demise and of the prophecies ut-

tered by the dying man, all of which the author

has seen come to pass.

Even less evidence exists to support the thesis

that he was a Christian Skeptic in the sense of

being a fideist. It is true that fideism was in the

contemporary air, that Giovanni Pico della Mi-

randola had exploited the newly available Sex-

tus Empiricus to fideist ends and thus stimulated

interest in ancient Skepticism, and that Henry

Cornelius Agrippa was doing much the same

around the time when Rabelais was writing.

However, the only time Skepticism of any sort

appears in Rabelais, either directly or indirectly,

is in chapters 35 and 36 of the Third Book, in

which the perplexed Panurge consults the sup-

posed wisdom of Trouillogan, the Skeptical phi-

losopher, who gives him the most infuriatingly

slippery series of answers imaginable. If the an-

swers are considered coolly, making allowances

for their cryptic language, they do indeed convey

a sensible if prosaic message, easily decoded by

Pantagruel, although quite opaque to the in-

creasingly maddened Panurge. Rabelais gives the

final word on the matter to the very authoritative

figure of Gargantua, who expresses in no un-

certain terms his disapproval of philosophers

who do not talk straight. It is pretty safe to as-

sume that the old giant’s opinion mirrors that of

his creator.

Readings: Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief

in the Sixteenth Century. The Religion of Rabelais

(1942; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1982); Max Gauna, Upwellings: First Expressions of

Unbelief in the Printed Literature of the French Ren-

aissance (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Uni-

versity Press, 1992); Richard Popkin, History of Scep-

ticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2003).

Max Gauna

SOCIAL CLASS The notion of social class

evolved dramatically in France during the time

spanned by the four books that Rabelais is

known to have written (1532–52). French society

still respected the medieval divisions of the three

estates. A person’s activities therefore continued

to define social status. Military service and lib-

eral spending, for example, helped distinguish

the noble from the commoners who relied on

manual labor to survive. Bloodlines reinforced

these group identities. As new professions, relig-

ious tensions, and financial difficulties devel-

oped, however, class became increasingly

aligned with the wealth that could buy nobility

and the education that offered access to power

and to an elite culture.

The critic Mikhail Bakhtin read Rabelais’s

fiction as a celebration of social change and used

it to illustrate his theory of the carnivalesque.

More recently, however, many critics have found

that Renaissance notions of popular culture

and the evolution of Rabelais’s four books sug-

gest a much more socially conservative author.

232 Sophists

The first book, Pantagruel, contains the most nu-

merous elements of a distinctly popular culture.

As peasant revolts and religious violence chal-

lenged traditional social structure, Rabelais’s lit-

erary world focused more and more on the edu-

cated, nonnoble group to which he belonged,

eliminating references to the urban poor and por-

traying increasingly resigned peasants and au-

thoritative monarchs. In the Third and Fourth

Books, suspicion of the “peuple” also translates

into a discrediting and emasculation of Panurge,

the agent of social disorder from the first book.

All four books, nonetheless, provide examples

of a tension between Rabelais’s understanding of

social class as alternately indicative of the moral

strength or decay of a community. On the one

hand, Rabelais promotes an evangelical leveling

of society where all play a role in God’s design

and are endowed at once with human dignity and

plagued by moral fallibility. This vision inspires

two recurrent themes: communal reciprocity and

the denunciation of class pretension. Throughout

his works, Rabelais depicts enlightened mon-

archs cognizant of their duty to their subjects (G

28). Among the band of merry Pantagruelistes,

Prince Pantagruel relies as much on the help of

his followers as they benefit from his leadership

(P 25, 4BK 19–22). Rabelais’s well-intentioned

Christian kings also reject the self-imposed slav-

ery of those they vanquish in favor of a mutual

respect (P 28, G 50) and consider their servants

their good friends or “bons amys” (4BK 3). The

social markers of wealth and birth do not deter-

mine the constitution of good Pantagruelistes,

but rather an attitude toward life.

Those whom Rabelais’s books target with the

most malice tend to be privileged members of

either a growing professional class or of the

lesser nobility. Panurge (whose own social ori-

gins are deliberately ambiguous) revels in hu-

miliating the wealthy and the powerful. His tricks

focus on the symbolic trappings of privilege that

ostentatiously express a sense of superiority (lux-

urious clothing, for example [P 16]). Panurge’s

strategies of social resentment reappear in Epis-

temon’s description of Hell (P 30) where the

privileged in this world are humiliated by menial

jobs in the next while the formerly disempow-

ered assume positions of power.

In the utopian Abbey of Theleme, even showy

apparel is redeemed since everyone wears the

same fabrics and colors (G 56). But the equity

in Theleme applies only to artistocrats. This elite

utopia suggests the degree to which Rabelais

does in fact maintain and even reinforce a rigid

social hierarchy in his books. In many ways, the

evangelical royalty of Rabelais’s fiction continue

to represent a traditional aristocracy. Military

honor and largesse take priority over all other

earthly pursuits. A credulous and violent major-

ity seem to require their leadership. The forces

of good prevail thanks to military discipline and

respect for authority (G 47). Commoners who es-

cape personification as superstitious fools (4BK

prol., 46) know their place in society and resist

any temptation to improve it. Even Panurge re-

mains a faithful servant to Pantagruel and seeks

to bolster his own social status by beating pages

(P 16).

Perhaps the most serious threat to communal

harmony proves to be the women in Rabelais’s

fiction. With the exception of Theleme, they are

excluded from the activities and virtues that

serve to validate men’s social status and can only

demote men (P 31, 4BK 10).



Press, 1968); Gerard Defaux, “De Pantagruel au Tiers

livre: Panurge et le pouvoir,” ER 113 (1976): 163–80;

Richard M. Berrong, Every Man for Himself (Sara-

toga, CA: ANMA Libri & Co., 1985); and Richard M.

Berrong, Rabelais and Bakhtin: Popular Culture in

Gargantua and Pantagruel (Lincoln: University of

Nebraska Press, 1986).

Emily E. Thompson

SOPHISTS A Greek term implying an appear-

ance of wisdom. The Sophists were fifth-century

b.c. philosophers criticized by Socrates for their

practical applications of philosophy. Plato’s dia-

logue of the same name pitted Socrates against

Gorgias. Considered derogatory since antiquity,

the term sophist implies a feigning of wisdom

through contentious rhetoric and self-interested

relativism. Rabelais uses it to denigrate a scho-

lastic emphasis on a method of argumentation (in

moda et figura, pro et contra) that subordinates

truth to form. In Gargantua, he parodies the

scholastics through his mockery of the young

princes’ sophistic tutors who strive not for com-

Sorbonne 233

prehension but rote memorization. Their methods

of education not only prevent their pupil from

progressing, but also corrupt his common sense

and confidence. Another self-proclaimed sophist

in the same text, Janotus de Bragmardo, further

illustrates sophism with his pointless arguments,

redundant conclusions, and privileging of selfish

corporeal concerns. Rabelais juxtaposes these

weaknesses with the discipline, lucidity, and sim-

ple eloquence of Gargantua’s humanist tutor,

Ponocrates.

In Pantagruel, Rabelais targets the theologians

of the Sorbonne with the term sophist, simply

replacing “Sobonnicoles” with “sophiste” in later

editions. Identification of diegetic sophists, how-

ever, proves less transparent in Pantagruel than

in Gargantua. Many of the characters display so-

phistic traits while simultaneously proclaiming

their disdain for the same. Pantagruel’s father

urges him to embrace an education that, though

avowedly humanist, recalls the exaggerated

claims of the sophists. Pantagruel himself chal-

lenges a series of theologians, lawyers, and doc-

tors to public debates with no apparent goal be-

yond personal glory and humiliation of his

adversaries.

Only when Panurge enters the narrative does

Pantagruel disentangle himself from the sophistic

temptations, leaving Panurge to carry on the con-

testatory public debates in his stead. Gerard De-

faux argues that Panurge becomes the foil, lib-

erating Pantagruel from the taint of sophistry.

While Pantagruel seeks the truth and acquires the

reputation of a selfless sage, Panurge vainglori-

ously argues through sheer bluff. He displays the

same strategies of intimidation and intentional

ambiguity in verbal as well as nonverbal debates.

During an example of the nonverbal, Thaumaste

and Panurge abandon words in order to escape

the decried sophism, but retain its public postur-

ing and empty bravado. In the Third Book, Ra-

belais makes fewer direct references to sophists

but provides a series of rhetorical duels between

Panurge and Pantagruel and various prophets and

experts. Although Panurge most closely demon-

strates sophistic argumentation with his falsely

confident, contestatory interpretations and his

self-interested relativism, Pantagruel also argues

speciously. The jurist Bridoye uses sophistic ar-

guments in his self-defense, but his caricature

targets a specific legal jargon and moral relativity

as much as it does a philosophical approach.

In the Fourth Book, Rabelais seems much less

concerned with denouncing sophists, retaining

only the most general traits of his satirical por-

traits from the earlier books and scarcely using

the term at all.

Readings: G. J. Brault, “ ‘Ung abysme de science’:

On the Interpretation of Gargantua’s letter to Panta-

gruel,” BHR 28 (1966): 615–32; Gerard Defaux, Pan-

tagruel et les sophistes: Contribution a l’histoire de

l’humanisme chretien au XVIeme siecle (The Hague:

Martinus Nijhoff, 1973); Edwin M. Duval, “The Me-

dieval Curriculum, the Scholastic University, and Gar-

gantua’s Program of Studies (Pantagruel, 8),” Rabe-

lais’s Incomparable Book (Lexington, KY: French

Forum, 1986); Michael A. Screech, “The meaning of

Thaumaste,” BHR 22 (1960): 62–72.

Emily E. Thompson

SORBONNE The Faculty of Theology of the

University of Paris which Rabelais satirizes in

his works. The Sorbonne considered itself the

theological authority of France. Its conservative

members, partisans of scholasticism and Aris-

totelian theology, quickly declared themselves

enemies of the new religious influences. To the

Sorbonne, the twin threats of the evangelism

movement and Martin Luther’s popular writ-

ings were not only ruinous for French souls, but

they menaced its own stranglehold on Church

doctrine. In fact, like most of his contemporaries

in the early sixteenth century, the Syndic of the

Sorbonne Noel Beda made no distinction be-

tween Lutheran ideas and evangelical thought.

Indeed, he considered them the same threat,

claiming before Parlement in 1526 that Luther’s

errors entered France mainly through the texts of

Lefevre d’Etaples, Erasmus, and Berquin

(Erasmus’s translator). One can easily imagine

the ire of Sorbonne theologians as they watched

their monopoly on biblical interpretation be frit-

tered away by access to the Bible in translation.

Evangelicals such as Lefevre d’Etaples were pro-

viding those very translations and asserting the

Gospel over liturgy and tradition.

Rabelais, too, believed in a living Word over

doctrinal debates. In the eyes of the Sorbonne,

this was the first count against him. But Rabelais

also knew his Greek, which encouraged him to

234 Sporades

side with Hebrew and Greek scholars who pro-

posed exegetical corrections to the Latin Bible,

the Vulgate. Now on the warpath, the Sorbonne

responded by throwing their venerable authority

behind efforts to examine books, censure them,

and pursue their authors with the aid of Parle-

ment. They were not always successful, particu-

larly in the case of Rabelais who had powerful

protectors in the du Bellays, also enemies of the

Sorbonne. Nevertheless, the Sorbonne put Ra-

belais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel on their first

list of prohibited books in 1542, the Third Book

in 1546–47 and the Fourth Book in 1552.

The Magistri nostri of the Faculty of Theol-

ogy, with their protracted academic disputes and

vain hair-splitting, began to look outmoded. It is

against this very stodginess that Rabelais

launched his attacks on the Sorbonne in Gargan-

tua and Pantagruel. In the 1533–34 editions of

Pantagruel, Rabelais came out with raised fists

against the Sorbonne and in the process cham-

pioned the cause of the du Bellays (whose iren-

ism did not sit well with the Magistri nostri). The

Sorbonne’s most prominent figure, Noel Beda,

bears the bulk of Rabelais’s joking. Hunch-

backed and lame, Beda had been depicted as a

monster by Parisian students. On the Library of

Saint-Victor’s shelves, Beda is the author of

some ridiculous titles such as On the Excellence

of Tripe (he had quite a belly) and Concerning

Hunchbacks and the Deformed: In Defence of

our Masters of the Sorbonne (P 7). Pantagruel

even kept Sorbonne theologians arguing for six

weeks with his defense of 9,764 theses (P 10)!

The juridical disputatio between Baisecul and

Humevesne (P 10–12) and the theological dis-

pute between Thaumaste and Panurge (P 17–

18) mock scholastic forms and academic vanity.

The penchant for sterile bickering is reinforced

by Rabelais’s changing of “theologian” to “soph-

ist” for later editions of his first two books.

But it was Beda’s special brand of intransi-

gence that made him an easy target for Rabelais.

Indeed, some critics have likened the seethings

and ragings of Picrochole to the Sorbonne’s hot-

tempered Syndic. To be sure, Beda groomed his

horrible reputation among humanists when he led

the charge against Erasmus and repeatedly re-

quested the interdiction of printing altogether.

He had even tried to prevent lectures on religious

texts in Francis I’s showcase for the new learn-

ing, the College des Lecteurs Royaux. In Rabe-

lais’s eyes, such a stance made him an obscur-

antist theologian and enemy of letters.

Grandgousier’s praise for his son’s ingenious

arsewipe is to compare him to a “docteur en Sor-

bonne” (G 12), a misguided ambition well borne

out by the lax education he received from former

Sorbonne doctors Holofernes and Bride. When

sent to Paris, Gargantua fared no better. The

young prankster borrowed the bells of Notre

Dame, provoking an uproar. To get the bells

back, the academic blowhard par excellence Jan-

otus de Bragmardo pronounced a harangue that

Rabelais used to parody Sorbonne jargon (G 16–

19). Afterward, Bragmardo instigates an episode

of infighting that shows the doctors as a vain and

vicious group. In the debacle of the bells of Notre

Dame, critics see a satire of the contemporary

episode where the Sorbonne incited the people

against Gerard Roussel’s evangelical sermons

during Lent in 1533–34. Beda himself was exiled

over the affair. Rabelais called the theologians of

Paris “Sophistes, Sorbillans, Sorbonagres, Sor-

bonigenes, Sorbonicoles, Sorboniformes, Sor-

bonisecques, Niborcisans, Borsonisans, and San-

iborsans.” Whatever you call them, they take it

on the chin in Rabelais’s work as caricatures of

the old, lifeless learning.

Readings: Gerard Defaux, “Rabelais et les cloches

de Notre-Dame,” ER 9 (1971): 1–28; Gerard Defaux,

Rabelais et les sophistes. Contribution a l’histoire de

l’humanisme chretien au XVIe siecle (The Hague: Ni-

jhoff, 1973); Francis Higman, Censorship and the Sor-

bonne (Geneva: Droz, 1979); Jean Larmat, “Picrochole

est-il Noel Beda?” ER 8 (1969): 13–25; Raymond

Mauny, “Rabelais et la Sorbonne,” BAARD 3.6 (1977):

252–61.

Amy C. Graves

SPORADES When Pantagruel and his com-

panions reach the Isle of the Macreons, after the

terrible storm at sea, their host, the venerable

Macrobe, informs them that his island is situated

in the Sporades—not the Sporades of the Car-

pathian Sea but rather the Sporades of the Ocean,

formerly subject to the ruler of Great Britain

(4BK 26). This imaginary archipelago, unknown

to ancient or modern science, has aroused a mild

degree of curiosity among the commentators,

Symbolic System 235

who usually refer us to Plutarch, as if he were

some kind of geographer. The whole episode of

the Macreons is widely recognized to derive

from Plutarch’s Pythian dialogue On the Decline

of Oracles, and so we might reasonably expect

to find some reference to the Sporades some-

where in the dialogue. In fact, after Philip the

historian recounts the death of Pan, the gram-

marian Demetrius of Tarsa confirms that several

islands scattered around Great Britain are named

after demons and heroes. The word he uses to

describe the situation of these islands in relation

to the main island is sporadas (419 E), or dis-

persed.

Later in the dialogue, Plutarch’s son Lamprias

admits that he has often spoken on the topic of

oracles, but his religious duties always inter-

rupted and dispersed his conversations, resulting

in “logous . . . sporadas” (431 D), or scattered

speech. What Rabelais has done, here as else-

where, is to take a common attribute and convert

it into a place name. In this case, the topicalized

attribute is not a human flaw or transgression as

in Tapinois (dissimulation), Farouche (ferocity),

Chaneph (hypocrisy), or Ganabin (theft), but

rather the defining characteristic of a narrative

that disperses or disseminates these places in spo-

radic fashion. In this sense, the episode of the

Macreons or Sporadic Islanders is a paradigmatic

example of Rabelais’s penchant for toponymic

narrative, where the place name is an epitome of

the story. A follower of Cratylus might suggest

that the Sporades is the proper name for Rabe-

lais’s work.

Readings: Jean Fleury, Rabelais et ses oeuvres, vol.

2 (Paris: Didier, 1877); Frank Lestringant, Ecrire le

monde a la Renaissance (Caen: Paradigme, 1993).

Eric MacPhail

STORM See Tempest

SYMBOLIC SYSTEM People have been at-

tributing symbolic values to the personae, ob-

jects and events of the Chronicles since they

were published. While individual attributions

seem to hit the mark (Picrochole as Charles V,

for example), none of the systems proposed has

proved sustainable against the contradictions that

the text throws up; they are generally simplistic,

one-to-one equivalences that take no account of

the complexities of the Rabelaisian text, and

scholars have in the main abandoned this ap-

proach. Some, for example, Terence Cave, con-

tend that Rabelais’s symbols are largely ludic,

lacking in continuity and subversive in nature;

others, including Mikhail Bakhtin and Claude

Gaignebet, seek the significance of the Chroni-

cles in folklore traditions, and still others, such

as Michael Screech, explore the historical context

of the Reform. However, a complex symbolic

system underlies the Chronicles, defined by de-

liberate contradictions that guide and drive un-

derstanding. Rabelais says as much in describing

the sustantificque mouelle, the substantial mar-

row of his work (G prol), and in insisting on the

need to see in each of the prologues to BK3 and

BK4.

The symbols are most often covert, revealed

in some cases by cryptic clues that confirm the

symbolic identification, sometimes not identified

at all. The only real authentication of the system

and of the individual symbols that compose it is

by the coherence they contribute to the structure

of the works.

The purposes of this covert system are de-

scribed in the rules of allegory; among them one

stands out as obvious. There were ideas in mid-

sixteenth-century France that were dangerous to

hold, and Rabelais is a heretic “up to but not

including the fire.” So although the import of the

symbols and, consequently, the substance of the

text would be readily comprehensible to the

sixteenth-century humanist, the gens de bien or

“good people,” it was intended to be impenetra-

ble to those outside the inner circle. The Chron-

icles are deliberately evasive.

The symbolic system has its roots in Panta-

gruel but is systematically applied in Gargantua

and grows to fullness in BK3, BK4, and BK5.

There are very many symbols, but five principal

ones with their associated trailers are the wine

(and the vines, grapes, bread); the giants and

their retinue; the water; copulation, which un-

derlies the marriage theme and therefore the last

three books; and the resurrected Panurge of

BK3, BK4, and BK5.

The wine is covered in another article, as are

the giants, but a supplement is required to fit the

giants into Rabelais’s system. They appeared on

earth as the direct consequence of the first the-

236 Symbolic System

ological dispute—that between Cain and Abel

which led to the murder of Abel (see P 1 and

Gen. 4:1–16)—and stand in a tutelary role be-

tween humanity and the divine, like Hurtaly sit-

ting on the Ark during the Flood and steering it

to safety with his feet. In this function, Rabelais’s

giants are symbols of the Church, the body of

Christ on earth. There has been a new church for

every generation since Cain (see the Genealogy

in P 1 to which G 1 refers); of the three giants

of the Chronicles, Grandgousier represents the

medieval church and Gargantua the church mil-

itant of the Reform. Pantagruel, in an extension

of the function described for him in P by Edwin

Duval, becomes from BK3 the Church of the

Troubles, protecting the human traveler, Panurge,

on a journey to discover his destiny and, like

Tobias, to resolve the problem of a marriage.

Important in understanding their significance

is the recognition of the Ficinian hierarchy in

which they stand. Figured as the “great Pan,”

Christ is symbolically replicated in the earthly

ideal of Pantagruel, who is in turn replicated on

a lower level in Panurge, his imperfect copy. Be-

low Panurge are a number of the unredeemed at

the level of matter, including the Chicanous, the

Engastrimythes, and the Gastrolatres. A parallel

series may be found in Gargantua where an im-

plicit Christ is replicated in his ideal body on

earth, the giant Church (Grandgousier and Gar-

gantua) which contains in its retinue imperfect

ecclesiastics: Janotus and the monks of Seuilly

on the one hand and Frere Jean on the other.

The shortcomings (αµαρτ�α) of the first group

are mortal, whereas those of Frere Jean are ve-

nial, the criterion being whether or not the per-

sona does the will of God (�εληµα). Frere Jean

with all his faults does, but the other monks and

Janotus do not. The Platonic level of materia is

represented by Tripet (i.e., Guts) and the Pichro-

cholian rabble. The parallel strands of this chain

of being, the personae, the wine/blood, the Logos

and Marriage, come together at the return from

the Divine Bottle (see Bacbuc) to form the con-

clusion of the Chronicles.

The book Gargantua is in a number of ways

parallel to the “Great Allegory” (BK3, BK4,

BK5) and different from it. One of the more ob-

vious differences is the horse symbol. In Gar-

gantua horses are doctrines; the play horses of

the juvenile Church (G 12) are part of the prep-

aration for the battle of Armageddon that will be

fought when Gargantua reaches adulthood, as

also are the equestrian maneuvers of Gargantua

23. Gymnaste in his battle (35) with Tripet

(materialism) demonstrates his mastery on horse-

back. He is the theologian of the band. What then

is the Great Mare? It comes out of Africa, a

Hippo from Hippo—Saint Augustine. Its tail,

that is, what follows—the consequences of Au-

gustinian doctrine—flattens the allegorical Forest

of Meanings (see Allegory) around Orleans,

which harbors the theological quibblers and pests

(frelons) of that city. The horse as a symbol of

doctrine is supplanted in later books by the

woman. But note that the theologian of 3BK 30

is Hippothadee.

Another ubiquitous but generally unobtrusive

symbol marking differences between G and

BK3-5 is the water. Its birth is marked by an

insertion about drinking water into the Thau-

maste episode of Pantagruel (P 18) at some time

between the first edition (1532) and the definitive

edition (1542). It seems to represent the value of

learning in Gargantua. Frere Jean is ignorant,

waterproofed by wine; indeed, the only learning

he has is the drip on the end of his nose. The

piss, too, is associated with ignorance: first the

gawking people of Paris are drowned by Gar-

gantua’s effluvia because they do not understand

the significance of the new Church and take it

for a passing wonder (G 17), while the pilgrims

are inadvertently trapped and put at risk for the

same reasons (38), and the misguided Pichrocho-

lian army drowns when the Great Mare empties

her bladder (36). As for the pilgrims, they are

ultimately saved by their bourdons or staves,

symbolizing their faith, and finally recognize and

are recognized by the giant (38, 45).

In the Fourth Book water takes on the domi-

nant value of the letter (as opposed to the spirit),

or writing. The sea is the sea of writing of all

sorts; the product of many springs, it is undrink-

able, perilous to the pilgrim Panurge by its

storms, but also a source of wonder and adven-

ture. The image of an ocean of writings may be

Talmudic. The pure springs at which the travelers

restock their water supplies are the Scriptures.

The Miracle at Cana when the water was

changed to wine is a leitmotiv of the last three

Symbolic System 237

books and a key to the enigma of the Temple of

the Bottle.

The sex symbol is the only one of the great

symbols to be fully and explicitly identified by

Rabelais in a vitally important text for the mar-

riage theme and the nature of Panurge’s quest—

the Couillatris episode of the Fourth Book’s sec-

ond prologue. By virtue of his name—Poor Little

Prick—Couillatris is identified with the male

genitals, whereas his lost axe-head is specifically

associated by Priapus with the female genitals.

The Neoplatonic poets, particularly Maurice

Sceve, figured their beloved as an Ideal. Among

other things, Delie is an anagram of l’Idee, the

Idea. Rabelais reverses the metaphor. The idea,

thought, doctrine, belief, philosophy, becomes

woman. The conmentanom (whatsit) in its essen-

tial femininity is, in the case of the farmer’s wife

in Papefiguiere, the power of doctrine, while the

virgin Clerices in Papimania are doctrines not

yet fertilized or promulgated. The man, or the

fecunding principle, represents the mind. As Ju-

piter says to Priapus (BK4, prol 2), “Et habet tua

mentula mentem” (“Your male organ has a

mind”). The couillons or testicles represent the

generative power of the mind, an analogy sup-

ported by the contrasted blazons in the Third

Book (26, 28): Frere Jean’s generative potential

is vigorous, but Panurge’s is failing.

Couillatris, representing the ordinary human

mind, has, in the mental maelstrom of the Re-

form, lost his coignee or axe-head—his “idea” or

belief system. He is given the choice between the

tried and trusty old one and “improved” versions

of gold or silver. If he accepts the old, he is given

the rest; but if he reaches for the silver or gold,

he loses his head. He is the model for the trans-

formation undergone by the mercurial Panurge of

P who has become the pilgrim figure of the last

three books. The story is an allegory of the state

of the humanist Church in the confusions of the

mid-sixteenth century. The old religious beliefs

are being challenged and lost. The bewilderment

of the “ordinary person”—the pilgrims of G—is

taken up in Panurge’s doubts. Panurge is the

questing humanist mind in search of a system of

belief he can hold on to. Rabelais’s counsel to

those in perplexity is to accept the doctrines one

has, and then, in time, one will see new beliefs

added to the old. If the humanist reaches for new

doctrines now, he will figuratively lose his head,

that is, indulge in mad actions, as the religious

factions in the 1540s and 1550s were steadily

doing. Homenaz presents the same lesson to

Frere Jean in the Papimania episode, in a differ-

ent guise, and forms the conclusion to the Bottle

episode and the Chronicles.

The humanist dilemma is summed up in the

issue of marriage. How is the current generation

to avoid the death of its ideologies? In 4BK 26

the physetere represents a species of intellectual

and spiritual death; but it is overcome by the

fleet of the replicate Christ, Pantagruel, drawn up

in a Y formation, the symbol of the human gen-

itals. Copulation between Mind and Idea ensures

a new generation of minds and ideas. We may

compare this notion with the famous letter of

Gargantua (P 8), where physical immortality is

assured by the same means. But how may this

transmission properly take place? The old Pan-

urge was lustful for new ideas. He claimed to

have stuffed 417 Parisian women in nine days (P

15). The new Panurge has been forgiven by Pan-

tagruel, has put off his old lustful ways, sym-

bolized by his codpiece, and in 3BK consults all

the sources of wisdom available about the out-

come of a marriage. His problem is that he is

imperfect; his wife (ideology) will be imperfect,

as is the Church which will sanctify the marriage.

As a consequence, he will inevitably be “cuck-

olded, beaten, and robbed.” Lust being forbid-

den, he must choose between an imperfect mar-

riage with undesirable offspring or continence

and no posterity. His problem is resolved at the

Divine Bottle. As with Couillatris’s gold and sil-

ver axe-heads, and the consummation of the mar-

riages of Papimania’s virgins, all will be given

in time, at Panurge’s/Pantagruel’s/Christ’s return.

Readings: M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World,

trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-

sity Press, 1984); S. B. Bushell, “Rabelais and Chris-

tian Initiation: Allegorical and Typological Motifs in

the Works of Rabelais” (Ph.D. diss., University of

North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1979); Terence Cave, The

Cornucopian Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979);

Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991);

Claude Gaignebet, A plus haut sens: L’esoterisme

spirituel et charnel de Rabelais (Paris: Maisonneuve

et Larose, 1986); Fred W. Marshall, “The Allegory of

238 Syphilis

Rabelais’ Gargantua,” AJFS 24.2 (1987): 115–154;

“The Great Allegory” AJFS 26.1 (1989): 12–51; F. W.

Marshall, “Les Symboles des Allegories de Rabelais,”

BAARD 5.2 (1993): 86–102; F. W. Marshall, The Wa-

ter Symbol in Rabelais: A Study Based on the Three

Central Books (Waikato: University of Waikato,

1990); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London: Duck-

worth, 1979).

Fred W. Marshall

SYPHILIS (LA VEROLE) Deadly, sexually

transmitted disease thought to have been con-

tracted by sailors under Columbus and subse-

quently spread through Europe with the help of

mercenaries and prostitutes following various ar-

mies during the Italian campaigns (hence the

term mal de Naples) at the onset of the Renais-

sance. Over the course of thirty years, spreading

from popular classes to the highest ranks of so-

ciety, syphilis or la grosse verolle had attained

epidemic proportions by the time Rabelais began

work in Lyon. His arrival there coincided with

an important increase in the presence of syphi-

litics in hospital populations, due as much to

their need for care as to the social shunning and

marginalization to which they fell prey. As no

effective treatment was known, a lucrative mar-

ket surfaced for charlatan doctors and barber-

surgeons whose promise of cure in the form of

mercury-filled lotions caused pain and death

more intense and rapid than the sickness itself.

Initially thought to be a form of divine punish-

ment, syphilis was also blamed on women as

perceptions of uncontrolled female lust intensi-

fied with its spread.

Rabelais observed and understood both the

cause and reactions to the new sickness. The fact

that the disease was sexually transmitted only en-

couraged a tendency to see in syphilis divine

punishment for sins of luxure or lust. Fully dis-

gusted with painful and even deadly treatments

offered by unschooled, profiteering charlatans,

Rabelais began his medical career confronted

with an epidemic perceived as nothing less than

a threat to the survival of humanity. Indeed, the

very act that perpetuates life could now destroy

it. In light of the crisis brought on by syphilis,

connections between Rabelaisian textual dedica-

tions to syphilitics and promises of the books’

curative value take on particular significance. His

interest in syphilitics characterizes the totality of

his allegorical production, insofar as they are pre-

sented in each dedication as those to whom the

works are addressed—those who stand to benefit

most from the healing power he promises they

contain. Elsewhere, Rabelais borrows Church

discourse on disease, turning authoritarian rea-

soning about syphilis back on its creators, thus

effecting a critique of hypocrisy while playing

with the theory of syphilis as divine punishment

(P26, 4BK 45). When women and syphilis con-

verge in his texts, the doctor echoes a popular,

male tendency to blame women for the ailment,

while the words and actions of Panurge serve to

unveil masculine lust and rampant promiscuity as

the true causes of the illness (P9, 5BK 15). Hav-

ing endeared syphilitics to himself by inscribing

their condition as the main reason for his healing

attentions, Rabelais borrows in his allegories the

most harmful ways of thinking and talking about

syphilis to encourage the afflicted and indeed all

of us to avoid the dangerous human excesses to

which all are prone and to focus on the superi-

ority of health, longevity, and freedom from sick-

ness and pain.


cine, ER 12 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1976); Lesa

Randall, “Representations of Syphilis in Sixteenth-

Century French Literature” (Ph.D. diss., University of

Arizona, 1999).

Lesa Randall

T

TAHUREAU, JACQUES (1527–55) Jacques

Tahureau was born in 1527 to a noble family of

Le Mans; he died tragically young, immediately

after his marriage in 1555. He was known in his

lifetime mainly as the author of Petrarchan love

poetry, some hedonistic, erotic, and satirical

pieces, and some serious and rather dark poems

dedicated to Marguerite de Navarre. However,

ten years after the death of the author, his Dia-

logues As Entertaining as They Are Useful (Di-

alogues non moins profitables que facetieux)

were published. They achieved immediate suc-

cess, and by 1602 they had run through an aston-

ishing seventeen editions, after which they fell

into sudden and complete oblivion. In 1870, a

Parisian bibliophile published the first modern

edition of what he considered to be an informa-

tive satire. Another long period of neglect was

followed by considerable scholarly interest, and

a modern critical edition was published in 1981.

Despite phenomenal success in its own time in

terms of published editions, the contemporary si-

lence regarding such success is even more sur-

prising, for apart from the publisher of the first

edition no one mentions it at all. The

seventeenth-century bibliophile Colletet wrote an

article about Tahureau but mentions only his po-

etry. It is at the very least possible that this

strange reluctance to mention the work has a

bearing on the modern debate about its place in

the history of ideas. In short, it is significant be-

cause it seems to attack religious belief in general

and Christianity in particular, and thus to resolve

in a positive way the critical debate that raged in

the twentieth century concerning the very possi-

bility of unbelief during the French Renaissance.

The work’s aggressive rationalism is highly re-

markable because it is based on Epicurean sen-

sory criteria; whatever is pleasurable is good and

rational, whatever is not is bad and irrational. Es-

pecially significant are the sections on magic—

which is simply laughed at—and on religion it-

self, in which Islam in particular is denigrated

for features that also apply exactly to Christian-

ity—a very early example of the technique of

indirection or assimilation, which would become

so important two centuries later. Often compared

to Rabelais for his irreverent wit and satirical

verve, Tahureau composed an epitaph commem-

orating the older writer’s passing shortly before

his own death in 1555. In that work, the young

poet emphasized Rabelais’s penchant for mock-

ing his detractors and for “stinging” those who

stung others (“piquoit les plus piquans”).

Readings: Barbara Bowen, Words and the Man in

French Renaissance Literature, French Forum Mon-

ographs 45 (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1983);

Max Gauna, Upwellings: First Expressions of Unbe-

lief in the Printed Literature of the French Renais-

sance (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University

Press, 1992); Jacques Tahureau, Les dialogues: non

moins profitables que facetieux, ed. Max Gauna, TLF

291 (Geneva: Droz, 1981); Jacques Tahureau, Poesies

completes, ed. Trevor Peach, TLF 320 (Geneva: Droz,

1984).

Max Gauna

TARANDE (4BK 2) Marvelous animal, bought

by Pantagruel during his visit to the Isle of Me-

damothi. Like all other persons, paintings, and

animals (unicorn) described in this initial epi-

sode, the tarande is on the edge of reality and

hallucinating fictionality. The animal’s descrip-

tion is a playful collage of Pliny the Elder’s

Natural History 8.34 and C. Julius Solinus’s

Polyhistor 33. Rabelais could have found both

descriptions in the much read Garden of Health

by Johannes Cuba (many editions in different

languages from 1485 on) or in one of the learned

sixteenth-century editions of Solinus. Although

240 Tartareti

mentioned by the ancients, the animal’s ontolog-

ical status remained uncertain at the time of Ra-

belais’s Fourth Book (1552). That is, in 1551,

the authoritative Swiss zoologist Conrad Gesner

hesitated about the animal’s identity; it was only

in 1554 that he identified it with the reindeer.

Belonging to the Arctic fauna, the animal con-

tributes to the Fourth Book’s local color. Because

of his mimicry, it informs the reader on the (sym-

bolic) colors of the characters’ clothes it ap-

proaches: scarlet for Pantagruel, grey for Pan-

urge. The description’s ludic use of zoological

and fictional discourses amused the modern nov-

elist Georges Perec, who in his La vie mode

d’emploi (1978, chapter 4) integrally incorpo-

rated Rabelais’s description of the tarande.

Readings: Marie Madeleine Fontaine, “Une narra-

tion biscornue: le tarande du Quart Livre,” Poetique

et narration. Melanges offerts a Guy Demerson, ed.

Francois Marotin and Jacques-Philippe Saint-Gerand

(Paris: Champion, 1993); Conrad Gesner, Historia an-

imalium. De quadrupedis viviparis (Zurich: Froschov-

erus, 1551); Conrad Gesner, Appendix historiae

quadrupedum viviparorum et oviparorum (Zurich:

Froschoverus, 1554); Paul J. Smith, “Description

et zoologie chez Rabelais,” Description-ecriture-

peinture, ed. Yvette Went-Daoust (Groningen: CRIN,

1987).

Paul J. Smith

TARTARETI (TARTARET, TATERET),

PIERRE (c. 1460–1522) Scholastic logician

and theologian born at Lausanne, Switzerland. At

the University of Paris Tartareti took his M.A. in

1484, was rector of the university in 1490, and

earned the license in theology in 1496 (doctorate

1500) at the College de Sorbonne. He became

the leading interpreter of the Franciscan scholas-

tic theologian Duns Scotus in Paris and taught

logic at the College de Reims. His books on

logic, Aristotelian ethics, and Scotist theology

were popular with many but were viewed as ster-

ile by humanists such as Lefevre d’Etaples and

reformers like Wolfgang Capito. Tartareti was

one of the busiest teachers in Paris from 1485

until his death in 1522. His membership on the

Faculty of Theology’s commission that con-

demned the writings of Johann Reuchlin (1514)

put him even more at odds with the humanists.

Rabelais showed his distaste for Tartareti by pre-

senting him as the author of a book, De modo

cacandi (How to Defecate) (P 7). His works were

reprinted several times in Venice in the seven-

teenth century.

Readings: Auctarium chartularii universitatis Par-

isiensis, 3, ed. Charles Samaran and Emile Van Moe

(Paris: Delalain, 1935); Peter Bietenholz, Basle and

France in the Sixteenth Century (Geneva: Droz; and

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971); Paris,

Bibliotheque de la Sorbonne, Registre 89; Augustin

Renaudet, Prereforme et humanisme a Paris (1494–

1517), 2nd ed. (Paris: Argences, 1953).

James K. Farge

TEMPEST, OR STORM (4BK 18–24) A

standard theme found in classical and earlier con-

temporary epics, the life-threatening storm found

in chapters 18–24 of Rabelais’s Fourth Book of-

fers distinctive narrative aspects. Whereas the

storms in stories such as Lucian’s True History

and Folengo’s Macaronees function as initia-

tions into fantastic worlds which then become the

focus of the stories, Rabelais’s storm episode is

at the center—sequentially and, arguably, the-

matically—of the narrative. It also evokes the

biblical storms seen in the Books of Matthew

(8.23–27), Mark (6.45–52), and Acts (27.9–44),

and the storm in Erasmus’s Shipwreck. With this

episode, Rabelais underscores the evangelical

motif of his text by highlighting the varying ex-

pressions of faith of the Pantagruelists when

faced with peril. The extended witty dialogue be-

tween Panurge and Frere Jean lightens the tone

of its serious topic, while the detailed description

of the endangered sails and fittings recall Rabe-

lais’s preference for technical accuracy through-

out his books.

After encountering nine ships on their way to

the Council of Chesil, a reference to the Council

of Trent, the Thalamege is buffeted by lightning

and high winds. Rather than assisting his com-

panions to secure the ship, Panurge crouches in

fear, praying to all the saints and to the Virgin

Mary. He then begs Frere Jean to hear his con-

fession, offers money to anyone who can save

him, and swears to God and various saints that

he will build chapels in their honor if they save

him. In marked contrast, Pantagruel, after

having made a short and pious plea directly to

God, steadfastly mans the rudder. At the height

Thalamege 241

of the storm, Pantagruel implores the grace of

God, while Frere Jean simultaneously berates

Panurge, resorts to drink, and assists the crew.

Pantagruel offers one last appeal to God, and

suddenly he sights land as well as a clearing of

clouds. The crew, reassured, enthusiastically ad-

justs the sails to reach Macreons Island, while

Panurge continues to cry and snivel.

Pantagruel proclaims that he values Panurge

no less for not having helped during the storm.

He declares that God should be praised for spar-

ing all aboard the Thalamege. Epistemon ex-

plains that he was just as afraid as Panurge, but

that in time of danger a person must pray to God

as well as help himself. Now out of danger, Pan-

urge boasts that as the ship’s hull is only two

inches thick, he is always that far away from

death and is not afraid. Pantagruel, Panurge, and

other crew members reveal their erudition by cit-

ing the ancients’ commentaries on death and

drowning. Eusthenes concludes the storm epi-

sode by declaring that Panurge lives up to the

Lombard expression that once danger has passed,

the saints are mocked.

This episode offers the clearest example in the

Fourth Book of the Thalamege community

working toward a common goal. It stands in stark

contrast to the Fourth Book’s insular communi-

ties which are static and incapable of change.

Thematically, it links the issue of death and man-

ners of dying broached during the visit to Tohu

and Bohu and concluded on the next island vis-

ited, the Macraeons.

Readings: L. Denoix, “Les Connaissances nau-

tiques de Rabelais,” Francois Rabelais. Ouvrage pub-

lie pour le quatrieme centenaire de sa mort 1553–

1953 (Geneva: Droz, 1953); Paul J. Smith, Voyage et

ecriture: Etude sur le Quart livre de Rabelais (Ge-

neva: Droz, 1987).

Margaret Harp

TEMPETE, PIERRE (c. 1480–1530) Princi-

pal of the College de Montaigu in Paris. Tem-

pete was born circa 1480 in the diocese of Noyon

(northern France), and died on November 3,

1530. He took the M.A. in Paris circa 1500 and

the doctorate in theology in 1516. In 1514 Noel

Beda selected Tempete to succeed him as prin-

cipal of the College de Montaigu, although Beda

continued to exercise considerable direction of

college affairs. Tempete held the post until 1527,

when he became a canon of the Cathedral of

Noyon.

In the Fourth Book 21, amidst his recital of

many dangers from “tempests,” Rabelais played

on Tempete’s name, depicting him as a tempes-

tuous pedagogue who beat the students at Mon-

taigu (Montem Acutum): “Horrida tempestas

montem turbavit acutum. Tempeste feut un grand

fouetteur d’escholiers au college de Montagu.” In

Gargantua 37, Rabelais excoriated Montaigu as

a “louse house . . . from what I know of the cruel

savagery [there]” and added: “Were I the king of

Paris, may the devil carry me off if I wouldn’t

light a fire and burn the place down—and I’d

make sure the headmaster was in it, and the

whole board of governors, too, for permitting

such inhumanity to flourish right under their

eyes” (GP 87). Historians have generally adopted

this view of Tempete propagated by Rabelais and

Erasmus (“A Fish Diet” [1526]), but the College

de Montaigu was at this time the second-largest

arts college in Paris and attracted notable stu-

dents, among them John Calvin and Ignatius

Loyola.

Readings: James K. Farge, “Tempete, Pierre,” Bi-

ographical Register of Paris Doctors of Theology,

1500–1536 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval

Studies, 1980), no. 450: 412–13; Marcel Godet, “Le

college de Montaigu,” RER 7 (1909): 297–302; Au-

gustin Renaudet, Prereforme et humanisme a Paris

(1494–1517), 2nd ed. (Paris: Argences, 1953).

James K. Farge

THALAMEGE The name of Pantagruel’s

ship in the Fourth Book. Described by the nar-

rator Alcofribas (Alcofrybas) Nasier at the out-

set of the Fourth Book, the Thalamege remains

central to the chronicle and becomes, literally,

the vehicle for all narrative development. In

Greek the name signifies a ship with individual

chambers. A ship with individual rooms conjures

up the design of Frere Jean’s Abbey of The-

leme, Rabelais’s best-known model of an ideal

community, described at the end of Gargantua

(53). The most apparent similarity between Frere

Jean’s abbaye and Pantagruel’s ship lies in their

names, Theleme and Thalamege. The word the-

leme, also of Greek origin, means volonte or

“will.” Although dissimilar in meaning, the two

242 Thaumaste

terms are nonetheless homonymic. It is just such

wordplay that dominates Rabelais’s oeuvre. On

both structural and semantic levels, Rabelais

pointedly establishes a parallel between Theleme

and the Thalamege. They are the centers, the for-

mer fixed and the latter mobile, of activity for

Pantagruel and his companions. Although The-

leme is the domicile for the adherents of Gar-

gantua’s evangelism, the Thalamege is the ac-

tual home, albeit temporary, of Gargantua’s

son, Pantagruel. Most significantly, they both

serve as model communities to Rabelais’s read-

ers. Their joyful atmospheres stand in contrast to

the funny but often chaotic milieux Rabelais de-

scribes surrounding them.

Contemporary readers may have made another

association with the name Thalamege, as the

Greek word talame signifies “nuptial chamber.”

Specifically, Rabelais’s literary contemporaries

would be most aware of the term from its pres-

ence in the Greek name for a nuptial song, the

epithaleme. Evocation of this inherently joyous

genre complements nicely both the celebratory

narrative tone found in the opening chapters of

the Fourth Book and the cheerful outlook of Pan-

tagruel’s community in general throughout the

entire work. As the ultimate goal of the voyage

is to determine whether or not Panurge will ever

reach a nuptial chamber, the deliberate etymo-

logical link between the two terms underscores

the leitmotif of marriage first established in the

Third Book. The theme of marriage, in turn, in-

troduces that of union and community at large.

As a vessel in motion with no fixed position,

the Thalamege becomes a model community that

passes from one static community to another on

its way to find the final “word” of the Holy Bot-

tle. A paradigm of model and inadequate com-

munities establishes itself throughout the narra-

tive with each insular encounter.

Reading: Francois Rigolot, Poetique et onomas-

tique: L’Exemple de la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz,

1977).

Margaret Harp

THAUMASTE (P 18–20) This encounter

forms the last of Pantagruel’s Parisian feats

which validate his intellectual mastery, prior to

the military triumph over the Dipsodes that will

confirm his epic heroism. Thaumaste is an Eng-

lish scholar who, hearing of Pantagruel’s fame,

has traveled far to see it verified in person. Ra-

belais lists several similar journeys undertaken in

antiquity and doubtless recalls his own transal-

pine voyages. By the register of his address to

Pantagruel, Thaumaste identifies himself clearly

as a fellow humanist, and Rabelais uses him as

yet another vehicle of antischolastic satire when

he insists that the planned disputation between

them should use signs rather than words to ex-

press their points, so defying the traditional pro

et contra method. In the event Pantagruel does

not even participate in the debate, which remains

a great public occasion; Panurge undertakes to

replace him in order to spare him further prepar-

atory work and also to allay his fears of being

outsmarted. Thaumaste accepts the substitution

on the grounds that if Pantagruel’s disciple can

satisfy him, then this will automatically substan-

tiate his master’s brilliance. However, instead of

addressing serious matters, the ensuing disputa-

tion is an elaborate piece of dumb-show involv-

ing complicated gesticulations on either side

which play with the conventions of academic in-

terchange. For the most part, however, they mys-

tify the audience (and the reader), the only clear

meanings being the obscene ones decipherable in

some of Panurge’s hand signs. Thaumaste,

having appeared to suffer great stress during the

argument, even to the point of beshitting himself,

nevertheless declares himself satisfied beyond his

expectations on all the points originally troubling

him, promises to publish the details of their dis-

cussions so as to preempt any notion that this has

all been a joke, and thanks Pantagruel with great

courtesy, hoping that God will reward him in like

degree. The scene ends with a riotous dinner and

the narrator’s declaration that Thaumaste’s

book has indeed been published in London.

The main problem facing scholars is the epi-

sode’s precise satiric import. Beyond the stock

antischolastic position, which Thaumaste shares

with Rabelais, he may be identified as an enemy

figure whom the jester Panurge defeats and hu-

miliates. Various corresponding clues indicate

his connexion with cabbalistic thought, to which

Erasmus (Rabelais’s inspiration in so many ar-

eas) was quite hostile (see Kabbala). However

the scene’s conclusion in no way substantiates

this pattern; moreover Thaumaste’s stated motive

Theleme, Abbey of 243

in meeting Pantagruel is not to best him in de-

bate, but merely to authenticate his reputation, as

indeed happens, albeit paradoxically. Thaumaste

insists (though perhaps insincerely) that his de-

sire is not to show off but to learn, a desire that

he finally declares, again preposterously, to have

amply fulfilled. One is again struck by the

scene’s theatricality, particularly in that charac-

ters’ words and gestures are presented, even to

excess, but not their thoughts. Rabelais therefore

grants his reader considerable initiative. The

mime sequence may be imagined either as an ac-

tual contest, with Thaumaste’s tremblings and

sweat betokening genuine distress, or as a parody

of one, with Thaumaste clowning along with

Panurge and only defecating because he had in-

judiciously risked a fart as part of the act. Ac-

cordingly, his praise of Pantagruel would come

as a comical response to a nontriumph (let us

recall that the hero has done nothing to deserve

the praise, nor is Panurge his pupil anyway). His

intention is to dispel any doubt that their ex-

changes have been “mocqueries,” a tongue-in-

cheek admission that this is precisely what they

have been. Whatever choice one takes cannot,

however, impugn Pantagruel’s brilliance. As a

hero of Renaissance wisdom, he can succeed

even by proxy and when extending no effort

whatsoever.

Readings: Laurence De Looze, “To Understand

Perfectly Is to Misunderstand Completely. ‘The De-

bate in Signs’ in France, Iceland, Italy and Spain,” CL

50 (1998): 136–164; Edwin M. Duval, The Design of

Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven, CT: Yale Univer-

sity Press, 1991); Armine Kotin, “ ‘Pantagruel.’ Lan-

guage vs. Communication,” MLN 92 (1977): 691–709;

Ion Muraret, “La Critique de la rhetorique des

sophistes dans l’œuvre de Rabelais,” Analeli Univer-

sitatii Bucuresti 45 (1996): 13–19; John Parkin,

“Comic Modality in Rabelais: Baisecul, Humevesne,

Thaumaste,” ER 18 (1985): 57–82; Michael A.

Screech, Rabelais (London: Duckworth, 1979).

John Parkin

THELEME, ABBEY OF (ABBAYE DE THE-

LEME) Gargantua gives the Abbey of The-

leme to Frere Jean as recompense for his part

in the Picrocholine War. The episode has been

variously characterized as the foundation of an

anti-abbey statement, a locus of satire, a uto-

pia or its more theologically loaded variant, a

terrestrial paradise, a courtly model, or a school

of preparation for marriage. These readings

need not be mutually exclusive.

The Greek name Thelema declares that the

will of God rules in this abbey satirically con-

trasted to other monastic establishments which

remain “de ce monde” or “of this world,” mock-

ing the failures of walls and mechanical rules to

restrain human will. Theleme mixes men and

women, has no walls, no fixed rules, no poverty,

and no expectation that the residents (who enter

the abbey between the ages of ten and fifteen for

women, twelve to eighteen for men) will spend

their whole lives there.

The architecture of the abbey seems to refer to

extant buildings and to have numerological im-

plications. Rabelais’s edition of Giovani Marli-

ani’s Topography of Ancient Rome (Topographia

antiquae Romae) is contemporaneous with Gar-

gantua. Several real buildings constructed in the

first third of the sixteenth century have been sug-

gested as models for the abbey: Bonnivet’s cha-

teau, Francis I’s new chateaux at Chambord, his

chateau de Madrid in the bois de Boulogne, Ser-

lio’s reconstruction of the port at Ostia, the cha-

teau de Concressaut in Berry. At the center of

Theleme’s courtyard is a fountain, influenced by

an illustration in the Dream of Polyphilus (Hyp-

nerotomachia Poliphili), where the Graces sup-

ply “eau vive,” metaphorically, the living Word.

The recurrence of six in the abbey’s architectural

scheme invites numerological inquiries: the ab-

bey is hexagonal, is six stories tall, and has six

staircases; there are six libraries; the residents

speak six languages, and so on. Six, the product

of the male two and female three, is associated

with earthly perfection (creation completed in six

days) and with marriage (Augustine, City of God

11.30; Philo, De Opificio mundi ch. 3).

Commentators have tended to assume that be-

cause we are told they may marry, all Thelemites

will do so, a reaction encouraged by the evan-

gelicals’ pro-marriage position and by reformers’

suggestions that monastic establishments be

turned into schools preparing young people for

Christian marriage. From this some see Theleme

as the prototype of such an institution. Others see

marriage as the moment of departure from The-

leme’s terrestrial paradise. Thelemites are bien

244 Thenaud, Jean

nes, innately good. The courtly setting marks the

Abbey as a spiritually noble place. Its inhabi-

tants’ rich dress mirrors their spiritual and intel-

lectual riches. Odor and the two other nonmater-

ial senses, sight and hearing, are privileged in

Theleme. In contrast to their prominence else-

where in Gargantua, eating and drinking have

little importance; they are included in a list of

things indifferent to salvation to be freely chosen,

like sleep and work, and cited as an example of

communal will. This communal will holds the

Thelemites until such time as they decide to

marry, when the subservience of wife to husband

would interrupt the harmony of the community.

The foundations of the abbey contain an “En-

igme en prophetie” or Enigmatic Prophecy, Ra-

belais’s appropriation of a poem by Mellin de

Saint-Gelais, written as a description of a tennis

game. With minor additions the poem is made

into a description of the course of Christian sal-

vation and concludes Gargantua. Andre Tournon

convincingly connects it to the spirit of the ab-

bey, as a realm of Christian perfection that nei-

ther Gargantua nor Frere Jean will enter, no more

than Moses entered the promised land.

Readings: Michael Baraz, “Rabelais et l’utopie,”

ER 15(1980): 1–29; Diane Desrosiers-Bonin,

“L’Abbaye de Theleme et le temple des rhetori-

queurs,” Rabelais pour le 21e siecle, ed. Michel Si-

monin, ER 33 (1998): 241–48; Max Gauna, “Fruitful

Fields and Blessed Spirits or Why the Thelemites

Were Well Born,” ER 15 (1980): 117–28; Mireille Hu-

chon, “Theleme et l’art steganographique,” Rabelais

pour le 21e siecle, ed. Michel Simonin, ER 33 (1998):

149–60; Giles Polizzi, “Theleme ou l’eloge du don: le

texte Rabelaisien a la lumiere de l’Hypnerotomachia

Poliphili,” RHR 25 (1987): 39–59; Jean-Yves Pouil-

loux, “Notes sur l’abbaye de Theleme,” Romantisme

1.2 (1971): 200–204; Bettina Rommel, Rabelais

zwischen Mundlischkeit und Schriftlichkeit: Gargan-

tua: Literatur als Lebensfuhrung (Tubingen: Nie-

meyer, 1997); Marian Rothstein, “Gargantua: Agape,

Androgyny and the Abbaye de Theleme,” FForum

26.1 (2001): 1–19; Jerome Schwarz, “Gargantua’s De-

vice and the Abbey of Theleme: A Study in Rabelais’

Iconography,” YFS 47: 232–42; Michael A. Screech,

Rabelais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979);

Emile V. Telle, “L’ile des alliances ou l’anti-

Theleme,” BHR 14 (1952): 159–75; Andre Tournon,

“L’Abbaye de Theleme,” Saggi e ricerche di lettera-

tura francese 26 (1987): 199–220.

Marian Rothstein

THENAUD, JEAN (1474?–after 1542) Fran-

ciscan theologian and scholar at the service of

the French royal family. On the instigation of

Louise de Savoye, Thenaud made a pilgrimage

to the Holy Land (1511–13), of which the rela-

tion (Voyage d’outremer, c. 1530) is his only

work printed during his lifetime. His other works

are published as precious manuscripts, destined

for the private use of the royal family. His first

known work is La Marguerite de France (1508–

9, dedicated to Louise de Savoye). His Triumph

of Virtues (Triumphe des vertus [1517–18]) is a

monumental encyclopedian allegory, written for

the instruction of Louise’s children: the future

king Francis and Marguerite. This text, in

which Thenaud presents himself as the narrator,

contains the first French translation of Eras-

mus’s Praise of Folly. For Francis I, he wrote

two treatises on the kabbala, one in verse and

one in prose. His last known work is Genealitic

de la tres sacree majestee du Roy tres chestien

(1533).

Although Rabelais mentions Thenaud only

twice (besides a brief mention in one of the lists

of the manuscript version of the Fifth Book), re-

ferring to his Voyage d’outremer in his descrip-

tion of the longtailed sheep (G 16), modern crit-

ics (L. Sainean, Schuurs-Janssen) have found

several intriguing lexical resemblances between

the two authors. For Marie Holban, Frere Jean

is a comical persiflage of the historical Jean

Thenaud. Among numerous thematic resem-

blances between the two authors, Anne-Marie

Lecoq noted a giant called Gargalasua in an

anonymous lucianic text, which Lecoq attributed

to Thenaud. For P. J. Smith and T. J. Schuurs-

Janssen, Nazaire, the name of one of the char-

acters of Thenaud’s Triumphe des vertus, pre-

sented as the humoristic, younger friend of the

narrator, refers to Rabelais. (Nazaire is related to

Rabelais’s anagram Nasier: both names can be

derived from the Latin name Nazarius.) This hy-

pothesis implies that the intellectual and succes-

ful Thenaud could have functioned as a mentor

for young Rabelais during his Franciscan years,

of which almost nothing is known.

Third Book 245

Readings: Marie Holban, “Autour de Jean Thenaud

et de frere Jean des Entonneurs,” ER 9 (1971): 49–65;

Anne-Marie Lecoq, “La grande conjonction de 1524

demythifiee pour Louise de Savoie. Un manuscrit de

Jean Thenaud a la Bibliotheque nationale de Vienne,”

BHR 43 (1981): 39–60; Lazare Sainean, “Jean Then-

aud et Rabelais,” RER 8 (1910): 350–60; Titia J.

Schuurs-Janssen, intro., Jean Thenaud, Le Triumphe

des Vertuz. Premier Traite. Le Triumphe de Prudence

(in collaboration with Rene E. V. Stuip) (Geneva:

Droz, 1997); Paul J. Smith and Titia J. Schuurs-

Janssen, “ ‘Plus feal que ne fut Damis a Appoloneus.’

Rabelais et Jean Thenaud avant 1517: quelques hy-

potheses,” Rabelais au Poitou, ed. Marie-Luce De-

monet (in press).

Paul J. Smith

THIRD BOOK (TIERS LIVRE) A sequel to

Gargantua (1534) and Pantagruel (1532), the

Third Book of the Heroic Deeds and Sayings of

Good Pantagruel (Tiers Livre des faicts et dicts

heroıques du bon Pantagruel), first printed in

Paris in 1546 by Chretien Wechel, is generally

considered Rabelais’s most complex and learned

book. The first of the novels to appear under the

author’s name, it was immediately banned by the

Sorbonne, despite being protected by a royal

privilege and dedicated to the king’s sister, Mar-

guerite de Navarre. Contrary to what the title

leads us to expect, the Third Book is not cast in

an epic mold, and it offers little in the way of

heroic deeds performed by the giant Pantagruel.

The protagonist of the novel is Pantagruel’s

comic double Panurge, whose indecision as to

whether or not to marry, along with the attendant

question of whether he will be cuckolded, trig-

gers the series of consultations with various or-

acles, prophets, and authorities. The novel stands

apart from the other books in Rabelais’s cycle

both in the breadth of its erudition, manifest in

the wealth of references, anecdotes, and exam-

ples drawing on all spheres of Renaissance

knowledge, and in its hybrid form, a Lucianic

mixture of philosophical dialogue and comedy

analyzed by Michael A. Screech and by Mireille

Huchon in the Pleiade edition of Rabelais’s

works. The Third Book consists mainly of mon-

ologues and dialogues involving two or more

characters, onto which are grafted a variety of

other genres, such as paradoxical encomia, bla-

zons and counter-blazons, maxims, and poems.

The symmetrical design of the Third Book has

attracted much scholarly attention. Edwin M. Du-

val sees the book as a set of concentric frames

at the center of which lies the answer to Pan-

urge’s dilemma. While the initial chapters, deal-

ing with the government of Dipsodie, form a

transition and ensure narrative continuity be-

tween the Third Book and Pantagruel, the final

chapters prepare the voyage in quest for the Di-

vine Bottle or Dive Bouteille which is the sub-

ject matter of the Fourth Book. The paradoxical

Praise of Debts in the opening chapters of the

book (3BK 3–5) is aesthetically balanced by the

panegyric of the marvelous herb Pantagruelion

(3BK 49–52). The allusion to marriage and Mo-

saic law (3BK 6), where Panurge announces his

desire to marry, also has its counterpart in the

disquisition against unsponsored marriages,

where the issue of Pantagruel’s marriage is first

raised (3BK 48). The series of consultations that

lies between these two sets of frames begins with

divinatory methods in the episodes of the Vir-

gilian lots, the dream, the Sybil of Panzoust, the

deaf-mute Nazdecabre, the dying poet Ramin-

agrobis (3BK 9–23) and ends with the counsels

of learned representatives of the higher faculties,

the theologian Hippothadee, the doctor Rondi-

bilis, and the skeptic philosopher Trouillogan

(3BK 29–36). The advice of the fool Triboullet,

interwoven with the episode of Judge Bridoye,

brings the procession to a close (3BK 39–46). At

the heart of these two series of consultations, en-

closed by the twin counsels of Epistemon and

Frere Jean, lies the interview with the suspect

diviner and cuckold Her Trippa (3BK 25),

whose self-love and inability to “know himself”

mirrors that of Panurge.

According to a principle of repetition and var-

iation, most episodes consist in an exposition of

the particular method of divination by Panta-

gruel, at whose instigation nearly all the consul-

tations take place, followed by an account of the

consultation itself and its interpretation. The ver-

dict invariably reached by all but Panurge, who

interprets the oracles and counsels in a manner

favorable to the fulfillment of his desires, is that

Panurge will marry and that his wife will make

him a cuckold, rob him, and beat him. Panta-

246 Thirst

gruel, the Christian-Stoic sage who embodies the

spirit of charity, has traditionally been seen as

opposed to Panurge, whose chief vice is identi-

fied at crucial points with philautie or self-love,

an Erasmian notion that has been the object of

numerous studies in connection with the Third

Book. More recently, critics have sought to re-

habilitate the character of Panurge, pointing out

that his interpretations are just as valid as those

of Pantagruel and his companions. This reading

is favored by the essential ambiguity of the

words and signs put forward by the various

prophets and authorities, as well as by the dia-

logical form of the book. Pantagruel and Panurge

would thus be complementary rather than anti-

thetical figures.

Critics have also varied in their assessment of

the subject of the Third Book. Abel Lefranc fa-

mously saw the book as an episode in the con-

temporary querelle des femmes, linking the

theme of marriage at the heart of the Third Book

to the debates that opposed feminists and anti-

feminists in France at the time. Others have ques-

tioned this reading of the novel, arguing that

marriage is merely a way to address the problem

of predestination and man’s ability to determine

his future, which they see as the dominant pre-

occupation in the Third Book. The two issues are

in fact indissolubly linked. Panurge’s indecision

about marriage and his fear of cuckoldry, as well

as being a comic device, enables Rabelais to en-

gage in many contemporary medical, legal, the-

ological, and philosophical debates surrounding

women. Other important aspects of the Third

Book to which studies have been devoted are the

question of Christian and learned folly, variously

embodied by Panurge, Triboullet, and the judge

Bridoye; Pantagruelism; the different methods

of divination surveyed in the novel; the interpre-

tation of verbal and nonverbal signs; Panurge’s

sophistry and his linguistic agility; and the pe-

culiar admixture of comedy and erudition that

characterizes the Third Book.


L’insolite au XVIe siecle en France (Geneva: Droz,

1977); Lance Donaldson-Evans, “Panurge Perplexus:

Ambiguity and Relativity in the Tiers Livre,” ER 15

(1980): 77–96; Edwin M. Duval, “Panurge, Perplexity

and the Ironic Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre,” RQ

36 (1982): 381–400; Francois Rigolot, Les langages

de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1987); Michael A.

Screech, The Rabelaisian Marriage: Aspects of Ra-

belais’s Religion, Ethics and Comic Philosophy (Lon-

don: Edward Arnold, 1958); M. A. Screech, Rabelais

(London: Duckworth, 1979).


THIRST The theme of wine and drink, in-

spired by unquenchable thirst, appears more than

fifty times throughout each of Rabelais’s four

complete books. Rabelais signals its importance

with the very name of his principal protagonist

Pantagruel who, Rabelais explains, born during

a moment of record drought, deserved a name

meaning “all thirst” as everyone thirsted at the

moment of his birth as well as because he would

be a future ruler of the thirsty. Indeed, Pantagruel

gains the title of king of the Dipsodes, or “the

thirsty,” when he conquers them during his battle

with Anarche or Anarchy. With this name, Ra-

belais evokes another Pantagruel, the little de-

mon featured in medieval mysteres who throws

salt into the mouths of sleeping drunkards. Ac-

cordingly, Pantagruel the giant often awakens a

thirst in others. After Pantagruel seizes a pedantic

Limousin by the throat so that he might at last

speak naturally, the unfortunate scholar suffers

an unquenchable thirst that kills him years later

(P 6) (see Ecolier Limousin). Upon joining Pan-

tagruel’s enlightened court, Panurge attributes

his new insatiable thirst to Pantagruel (P 14).

The theme of thirst serves as a principal source

of comedy for Rabelais: he devotes numerous

passages and even entire chapters to the banter,

jokes, and escapades of the happily drunk (G 5).

Increasingly through his epic, however, the con-

sumption of wine becomes a metaphor for the

thirst of life, knowledge, and faith that both his

protagonists and his ideal readers experience. In

the prologues to Gargantua and the Third Book,

Rabelais calls his readers “esteemed drinkers”

(“buveurs tres illustres”). The Fourth Book tells

of a voyage undertaken to visit the oracle of

the Holy Bottle. And tellingly, the closing word

of Rabelais’s Fourth Book—the last of the epic

known to be entirely his own—is a call to drink:

“Beuvons!” The Fifth Book’s prologue, ap-

parently written by Rabelais himself, advises his

readers—buveurs infatigables, or tireless drink-

ers—to consume books much as they do

Translations, Dutch and German 247

wine. That is, to imbibe but also to digest and

let inspiration, and hence self-knowledge, have

free reign. Reading becomes a drink that one

must consume to quench, albeit fleetingly, the

thirst for knowledge.

Readings: Jean Larmat, “La vigne et le vin chez

Rabelais,” Revue des sciences humaines (1966): 179–

92; Florence Weinberg, The Wine and the Will (De-

troit: Wayne State University Press, 1972).

Margaret Harp

TIRAQUEAU, ANDRE (1488–1558) A re-

nowned French jurist, member of the Parle-

ments of Paris and Bordeaux, “le docte Tira-

queau” (P 5) is the dedicatee of Rabelais’s

Medical Letters (1532) and the object of a eulogy

in the prologue to the Fourth Book (1552). Ra-

belais’s friendship with Andre Tiraqueau dates

back to their formative years at Fontenay-le-

Comte in Poitou, when both belonged to the so-

called cenacle de Fontenay, a circle of humanist

lawyers. It was in the course of their meetings

and discussions that Rabelais acquired much of

the legal learning that frequently surfaces in his

writings. Tiraqueau gained early notoriety fol-

lowing the publication of an expanded version of

On the Laws of Marriage (De legibus connubi-

alibus [1524]), a highly controversial collection

of commonplaces about women to which Rabe-

lais contributed. All references to Rabelais dis-

appear from later editions of the work, leading

some critics to speculate as to why the friendship

suddenly ended. The Third Book (1546) with its

overarching theme of marriage owes much to

Tiraqueau’s recently reedited treatise, especially

the pronouncements made by the theologian

Hippothadee and doctor Rondibilis (3BK 30–

1). For the casting of dice in Bridoye’s trial

(3BK 39–43), foreshadowed by the episode of

the Homeric and Virgilian lots (3BK 12), Rabe-

lais drew on Tiraqueau’s On the Law of Primo-

geniture (De iure primigeniorum) of 1549. The

name of Judge Bridoye’s interlocutor, the mag-

istrate Trinquamelle, evokes Tiraqueau’s Latin

name (Tiraquellus). Although preponderant in

the Third Book, Tiraqueau’s influence lies behind

many examples and anecdotes in Rabelais’s

books, most notably the treatment of eleven-

month pregnancies in Gargantua (3), which is

largely based on Tiraqueau’s famous Commen-

tary on the Law, “Si unquam” (1535).

Readings: Jacques Brejon, Un jurisconsulte de la

Renaissance: Andre Tiraqueau (1488–1558) (Paris:

Librairie du Recueil Sirey, 1937); Enzo Nardi, Rabe-

lais e il diritto romano (Milan: A. Giuffre Editore,

1962); Charles Perrat, “Rabelais et Tiraqueau,” Bib-

liotheque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 16 (1954):

41–57.


TRANSLATIONS, DUTCH AND GERMAN

(16TH–17TH CENTURIES) The first trans-

lations of Rabelais’s works originated from Prot-

estant countries: respectively, the southern Neth-

erlands (especially Flanders, situated on the

borderline between Catholicism and Reforma-

tion, 1554–61), Lutheran Germany (Fischart,

1572–90), England (Urquhart and Motteux,

1653, 1693, 1708), and the northern Netherlands

(Wieringa, 1682).

The Pantagrueline pronostication is the first

work to be translated, although the translations are

only known by title. In 1554 the Gantois printer

Jan Cauweel obtained a privilege for printing a

Pantagruelsche prognosticatie metter prophetie.

According to a recent hypothesis of Jelle Koop-

mans, the “prophecy” mentioned in the title prob-

ably is a Dutch adaptation of the Enigmatic

Prophecy of Gargantua, chapter 58. No copy of

this edition survived, nor that of another edition

printed by Jan van Ghelen II (Antwerp, before

1560) nor the one mentioned in the 1570 Index.

The only text that has come to us in one single

copy is the anonymous Lieripe (Antwerp, 1561,

Royal Library, Brussels), an accurate translation

of Rabelais’s Pantagrueline pronostication,

which, however, leaves out any mention of Rabe-

lais’s or Pantagruel’s names. Lines from the

Lieripe literally reappear in the Testament rheto-

ricael, a manuscript collection of texts (finished in

1561) by the Brugean poet Eduard de Dene,

which includes many other Rabelaisian borrow-

ings and adaptations, among which is an imitation

of Rabelais’s Library of Saint-Victor (P 7).

Independently from these Flemish translations,

the prolific writer Johann Fischart (c. 1546–90),

living in Protestant, German-speaking Stras-

bourg, translated the Pantagrueline pronostica-

tion in German under the title Aller Praktic

248 Translations, English

Grossmutter (1572). In 1590 he published a Ca-

talogus catalogorum perpetuo durabilis, an ad-

aptation of Rabelais’s satirical Library of Saint-

Victor, curiously mixed up with the very serious

and influential Bibliotheca universalis (1545) of

the Swiss scholar Conrad Gesner. Fischart’s most

important translation is Geschichtklitterung

(abridged title; Geschichte � “story” and Klit-

terung � “hotchpotch”), a free version of Ra-

belais’s Gargantua. While the first edition

(1575) stays fairly close to its model (except for

some lengthy additions to chapters 3 to 7), the

second edition (1582) is enlarged by massive po-

lemical interpolations, and the third and last one

(1590) is only slightly enlarged, the final version

being almost three times the length of Rabelais’s

original. Fischart’s style is characterized by a

marked preference for the grotesque, ingenious

wordplay, verbal invention, and accumulation,

all stylistic features in which he tries to surpass

his model. His tone is polemic and heavily satir-

ical: as a Lutheran he is not only anti-Catholic,

but also opposes Erasmian humanism (contrary

to the Erasmian inspiration of his model). Be-

cause of his linguistic invention, Fischart is con-

sidered to be the greatest renewer of the German

language of his time. For his English translation

of Gargantua (1653), Sir Thomas Urquhart

consulted Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung, as can

be deduced from the following addition among

many others: whereas Rabelais simply has “I

don’t understand the theoretical” (“je n’entens

point la theorique” [G 5]), Fischart expands: “Ich

verstand dise Redtorich [pun on “Rede” (“dis-

cours”) and “Tor” (“fool”)], Theoric solt ich sa-

gen,” followed by Urquhart who has: “I under-

stand not the Rhetorick (Theorick I should say).”

In 1682, a Dutch translation of all Rabelais’s

works was published by a certain Claudio Gal-

litalo, a pseudonym of the Dutch translator Ni-

colaas Jarichides Wieringa. This translation is the

first one ever to include not only Rabelais’s Five

Books but also the Pantagrueline pronostication

and his letters from Italy. Wieringa’s translation

is very accurate, even scrupulous. He made use

of the recent pseudo-Elzevier edition (1675),

from which he also translated Rabelais’s bio-

graphical sketch and the lenghty linguistic com-

mentaries as well. He also compared this edition

with some older ones and checked his transla-

tions upon the versions of his German and Eng-

lish predecessors Fischart and Urquhart.

Readings: Articles by Dirk Geirnaert, Jelle Koop-

mans, Enny Kraaijveld, and Paul J. Smith in Paul J.

Smith, ed., Editer et traduire Rabelais a travers les

ages (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997); Michael Schilling,

“Einleitung,” Johann Fischart, Catalogus Catalogo-

rum perpetuo durabilis (1590) (Tubingen: Niemeyer,

1993); C. L. Thijssen-Schoute and Nicolaas Jarichides

Wieringa, Een zeventiende-eeuwse vertaler van Boc-

calini, Rabelais, Barclai, Leti e.a. (Assen: Van Gor-

cum, 1939); Florence M. Weinberg, Gargantua in a

Convex Mirror. Fischart’s View of Rabelais (New

York: Peter Lang, 1986).

Paul J. Smith

TRANSLATIONS, ENGLISH Although Ra-

belais’s works have been translated numerous

times into English since the seventeenth century,

the two best English translations remain the Ur-

quhart–Motteux translation (1653–93) and

Burton Raffel’s 1990 translation. In 1653, an

English translation by the Scottish writer Thomas

Urquhart (1611–60) of Rabelais’s first three

books was published. Forty years later, Peter

Motteux (1660–1718) revised Urquhart’s trans-

lation and completed his own translation of the

last two books. Even today this joint translation

is available, and it has been included in its en-

tirety in the University of Pennsylvania’s Project

Gutenberg collection of online books. In his

1933 book Rabelais in English Literature,

Huntington Brown pointed out that the Urqu-

hart–Motteux translation had a profound influ-

ence on numerous English writers of the Resto-

ration and during the decades immediately after

the Glorious Revolution of 1688. From a lin-

guistic point of view this translation is somewhat

difficult for modern English speakers to under-

stand because so many words used by Urquhart

and Motteux are no longer in common English

usage, but their translation did make Rabelais’s

five books available to English readers of the late

seventeenth century. Urquhart and Motteux were

somewhat prudish in translating Rabelais’s writ-

ings, but their complete translation still remains

an important text in the critical reception of

French Renaissance literature in England.

Burton Raffel’s 1990 English translation,

which he entitled Gargantua and Pantagruel, is

Travel Literature 249

still in print in both cloth and paperback. This

excellent translation reads very well, and it cap-

tures very nicely Rabelais’s wit, wordplay, and

the different levels of style for the different char-

acters. This should remain the standard English

translation of Rabelais’s works for generations to

come. The original French edition of Rabelais’s

books includes many long lists largely in Latin

such as the catalogue of the Parisian Library of

Saint Victor in the seventh chapter of Panta-

gruel. Burton Raffel correctly understands that

most modern readers of English do not possess

a solid command of Latin and would not appre-

ciate the satirical intentions of many of the fan-

ciful titles in this library. For that reason, Burton

Raffel translated the Latin titles into English,

which makes Rabelais’s satire more accessible to

modern readers. Although one could quibble

with certain translations, such as his translation

of Frere Jean as Brother John and not as Friar

John, because the words “Brother John” imply

that this character is a religious brother and not

an ordained priest, this is a minor defect in an

otherwise excellent English translation, which re-

produces the sharp wit and subtle humor of

Francois Rabelais.



1933); Francois Rabelais, Five Books of the Lives, He-

roic Deeds, and Sayings of Gargantua and Panta-

gruel, trans. Thomas Urquhart and Peter Motteux,

1653–93; http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/web

bin/gutbook/lookup?num�1200 (accessed August 14,

2003); Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel,

trans. Burton Raffel (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990).

Edmund J. Campion

TRAVEL LITERATURE A popular genre in

France long before the Renaissance, travel lit-

erature was perhaps influenced by the new mo-

bility of the European population that was pro-

moted by the Crusades. Villehardouin’s The

Conquest of Constantinople about the Fourth

Crusade, and Joinville’s life of Saint Louis,

whom he accompanied on the Crusade of 1248,

are the prime examples, although they are as

much propaganda and hagiography as they are

travel accounts. Also of importance for Renais-

sance travel writing were the journeys of Marco

Polo (which first appeared in French translation

some time before 1307) and those of Jean de

Mandeville (c. 1356), which were composed in

French, even though de Mandeville claimed to

be an English knight. Travel literature received

a tremendous boost thanks to the fifteenth- and

sixteenth-century voyages sponsored by the Por-

tuguese and Spanish monarchies. It is not by

chance that, in Pantagruel, when the young gi-

ant returns to his native Utopia, he at first fol-

lows the exact itinerary pioneered by Portuguese

mariners on their journeys to the Far East, al-

though the final segment is pure fantasy.

The “New World,” however, generated less in-

terest than might be expected in Renaissance

France. According to Geoffroy Atkinson (1969:

10ff), almost twice as many books were pub-

lished on the Mediterranean region and the Mid-

dle East as on the Americas. This can perhaps be

explained by a lack of French colonial involve-

ment in the New World and by a fascination with

and fear of the Turks as the struggle between

Christianity and Islam continued. More recently,

Frank Lestringant has maintained that the greater

interest in the Turkish Empire and the Holy Land

is merely a question of “scale” (echelle), since

the Mediterranean was already well known and

circumscribed by this time, whereas the newly

discovered lands existed in an imprecisely

charted geographic space (12), the immensity of

which Renaissance cosmographers had, at first,

little idea. Subsequently, however, French inter-

est in the New World began to increase, thanks

in particular to the writings of travelers, the most

important being Jacques Cartier, Andre Thevet,

and Jean de Lery. Andre Thevet (1516–92), self-

styled cosmographer of four kings (Henry II

through Henry III), was a Franciscan. His first

major work dealt with the Middle East (Cosmog-

raphy of the Levant, 1554), but his 1557 Singu-

larities of Antarctic France was an account of

the French settlement in Brazil, where he spent

less than two months. His final major work was

the Universal Cosmography (1575), which, like

his previous works, was criticized for being little

more than a compilation.

Thevet is often contrasted with the other major

French travel writer of the second half of the six-

teenth century, Jean de Lery (1534–1613). Lery

was a Calvinist minister who wrote his own ver-

sion of the French expedition in Histoire d’un

250 Trent, Council of

voyage fait en la terre du Bresil (1578). This

work, devoid of erudite references, reads much

more like an eyewitness account than Thevet’s

Singularities, even though it was written some

twenty years after the dissolution of the French

colony in Brazil and so would appear to lack

immediacy. Successive editions attacked both the

authenticity of Thevet’s account and Thevet’s

claim that it was the fault of the Calvinist mem-

bers that the colony failed in 1558. Recent critics,

in particular Lestringant, have presented a more

positive review of Thevet’s work and have

praised its anthropological detail and the impor-

tance it attributes to eyewitness accounts. Others,

however, such as Jeanneret, also emphasize its

preponderantly humanist perspective, pointing

out that Thevet attenuates the shock of the new

by referencing it with what is already known.

Lery is closer to the modern anthropological

point of view in presenting, or purporting to pres-

ent, a simple eyewitness account, without learned

references and “interpretation” of the new culture

in the light of the old. Montaigne’s famous essay

“Les cannibales” was probably influenced by

both Thevet and Lery. Perhaps because of the

interest generated by these three writers and the

progressive engagement of the French in Amer-

ica, travel literature became more and more fo-

cused on the New World. Samuel de Champlain

wrote about his journeys there in 1608 and 1611

and later in the seventeenth century, and the Jes-

uit missionaries produced a body of literature

that provides valuable information on the Am-

erindian civilizations they were attempting to

convert. Thus, by the early seventeenth century,

the Americas had become firmly established at

the center of French travel writing until the locus

of the exotic was shifted to the South Pacific in

the eighteenth century.

Readings: Geoffroy Atkinson, Les nouveaux hori-

zons de la Renaissance francaise (Geneva: Slatkine

Reprints, 1969); Michel Jeanneret, “1578—Antarctic

France,” A New History of French Literature, ed.

Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1994); Jean de Lery, Histoire d’un voyage fait

en la terre du Bresil, ed. Frank Lestringant (Paris: Li-

vre de poche—Bibliotheque Classique, 1994); Frank

Lestringant, Ecrire le monde a la Renaissance (Caen:

Paradigme, 1993), particularly pp. 107–85 devoted to

Rabelais; Frank Lestringant, L’atelier du cosmographe

(Paris: Albin Michel, 1991); Andre Thevet, Cosmo-

graphie de Levant, ed. Frank Lestringant (Geneva:

Droz, 1985); Andre Thevet, Le Bresil d’Andre Thevet:

les singularites de la France antarctique (1557), ed.

Frank Lestringant (Paris: Chandeigne, 1997).

Lance Donaldson-Evans

TRENT, COUNCIL OF Meeting convened

by the Church in 1545–49 and again in 1551 and

1552 to confront challenges to the mass and the

Eucharist by evangelicals and Reformers. The

net result was a retrenching of Catholic doctrine,

increased factionalism, a confirmation of the

schism with Protestants (Frame 1977), and a step

toward the Counter-Reformation. In his Fourth

Book, during the episode of the Reformist An-

douilles, Rabelais refers to the gathering pejor-

atively as the “concile national de Chesil” (4BK

35)—the national council of fools.

Readings: Andre Duval, Des sacrements au Concile

de Trente (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1985); Donald

Frame, Francois Rabelais: A Study (New York: Har-

court Brace Jovanovich, 1977).


TRIBOULLET (TRIBOULET) This charac-

ter, who appears in the Third Book (45), is taken

from the historical name popularized by Victor

Hugo’s play Le Roi s’amuse (1832) and Verdi’s

opera Rigoletto (1851). Triboullet was a popular

name given to professional entertainers such as

those who served Louis XI, Louis XII, and Fran-

cis I. It has been suggested that Triboullet was

also the name of a particular individual, the au-

thor of various farces and sotties (closely related

to the farce, they are short, carnivalesque dramas

in which the central character is a fou or sot

[fool]; topical satire is often included), even per-

haps the author of the Farce de Maıtre Pathelin.

The word tribouler means to agitate. A play en-

titled La farce ou sotie des vigilles Triboullet de-

scribes a fictional funeral procession organized

by an acting troupe for Triboullet. Triboullet be-

came a synonym for fool, as well as a name used

in comic theater to indicate a particular type of

comic role.

In the Third Book, Triboullet is the last person

consulted by Panurge, and it is through this en-

counter that Panurge comes up with the idea to

go in search of the Dive Bouteille or the Holy

Trickster 251

Bottle. Seven chapters earlier (3BK 38), Panta-

gruel and Panurge expound upon the virtues of

Triboullet in a format that combines the genres

of blason and dialogue. The structure of this di-

alogue opposes Pantagruel, who focuses on ex-

treme or even divine folly, with Panurge, who

opts for a more earthy and material folly in de-

scribing the professional fou. After this theatrical

exchange, the subsequent consultation with Tri-

boullet is delayed for seven chapters with the in-

sertion of the trial of Judge Bridove. When Pan-

tagruel and Panurge finally meet Triboullet,

Panurge’s attempts to explain his situation in

“paroles rhetoriques et eleguantes” (“rhetorical

and elegant words”) is interrupted by the fool

thumping him on the back, giving back the bottle

Panurge had offered him as a gift, and smacking

him on the nose with a pig’s bladder. Pantagruel

maintains that Triboulet is an inspired fool, but

whether Pantagruel’s encomium of the fool is

sincere or ironic is a matter of debate. In the

organizational structure of the Third Book, Tri-

boullet’s placement at the end mirrors the posi-

tion of Pantagruel at the beginning, thus contrast-

ing the wise prince with the foolish fool as each

counsels the hopelessly perplexed Panurge.

Readings: Marie-Luce Demonet, “Le ‘Blason du

fou’ (Tiers livre, ch. 38): binarite et dialogisme,”

L’intelligence du passe (Tours: Universite de Tours,

1988); Eugenie Droz, Le recueil trepperel (Paris,


Tiers livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Alan

Hindley, “Acting Companies in Late Medieval France:

Triboulet and His Troupe,” Drama and Community:

People and Plays in Medieval Europe (Turnhout, Bel-

gium: Brepols, 1999); Bruno Roy, “Triboulet, Jos-

seaume et Pathelin a la cour de Rene d’Anjou,” Le

moyen francais 7 (1980): 7–56; Michael A. Screech,

Rabelais (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1979).

E. Bruce Hayes

TRICKSTER A type of character associated

with diverse folkloric narrative traditions. The

trickster is defined by actions and attitudes that

include deception, trickery, joking, punning,

drinking, gluttony, and even outright malice

against others. Many of the characters in Rabe-

lais’s works possess some of the attributes of

tricksters, most notably the figure of Panurge,

but also Frere Jean des Entommeurs, as well as

many of the wandering minor characters who

joust with the protagonists, such as Thaumaste

the Englishman (P 19–20), Janotus de Brag-

mardo (G 18–19), Dindenault (4BK 5–8) or any

of a wide range of charlatans who traverse the

work. Rabelais conflates the specific traits of the

trickster, recognizable in figures as wide ranging

as the coyote in American Indian tales, or the

fox in the Roman de renard, with those of the

rogue, the clown, and the fool, which Mikhail

Bakhtin described as belonging to a certain kind

of comic “chronotope.” In Bakhtin’s reading, Ra-

belais’s hybrid version of the trickster operates

within certain spatial and temporal parameters:

he haunts taverns, public markets, festivals, and

even official public ceremonies, such as the

masses Panurge invades with his powders and

parasites (P 16). He is also associated with the

cyclical and cosmic time periods of Carnival

and the harvest, like the bons buveurs who cel-

ebrate Mardi Gras by eating massive amounts of

tripe with Gargamelle and Grandgousier just

before Gargantua’s birth (G 5). While the Pan-

urge of Pantagruel may represent the trickster in

his purest form, especially in the chapter that de-

scribes les moeurs et conditions de Panurge (P

16), the other characters in Rabelais’s work share

only some of these attributes without being fully

devoted to tricksterism.

Panurge as trickster plays an important role in

the development of Rabelais’s works and seems

to represent a particularly puzzling component of

the author’s thought. In the first book, the young

Gargantua is subjected first to a sophist educa-

tion (G 14–15 21–22) and then to a humanist one

(G 23–24), thus exchanging a life of laziness,

gluttony, meaningless games, and scatological

verbal trickery (the poem on defecation [G 13],

the “urinological” etymology of the name “Paris”

[G 17]) for a life of discipline and directed study.

The vertiginous oscillation between these serious

and comic positions, which is typical of the Rab-

elaisian text, in the notorious prologue of Gar-

gantua as in the description of the giant’s dual

education, eventually is personified in the oppo-

sition of Pantagruel and Panurge, the humanist

prince versus the trickster. From a modern per-

spective, it may be difficult to understand why

the learned and disciplined side of Renaissance

thinking, at least in its Rabelaisian variant, was

252 Trouillogan

affixed to a carnivalesque underside that was as-

sociated with Panurge the trickster, whom Ra-

belais retains as a beloved figure and “gentil

compagnon” even after the most repugnant and

misogynistic of episodes, such as the chapters

dealing with the Haughty Lady of Paris (P 21–

22) and the scandalous new method of building

the walls of Paris out of the private parts of

women (P 15).

There is no easy answer to this “riddle of Pan-

urge,” while the following possibilities have been

explored. Most notable among these is the “cos-

mological” and “carnivalesque” answer offered

by Bakhtin, who somewhat naively and optimis-

tically reads the cruel and scatological elements

of Rabelais’s work as belonging to a cosmic

whole, in which positive and regenerative ele-

ments are necessarily linked to negativity, death,

and destruction, which are represented in the

realm of the characters in scatology and violence.

Critics such as Carla Freccero have read Rabe-

lais’s more scandalous chapters as instances of

male bonding accomplished at the expense of fe-

male figures both within and beyond the text, as

in Wayne Booth’s reaction to the Dame de Paris

episode. In this sense, the bond between Panta-

gruel and Panurge mirrored a misogyny that was

an integral part of humanist patriarchy, whose

aporias and problems were explored in depth in

the sixteenth century by Marguerite de Navarre

in the Heptameron.

Gerard Defaux’s solution to the problem of

Panurge as trickster understands Rabelais’s alter

ego, Alcofrybas Nasier, as a comic mask that

allows the writer to evoke and exorcize the de-

monic elements of his own personality. Hence

these attributes are brought out into the light

through the representation of Panurge in order to

triumph over them. A final solution to this

enigma would be the recognition of Rabelais’s

narrative sources: the learned monk wrote in a

clerical literary tradition that included the insti-

tutionalized misogyny of the exemplary Disci-

plina clericalis as well as the medieval fabliaux,

the learned facetiae, and the Renaissance nou-

velle, in which trickster figures, rogues, charla-

tans, and clowns were ubiquitous. The trickster

in Rabelais’s work is thus a remnant of a long

literary tradition and a representative of a certain

kind of clerical thinking, which he attempts to

characterize, ridicule, and carry forward in an ex-

traordinarily multiple and ambivalent mode of

writing.

Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Chronotope of the

Rogue, Clown, and Fool,” The Dialogic Imagination,

trans. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas

Press, 1981); Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His

World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1984); Gerard Defaux, Rabelais

agonistes: du rieur au prophete. ER 32 (Geneva: Droz,

1997); Carla Freccero, “Damning Haughty Dames:

Panurge and the Haulte Dame de Paris (Pantagruel,

22),” JMRS 15.1 (Spring 1985): 57–67; David La-

Guardia, “ ‘Un bon esmoucheteur par mousches ja-

mais emousche ne sera’: Panurge as Trickster,” RR

88.4 (November 1997): 519–28.

David LaGuardia

TROUILLOGAN (3BK 29, 35–36) A philos-

opher whom Panurge consults in the Third

Book. Early in the book, Panurge expresses a

wish to marry but, as he is aging, he fears cuck-

oldry. Torn between wish and fear, he cannot

decide for himself, and the book centers largely

on attempts to resolve his doubts. After several

vain attempts to divine what Panurge’s matri-

monial fate will be, Pantagruel arranges for him

to consult experts: a theologian, a doctor, and the

philosopher Trouillogan. Trouillogan’s advice is

interesting for his philosophy, and also for the

reactions of Panurge and other characters.

In Rabelais, the word “philosophe” usually has

positive connotations. Thus, when Pantagruel

calls Trouillogan a “perfect philosopher,” high

esteem is implied (29). Moreover, because Pan-

tagruel claims here that Trouillogan answers all

uncertainties “assertivement,” that is, “affirma-

tively” or “positively,” we are led to expect clear,

illuminating answers. This expectation is not met

because Trouillogan proves to be an extreme

skeptic, in the manner of the philosopher Pyrrho

of Elis (c. 300 b.c.). He and his followers held

that nothing was certain, and they conveyed this

view obliquely by claiming, for instance, that

propositions were simultaneously true and false,

or things simultaneously existent and nonexist-

ent. (It seems that, for his day, Rabelais was un-

usually well informed about pyrrhonism.)

Initially, when Pantagruel asks Trouillogan

whether or not Panurge should marry, he an-

Turks 253

swers, “Both” (35). When Panurge himself asks,

“Should I marry or not,” he replies, “Neither.”

These answers are not quite as self-contradictory

as they appear: because he was asked which al-

ternative was preferable (marriage or nonmarri-

age), Trouillogan may simply mean that the case

on each side is equally strong or equally weak.

True, the answers are indecisive, but since

Trouillogan is expected to answer “assertive-

ment,” it may be that his answers are as decisive

as they reasonably can be. Certainly, various

characters try to make sense of them. The doctor,

Rondibilis, thinks that they advocate moderation

within marriage, “by denial of both extremes.”

Hippothadee the theologian and Pantagruel

think that they recall Saint Paul’s advice:

“Those who are married, let them be as if they

were not married.” This, too, is a counsel of

moderation, in that excess of marital love puts

the husband in danger of neglecting the love of

God. These convergent reactions indicate that,

for those who know how to interpret them,

Trouillogan’s paradoxes constitute advice, albeit

on marriage in general rather than the particular

case of Panurge.

But Panurge remains dissatisfied. Hoping to

force a clearer answer from Trouillogan by

avoiding questions framed as alternatives, he re-

sumes, “Should I marry?” While the subsequent

dialogue still does not satisfy Panurge, Trouil-

logan offers one more major point. Asked, “What

should I do?” he replies, “What you will.”

Though Panurge reacts angrily, clearly thinking

this response mere evasion, it is in fact good ad-

vice. Just as Pantagruel had done (10), when

Panurge first raised the question of marriage,

Trouillogan is advising him that he must make

his own decision. After another two pages of

frustration, Panurge forgets his resolve to avoid

alternatives and asks, “Are you married or not?”

The instant reply is: “Neither, and both at once.”

This time, because the question concerns fact,

not advice, the alternatives do cover all possibil-

ities: at any moment, one must either be married

or not married; and similarly, one cannot be both

married and not married. Here, Trouillogan’s re-

sponse really is self-contradictory and pure pyr-

rhonism. Thus, though highly comic, this

exchange does not mean that Trouillogan is be-

ing merely evasive; as befits a “perfect philoso-

pher,” he is consistently giving the best answers

available to him, within his pyrrhonist philoso-

phy. Similarly, when Panurge rephrases his ques-

tion without an alternative (“Are you married?”),

Trouillogan replies, “I think so.” For a pyrrhon-

ist, this is a sensible answer.

Not surprisingly, Panurge gives up in despair.

More strikingly, however, Gargantua shares his

frustration at Trouillogan’s noncommittal an-

swers: “Henceforth we may catch . . . birds by

their feet, but never will such philosophers be

caught in their words.” It has been suggested that

here the text mocks the old king, disconcerted by

innovations that he simply cannot understand.

Nevertheless, in his way, he indicates that Trouil-

logan’s deliberately oblique language is partly re-

sponsible for Panurge’s failure to gain enlight-

enment from their dialogue.

Readings: Emmanuel Naya, “Ne scepticque ne dog-

matique, et tous les deux ensemble”: Rabelais “On

Phrontistere et escholle des pyrrhoniens,” ER 35

(1998): 81–129; Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Lon-

don: Duckworth, 1979); Veronique Zaercher, Le dia-

logue rabelaisien (Geneva: Droz, 2000).

Ian R. Morrison

TURKS The rise of the Ottoman Turks had

astonished and terrified Christendom since the

dynasty’s appearance around 1300. After rapid

expansion through the Balkans, their forces un-

der Sultan Suleyman II destroyed the Hungarian

kingdom at Mohacs in 1526 and besieged Vi-

enna—unsuccessfully—in 1529. At about this

time Francis I, ignoring the French crusading

tradition, negotiated an entente with the sultan as

a counterweight to the designs of Emperor

Charles V. There are numerous echoes in Ra-

belais of these events and of the depiction of the

Turk in travelers’ writings. Rabelais’s letters

from Rome (1535–36) contain news of the Ot-

toman campaign in Persia as well as skeptical

references to crusade indulgences and to a proph-

ecy of the Turks’ imminent overthrow that was

being widely published by Charles V’s support-

ers. The mockery of Picrochole’s ambition in G

33 includes probable allusions to Charles V’s

thwarted ambitions in North Africa, where he be-

sieged Tunis in 1535 and Algiers in 1541, to his

support for the Knights of St. John, recently ex-

pelled from Rhodes and reestablished by Charles

254 Turks

on Malta, and to the unthinking bloodlust and

territorial ambition of the new crusaders: “ ‘Shall

we not kill all these dogs of Turks and Mahom-

etans?’ said Picrochole. ‘What the devil else shall

we do?’ said they. ‘And you shall give their

goods and land to those who have served you

faithfully.’ ” This chimes with Pantagruel’s

prayer before battle (P 29), where the giant im-

plicitly rejects “holy war” and refuses to inter-

vene in God’s “own business, which is the faith.”

In the prologue to the Fourth Book, Jupiter’s

survey of the political horizon includes two

hopeful signs for France, in that the Sultan has

finished his business with his ancestral foe (cf.

3BK 41) the shah of Persia (freeing him, implic-

itly, to turn against Charles V) and in that Trip-

oli, an outpost of the Knights of St. John, has

fallen “through carelessness; its hour had

come”—rebutting rumors that French treachery

was responsible.

Besides these allusions to the Ottomans’ geo-

political role, one picturesque scene in Panta-

gruel (14) is set in Turkey. Panurge, who in

chapter 9 revealed that he had been taken pris-

oner in Louis XII’s expedition to Mytilene (Les-

bos) in 1502, recounts his escape. The episode

mingles fantasies of alterity (the Turks appear to

be cannibals and polytheists) with a smattering

of solid information, perhaps gleaned from Jehan

Thenaud’s Voyage d’oultre mer (1530). Panurge

uses the neologisms baschatz (pachas) and mus-

safiz (glossed in the Briefve Declaration as “doc-

tors and prophets”), deplores the Muslim prohi-

bition on wine, and essays some cod-Arabic. In

this pseudoromantic scene, the formidable Turks

are comfortingly portrayed as buffoons and cow-

ards.

Readings: Clarence D. Rouillard, The Turk in

French History, Thought and Literature (1520–1660)

(Paris: Boivin, n.d.); Frederic Tinguely, L’ecriture du

Levant a la Renaissance: Enquete sur les voyageurs

francais dans l’empire de Soliman le Magnifique (Ge-

neva: Droz, 2000).

Michael J. Heath

U

URQUHART, SIR THOMAS (1611–58) The

first translator of Rabelais into English, Urquhart

was born in 1611 in Cromarty, in the far north

of Scotland. After taking a degree at Aberdeen

University and traveling on the Continent, he re-

turned to Scotland in 1635. From then onward

his life was never untroubled, and his eccentric

works, or “elucubrations” as he termed them, al-

ways aimed either at freeing his ancestral lands

from his father’s creditors’ claims, or securing

his own release from the Tower, where Oliver

Cromwell had imprisoned him as a Royalist. The

frequently bawdy epigrams Apollo and the

Muses (1640)—the manuscript is in the Beineke

Library at Yale—were followed by Epigrams

Divine and Moral in 1641. In 1645 his Trissso-

tetras postulated a mnemonic approach to trigo-

nometry, but his enormous Latin- and Greek-

based coinages render the book virtually

impenetrable. From 1651, in prison, Urquhart

can hardly have stopped writing. After Panto-

chronocanon (1652), a largely fantastical tracing

of the Urquhart family back to Adam, there came

in quick succession Ekskubalauron (1652), an

idiosyncratic history of Scotland, then Logopan-

decteision (1653), the guidelines of a uni-

versal language accompanied by much self-

aggrandizing bluster, and lastly, also in 1653, his

magisterial translation of the first two books of

Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, where all

of his linguistic extravagances and high-

spiritedness happily combined as literature. Ap-

parently, Urquhart’s self-petitioning reached

Cromwell’s ears, for in 1653 he was released. He

died in Middelburg, in Holland, in 1658. An un-

confirmed account that he died of a fit of laughter

on hearing of the Restoration is almost certainly

a fiction.

Readings: Roger Craik, Sir Thomas Urquhart of

Cromarty (1611–1660): Adventurer, Polymath, and

Translator of Rabelais (Lewiston, NJ: Mellen Re-

search University Press, 1993); “Sir Thomas Urqu-

hart’s Apollo and the Muses,” Yale University Gazette

70 (1996): 135–43; R.D.S. Jack and R. J. Lyle, eds.

The Jewel by Sir Thomas Urquhart (Edinburgh: Scot-

tish Academic Press, 1983); John Willcock, Sir Tho-

mas Urquhart of Cromartie (Edinburgh: Oliphant, An-

derson & Ferrier, 1899).

Roger Craik

UTOPIA The shortened title of a work of fic-

tion by Sir Thomas More (1516) which, like

Montaigne’s Essais, gave rise to a new literary

genre of the same name. Based on two Greek

roots, oy¬ (no, not) and to¬ pos (place, region),

More’s Utopia is a newly discovered island that is

nonetheless located “no place” or “nowhere.” By

the time he coined the term, Europeans were fa-

miliar with dozens of “proto-utopian” elements

ranging from Greco-Roman nostalgia for a lost

Golden Age to the messianic, eschatological, and

millennarian yearnings of the Jewish and Chris-

tian traditions. But More’s Utopia does not de-

pend on divine intervention or require the univer-

sal regeneration of humanity. Social evils have

been reduced or eliminated there because the best

form of government had been established from

the ground up by rational human enterprise.

Numerous passing references to Utopie, les

Amaurotes, and Dipsodie in his own books prove

that Rabelais was familiar with More’s work. But

in a larger sense, both Pantagruel and Gargan-

tua share deep affinities with the spirit of Utopia.

Rabelais’s goal of reforming secular and relig-

ious education, which is largely implicit in Pan-

tagruel but which constitutes the principal theme

of Gargantua (13–15, 21–24), is presented as a

way of greatly improving the lives of all mem-

bers of society. The lessons to be drawn from the

Picrocholine War (G. 25–50) are also utopian in

256 Utopia

the sense that they oppose the Erasmian educa-

tion of the ideal prince to the chaotic medieval

traditions of militaristic aggression, continual ter-

ritorial expansionism at the expense of the weak,

unbridled violence, and so on. The celebrated

Abbey of Theleme (G 52–57) can be seen as a

scaled-down version of More’s Utopia, and Ra-

belais’s oft-expressed desire for religious reform

demonstrates nostalgia for a return to the utopian

conditions of the primitive Church.

More’s last two books call into question the

possibility of bringing about successful large-

scale transformations and paint a darker picture

of human nature, which seems better suited to

creating dystopias. Panurge’s obstinate, seem-

ingly inexorable descent into moral and spiritual

autism renders him incapable of using his reason

or grasping the liberating potential of evangelical

charity and pantagruelisme. He also becomes

vulnerable to the most absurd suggestions about

obtaining answers to his questions. The archi-

pelago of the Fourth Book offers many varieties

of collective obsessions fueled by fear and hatred

of those who are different. Finally, although the

message of the oracle is often considered to be

an exhortation to accept the limits of the human

condition, it hardly lives up to the initial expec-

tations of the gentilz compagnons.

Readings: Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Realistic Utopias.

The Ideal Imaginary Societies of the Renaissance,

1516–1630 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); Carla

Freccero, “Theleme: Temporality, Utopia, Supple-

ment,” Father Figures. Genealogy and Narrative

Structure in Rabelais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press, 1991); Marina Leslie, Renaissance Utopias and

the Problem of History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-

sity Press, 1998).

William H. Huseman

V

VILLON, FRANCOIS (1431–after 1463)

Villon is a French fifteenth-century poet and

scholar remembered as much for his brazen per-

sonality as for his fine and witty verse. Described

by Clement Marot in 1533 as “the best Parisian

poet around” (“le meilleur poete parisien qui se

trouve”), Villon is best known for the works Tes-

tament, Ballade des dames du temps jadis, and

Ballade des pendus. Only 3,000 lines of Villon’s

poetry are known today. Imprisoned at least

twice for murder, theft, and assault, Villon van-

ished when he was thirty-two and no subsequent

record of him exists. This mysterious disappear-

ance augments his legend. Much read in the six-

teenth century, Villon’s works were ignored with

the advent of classicism but enjoyed renewed

popularity in the nineteenth century.

Rabelais’s fleeting references to Villon in

chapters 14 and 23 of Pantagruel (1532) reflect

both Villon’s poetry and his reputation. In the

poetry, the giant Pantagruel’s ne’er-do-well

friend Panurge compares his loss of money to

Villon’s famous query, “But where are the snows

of yesteryear?” (“Mais ou sont les neiges

d’antan?”). With this remark Rabelais highlights

what remains to this day Villon’s most famous

line. Chapter 23 describes Villon haggling with

the former Persian king Xerxes over the price of

mustard. Villon protests Xerxes’s hard bargain

by urinating into the mustard bucket. Mentioning

Villon in neither Gargantua (1534) nor the

Third Book (1543), Rabelais twice highlights the

Villon persona in his final edition of the Fourth

Book (1552). The stories found in both chapters

13 and 67 portray Villon as a ribald bon vivant

who offers witty rhymes—rewritings of Villon’s

actual verse—as he first performs a cruel hoax

and, second, nonchalantly pays a visit to the Eng-

lish king Edward V. Rabelais has transformed

Villon into an older gadfly who mingles com-

fortably with peasantry and royalty alike. Rabe-

lais’s sketches of Villon’s problematic character

serve to underscore Panurge’s flawed nature.

Readings: Margaret Harp, “Panurge and the Villon

Legend in Rabelais’s Quart Livre,” Aevum 3 (1996):

619–23; Louis Thuasne, Villon et Rabelais (Paris,

1911).

Margaret Harp

VIOLENCE Written during a century full of

bloody wars and civil strife, Rabelais’s work sur-

prisingly contains relatively few violent scenes.

Its depictions of graphic and lethal violence are

usually symbolic or even allegorical in nature. Of

the many battles and attacks described in the

work, the most significant is undoubtedly the Pi-

crocholine War (G 25–42), which parodies the

figure of the Habsburg emperor Charles V. Hav-

ing been educated by his humanist tutors shortly

before this conflict, Gargantua demonstrates his

prowess as a warrior as well as the fruits of his

learning, both of which were requirements for

Renaissance gentlemen. Moreover, Frere Jean

kills a preposterous number of enemy soldiers in

order to save his grape vines, in a hyperbolic

parody of the Homeric battle scenes of the Iliad

(G 27). The violence depicted in this war thus

serves multiple purposes: it satirizes the Franco-

Spanish conflict of the first half of the sixteenth

century, it mocks the stereotypical gluttony and

alcoholism of monks, and it emblematizes the

figure of the Renaissance prince. Aside from

these typically polyvalent functions, Rabelaisian

violence is highly stylized and develops accord-

ing to fixed comic codes (e.g., the usage of the

spit on which Panurge was being roasted by the

Turks to kill one of his captors [P 14]), or fol-

lows the dictates of the parodic, anatomical de-

scriptions that are among the distinguishing char-

acteristics of the author’s style, as in the near

258 Virgil

blasphemous scene of Gargantua’s birth (G 6),

or in the aforementioned passage in which Frere

Jean goes on his rampage.

The episode of the Haughty Lady of Paris (P

21–22) raises the important question as to what

may be considered “violent” in Rabelais’s work,

given the radically different perspective from

which we read it. Panurge’s treatment of the Par-

isian lady has (rightly) been read as an instance

of male misogynistic violence and figurative

rape, although sixteenth-century readers would

likely have seen only the comic topoi of the

story—that is, the parody of a religious proces-

sion, the carnivalesque smearing of the body in

refuse, the intrusion of animals into the human

domain, the false genealogy of the stinking

stream behind the Gobelins textile factory—

without recognizing the story as violent.

Similarly, learned readers would have enjoyed

the Homeric references in Gargantua without be-

ing shocked by their violence. Hence, the issue

of realism is crucial to an understanding of vi-

olence in Rabelais. After nearly two hundred

years of realism and its attendant valorizations,

it is difficult for modern readers to see the de-

piction of violence as a kind of trope or figure

of style. One accepts the notion that works of

fiction represent real or (at least) possible worlds,

and the idea that a great writer could laugh at

and even relish violent scenes—see, for example,

Panurge’s delight at torturing bourgeois ladies

and theology students in Pantagruel 16—is un-

acceptable to a modern reader. Perhaps a more

appropriate reaction to Rabelais would be to un-

derstand the depiction of violence as one type of

conventional description among many others de-

rived from the multiplicity of narrative traditions

and techniques that the writer adopts and paro-

dies.

Readings: Douglas L. Boudreau-Tiefezh, “Death in

the Quart Livre,” RN 37.2 (1997): 183–91; Guy De-

merson, “Rabelais et la violence,” Revue litteraire

mensuelle (Europe) 70.757 (1992): 67–79; Dominique

Garand, “Rabelais au risque de la topique,” Violence

et fiction jusqu’a la Revolution, ed. Gabrielle Verdier

(Paris: Etudes Litteraires Francaises, 1995).

David LaGuardia

VIRGIL To the extent that the trope of the

journey in Rabelais is a literalized or spatialized

journey of the individual (a figure, in turn, of

appetite or desire), the Chroniques constute a dis-

tinctively Homeric enterprise (see Homer). But

the journey can just as much be viewed as the

key to the Chroniques as a work inspired by or

modeled upon the Virgilian epic. This is true in

at least two senses. First, Rabelais’s narrative can

be approached as everywhere informed by the

structure of the temporal journey; the Chroniques

are an exercise in time-traveling in which linear

adventures are everywhere fractured and compli-

cated by prophetic and historical or genealogical

perspectives. Second, the narrative of past or

present in Rabelais almost always carries with it

a collective or communitarian force: recollection

or prognostication becomes a matter of cultural

foundation and utopian construction. These are

the narratives on which Virgilian epic depends.

Let us begin with the second point first. In an

obvious or literal sense, the Rabelaisian wars of

domination and colonization (the wars against

the Dipsodes and the Pichrocholians) are an Il-

iadic and, by extension, an Aeneidic theme. It is

also true that Gargantua and Pantagruel are Par-

isian narratives and that Rabelais’s Paris can be

viewed as Virgil’s Rome. The famous or infa-

mous image, envisioned by Panurge, of a city

whose walls are constructed entirely of vulvas

and that must therefore be indestructible, sug-

gests the extent to which the Chroniques promote

an ideology of city-building, of empire. Thus,

Panurge is not just Odysseus, but also Achates

to Pantagruel’s Aeneas. Odysseus is the lone

survivor of his odyssey: the Homeric journey is

the journey of the individual, returning to rein-

tegrate into the community. But Pantagruel re-

mains one with his friends (a symbol of cohe-

sion, community, and fidelity from beginning to

end). See the list of faithful hero-friend pairs in

the very last chapter (47) of the Fifth Book, and

their journey is one that aims to build a com-

munity that cannot yet be said to exist. Aeneas’s

story cannot be separated from Rome’s; it is one

and the same. The Chroniques, then, are every-

where concerned with foundation, with the con-

struction of ideal communities or utopias. The-

leme, of course, represents the most obvious and

explicit of these communities. (Pantagruel’s own

nation is the Amaurotes, or “Obscure”; it is sit-

uated in Utopia.)

Voyage 259

Theleme, as a utopian empire, is also a future

present: an ideal teleology. As such, it suggests

to what extent the Chroniques depend on a kind

of temporal elasticity that is specifically Virgilian

in nature (inflected, as always, with biblical

force). Thus, Rabelais’s frequent genealogies,

vistas opened upon a mythic past, always point

inevitably and simultaneously toward a distant—

and collective—future. Like the Aeneid, the

Chroniques represent a genealogical, and

therefore messianic, epic. Gargantua’s letter to

Pantagruel (P 8), before addressing the specifics

of a humanist education, begins with Gargan-

tua’s hopes of living in and through his son, and

the attendant Virgilian image of the “generations

of men.” The fantastic genealogy of Pantagruel

is modeled as much upon Anchises’s narrative of

Rome as it is upon Matthew’s geneaology of

Christ. (It also reverses Ovid’s etiology of hu-

mankind at Metamorphoses 1.156–162, where

men spring from the earth soaked with the blood

of slain Titans.)

It is important to stress the extent to which

geneaology in Rabelais functions as an image of

historical and communitarian coherence and sta-

bility. The most powerful instance of this prac-

tice is to be found at Gargantua 1, where Ra-

belais capitalizes on the early modern topos of

the translatio imperii and studii. This is a Vir-

gilian genealogy of cultural power that links cul-

tural origins seamlessly with a utopian future.

The model here is once again Anchises’s post-

humous narration of Roman past, present, and

future in Aeneid 6—the single most significant

passage for Rabelais’s purposes in the Chro-

niques.

Rabelais’s text is everywhere driven by this

prophetic impulse. Panurge’s consultation with

the sibyls in the Third Book (16–18) suggests, as

it does in Virgil, the force of a transcendent and

eschatological impulse. At the end of the Fifth

Book we find ourselves in the Temple of Bac-

chus, with Bacbuc, a sybelline priestess, and a

Virgilian figure par excellence. The sound of the

Dive Bouteille is compared to the drone of bees

in a bull—a clear allusion to the oft-cited and

influential bugonia of Virgil’s Georgic 4, which

was commonly moralized in the medieval and

early modern periods as a prophetic image of the

Eucharist: bees symbolizing humanity regener-

ated by the blood of Christ.

But just as in Virgil, Rabelais always seeks to

critique the eschatological impulse, to cast doubt

upon prophetic certainties and utopian destina-

tions. Virgil’s Georgic 4 ends with the suffering

of the decapitated Orpheus. It has often been

pointed out to what extent the tale of Rome tri-

umphant in the Aeneid itself is undermined by

intimations of moral bankruptcy and the possi-

bility of apocalypse. Anchises’s narrative at

Aeneid 6 ends on a note of fratricide and chaos

that is all too easily recognizable in the landscape

of Virgil’s contemporary readers. Rabelais, as the

wars of religion erupt around him, plays a similar

game in the Chroniques. Like Virgil, Rabelais

refuses to take solace in any stable ideology or

historical structure or textual referent: as for Vir-

gil, for Rabelais the past is no guarantee of the

future.

One might conclude here with Panurge’s con-

sultation of the Virgilian and Homeric lots (3BK

10–15), in the Third Book: the consultation of

the Greek and especially the Roman epic as a

prophetic guide by opening up its pages at ran-

dom. But randomness is precisely the problem in

Rabelais, as it is in Virgil. It is interesting to see

how Rabelais both embraces and distances him-

self from the prophetic and the Virgilian. For in

chapters 10 and 11 of the Third Book, Pantagruel

recommends the use of both Virgil and dice—

dice being the perfect emblem here of the alea-

tory. The image is one that suggests the emblem-

atic Rabelaisian synthesis (or lack of synthesis)

between historical precedents or textual grounds

and the uncertain and uninterpretable force of the

random.

Readings: Gerard Defaux, “Le curieux, le glorieux

et la sagesse du monde dans la premiere moitie du

XVIe siecle,” French Forum Monographs 34 (Lexing-

ton, KY: French Forum, 1982); Myth and Legend in

French Literature, ed. Keith Aspley, David Bellos,

and Peter Sharratt (London: Modern Humanities Re-

search Association, 1982) 47–50.

Matthew Gumpert

VOYAGE Rabelais traveled extensively dur-

ing his lifetime. Born near Chinon, he studied at

Fontenay-Le-Comte in the Bas-Poitou and at

Maillezais. He then traveled to Bordeaux, Tou-

260 Voyage

louse, Orleans, Paris, Lyon, Montpellier, and

throughout the south of France. He later prac-

ticed medicine in several French cities, as well

as traveling to and practicing in Turin and Rome,

Italy. Later in life, Rabelais lived in Metz, then

in Saint-Maur, France.

This actual, physical life experience of travel

is rivaled, and perhaps even surpassed, by the

sort of intellectual travel that Rabelais experi-

enced in his humanist quest for knowledge, and

in the abstract, imagined displacements—shifts

in the space of knowledge, whether ideological

or spiritual, shared or solely subjective—that he

requires of himself and his readers.

His four—perhaps five (the anonymous Fifth

Book not having been surely attributed)—pieces

of literature all come under the rubric of epic

literature, but it is undeniable that, in both con-

ventional and unconventional ways (how they

enlarge the scope of hermeneutical apprehension

and the philosophical language of alterity), Pan-

tagruel, Gargantua, the Third Book and the

Fourth Book are also masterpieces of a new var-

iant of travel literature. They both describe the

real space in which their fictive exploits tran-

spire—Chinon and environs, in Gargantua; Poi-

tou, Paris and—a hint of theoretical space—Uto-

pia in Pantagruel; a sea voyage and escales or

ports of call at several islands in the Fourth Book

(continued in the Fifth Book)—as well as invite

the reader into a meditation on the nature of life

and gnosis: a kind of guided tour of systems of

knowledge. These compositions—episodic, ap-

parently fragmented—mime the stop-and-start

nature of a person on a trip, pausing here and

there to glean information or simply just to look

around.

The Third Book is the least explicitly land-

linked of all; it recounts Panurge’s incessant

personal divagations, emotional and intellectual,

and his quest for knowledge and reassurance as

he assays various methods for finding and keep-

ing a wife. In that sense, the Third Book is per-

haps the most obvious component of the new sort

of travel literature that Rabelais is drafting, for it

requires the reader to enter into the ontological

and subjective space of another being. Panurge

himself is a form of trickster, a shape-shifter

whom Gerard Defaux has described as an am-

biguous, pliable character subject to internal

metamorphoses. Panurge, that is to say, travels

both within and without himself. Rabelais’s fas-

cination with both experiential and virtual space

and travel, a reflection not only of his own search

for knowledge but also of his time period’s fas-

cination with travel, cartography, and cosmog-

raphy, manifests itself from the very inception of

his narrative project: “It won’t be a waste of

time, since we’re in no particular hurry, if I begin

by reminding you of the primal roots from which

our good Pantagruel flowered. Besides, all good

historians begin their chronicles that way, and

not just the Arabs, the Barbarians, and the Ro-

mans, but also the noble Greeks” (P 1; GP 135).

By commencing Pantagruel with reference to

other nations of the world (“Arabs,” “Barbari-

ans,” “Romans,” “Greeks”) and thereby intro-

ducing the “other” into his text, Rabelais begins

to map out the space of the text, and the space

toward which it will travel, in its quest for

knowledge. This search is always relativistic

rather than self-referential.

Rabelais, avatar of humanist curiosity and en-

cyclopedic cravings par excellence, invites his

reader to join him on a textual journey toward

the discovery of multilayered resonance rather

than exclusive, totalitarian interpretation. He

seeks a reader who will not perform a reduction,

but rather an amplification of meaning, and

hopes for a journeyman geographer not content

with the confines of the known world, but rather

avid for the far-flung, unexplored reaches be-

yond: one who will become, like Rabelais him-

self, “ung abysme de science” (“an abyss of

knowledge” [P 8]).



of Two Renaissance Mock Epics (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 1982); Tom Conley, “Du mot a la

carte: Verbal Cartographies of Gargantua (ch. 33),”

Writing the Renaissance; Essays on Sixteenth-Century

French Literature in Honor of Floyd Gray, ed. Ray-

mond La Charite (Lexington, KY: French Forum,

1992); Gerard Defaux, Rabelais agonistes: du rieur au

prophete: Etudes sur Pantagruel, Gargantua, et Le

quart livre (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Michel Jeanneret,

Perpetuum mobile: Metamorphoses des corps et des

oeuvres de Vinci a Montaigne (Paris: Macula, 1997).

Catharine Randall

W

WARFARE For Rabelais war was always

metaphorical, as illustrated by Pantagruel’s

shattering the very possibility of resistance in the

physetere episode of the Fourth Book (33–34).

This conquest of nature follows the evocation of

the best (Guillaume du Bellay [27]) and worst

of men (the “Papelars” and “Demoniacal Cal-

vins, Genevan Impostors” [32]), and encouraged

readers to revel in the giant’s destructive prow-

ess. The Physetere episode leads immediately to

the comic battle with sausages and then to the

more obviously mimetic encounter with the re-

doubtable Homenaz. Along with the concluding

chapters and the storm reworked from the 1548

edition, it can be read as a reassertion and cele-

bration of Pantagruel’s humanity, in contrast to

the proto-Baroque challenges of the rest of the

Fourth Book.

The earliest book, Pantagruel, also centered

on the epochal struggle between the human and

the bestial. After Panurge shows that “ingenuity

is worth more than force” (P 27) by roasting their

chivalric adversaries over a slow fire, Pantagruel

embodies Christian conduct in his duel with the

werewolf Loup Garou. For all the piety of his

prayer (where Cuius regio, eius religio makes an

early appearance), the giant forgets the primacy

of faith for a moment in the heat of the battle.

His Creator intervenes as promised, however,

and delivers a champion who would have been

sundered from nave to chaps without His aid.

Nowhere are the differences between Panta-

gruel and Gargantua more clear than in their

martial metaphors. The contrast between

Grandgousier’s eagerness to appease his chol-

eric neighbors and Frere Jean’s ardor makes

space for the political concerns central to this

book. The old Europe of weak monarchs united

under the tutelage of an emperor aspiring to

world dominion was represented by Picrochole,

while the new political order of strong and in-

dependent kings was represented by the younger

generation, Gargantua and his companions. The

most explicit elaboration of this vision was Ul-

rich Gallet’s Ciceronian harangue, in which Gal-

let recalls how two autonomous monarchs were

able to band together to preserve peace and pros-

perity for both of them. Such an arrangement re-

called the brief but close alliance between Fran-

cis I and Henry viii and the negotiations in Rome

on Henry’s behalf by Jean du Bellay, Rabelais’s

patron and bishop of Paris.

The metaphorical nature of Rabelais’s ongoing

interest in warfare is made most explicit in the

prologue to the Third Book, when the narrator

takes preparation for war as emblematic of civic

life in general. In the first chapter, however, he

makes clear that his interest will be less in the

violent changes wrought by force of arms than

in the influence of family life. In Gargantua, Ra-

belais had sketched his vision of a political order

freed from traditional constraints; twelve years

later, he had become unabashedly conservative.

Panurge’s Praise of Debts immediately reveals

his now characteristic solipsism, for which the

remedy shown throughout the rest of the book,

for instance in the selection of marriage part-

ners, is reinforced reliance on patriarchal author-

ity.

Reading: Edward Benson, “The Development of

Rabelais’ Historical Consciousness in the Picrocholine

and Dipsodean Wars,” ER 13 (1976): 159–61.

Edward Benson

WECHEL, CHRETIEN (ff. 1526–54) Pari-

sian printer/bookseller and a humanist publisher,

for example, of the earliest French editions of the

Emblemata of Andrea Alciato. Printed the first

edition of the Third Book in 1546 but was not

employed by Rabelais again, with whom he may

262 Wine

well have been involved in a legal dispute early

in 1546.

Reading: Hubert Elie, “Chretien Wechel, imprimeur

a Paris,” Gutenberg-Jahrbuch (1954): 181–97.

Stephen Rawles

WINE A dominant theme in Rabelais’s work,

wine provides a key to his meaning and his sym-

bolic system in general. The opening words,

“Beuveurs tres illustres” (“Illustrious topers,” G

prol.) address readers capable of drinking in Ra-

belais’s message. The greatest topers are Pan-

tagruel (� All-Athirst) and Gargantua (“Que

grand tu as! supple le gousier” [“What a big one

you have! meaning the throat”] G 7). Rabelais’s

wine, the content of his apparently frivolous

books, must be interpreted as “a plus hault sens,”

in the higher sense, and he promises revelations

of high sacraments and mysteries. He compares

himself to Homer and Ennius, admitting that his

book smells more of wine than of study-lamp oil

(G prol.).

The prologue to the Third Book is again ad-

dressed to the Good Topers, inviting them to phi-

losophize “en vin, non en vain, ains plus-que-

physicalement” (“in wine, not in vain, thus more

than physically”). Like Diogenes, Rabelais rolls

his barrel and invites the good topers to drink,

for his barrel/book has an inexhaustible and eter-

nal source. It will never run dry; Good Hope lies

at the bottom.

Wine appears in repeated banquet scenes

throughout the five books, prominently in Gar-

gantua, the “propos des bien yvres,” where the

punning is based on ecclesiastical and evangeli-

cal joking. Wine dominates chapter 27, where

Frere Jean defends the abbey vineyard, deci-

mating the enemy with the base of the crucifix

as a club. This terrible weapon (� the foundation

of the faith) defeats the marauding army and

transforms the fallen into a bloody mess resem-

bling trampled grapes.

In the Fourth Book, the figureheads on the

twelve ships are mostly emblems of wine: a half-

full bottle, a tankard, a wine-pot, a vase, a

monk’s drinking-bowl, a funnel, a goblet, a glass,

and a wine-cask. The Divine Bottle chapters of

the Fifth Book, penned by Rabelais or by some-

one with equivalent erudition, manipulate the

same symbols. Led by the priestess Bacbuc (im-

itating the sound of wine being decanted), the

company enters the temple through a vineyard

planted by Bacchus, god of wine and a symbol

for Christ. The temple floor is paved with repro-

ductions of grape vines so realistic that the com-

pany feels it is walking above a real vineyard.

The walls depict the conquest of India by Bac-

chus (figuring the conquest of the infidel by

Christ). Once Panurge has performed the ritual,

the Word he hears from the bottle is simply (and

profoundly) “Trinch!” (� Trink! � Drink!).

What is the symbolism of the wine? Rabelais

works on two levels simultaneously: surface rib-

aldry and joking, and profound seriousness. On

the deeper level, he draws on traditional Chris-

tian and hermetic sources rediscovered by pre-

cursors: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Mar-

silio Ficino, Nicholas of Cusa, and Francesco

Colonna. Rabelais’s preoccupation with wine

symbolism is not unusual for his time: from the

fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, in-

creasingly bloody crucifixion scenes and cruci-

fixes were created. The mystical theme of “The

Fountain of Life” depicts the cross rising from a

large chalice filled with the blood flowing from

Christ’s wounds, while the faithful prepare for a

purifying, saving baptism of blood. Eucharistic

symbolism produces, for example, depictions of

Christ crushed by a giant cruciform winepress,

his blood gushing into a waiting vat. His is eter-

nal, inexhaustible blood, like the wine in Rabe-

lais’s barrel, having already filled countless wine

barrels being hauled away and stored in

churches. Rabelais’s barrel-books contain Wis-

dom, the Good News as purveyed in his jolly

Franciscan, Benedictine, evangelical idiom. His

church, the wine of his message, consists of com-

munion, prayer, thanksgiving, joy, and full par-

ticipation in the banquet of life. Eucharistia, Ec-

clesia, Evangelium unite for him as aspects of

Christ the Logos, all part of the Good News, the

potus laetitiae.

Readings: Edwin Duval, “La messe, la cene, et le

voyage sans fin du Quart livre,” ER 21 (1988): 131–

41; Etienne Gilson, “Rabelais franciscain,” Les idees

et les lettres (Paris: Vrin, 1955); Fred W. Marshall,

“Les symboles des allegories de Rabelais,” BAARD

5. 2 (1993): 86–102; Per Nykrog, “Theleme, Panurge

et la Dive Bouteille,” Revue d’histoire litteraire de

la France 65 (1965): 383–97; M. A. Screech,

Women 263

L’Evangelisme de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1959);

Florence Weinberg, The Wine and the Will (Detroit:

Wayne State University Press, 1972); Florence Wein-

berg, Rabelais et les lecons du rire (Orleans: Para-

digme, 2000).


WOMEN The question of the portrayal of

women in Rabelais’s books has the status of a

veritable querelle or polemic, with critics arguing

either that Rabelais champions the equality of

women—citing the enlightened sexual politics of

the Abbey of Theleme to prove it—or that he is

a misogynist in the grand tradition—pointing to

the episode of the Haughty Lady of Paris and

the debates on marriage in the Third Book as

evidence for the claim. Rabelais’s women are

few and far between: Gargantua and Panta-

gruel’s mothers (G 3–4; P 2), who die early on

in the lives of the two heroes; the girls who assist

the boys in creating the leagues of France (P 23;

TLF 15); the women referred to in Theleme,

whose presence counters conventional represen-

tations of convents and monasteries as gender-

segregated environments (G 50–55; TLF 52–57);

Bacbuc, the Sybil-like oracle of the Holy Bottle

(Fifth Book); and, of course, the Haughty Lady

of Paris whom Panurge courts, and her nameless

counterpart, the lady who sends a ring and a

cryptic message to Pantagruel upon his desertion

of her (P 23–24; TLF 14–15).

Indeed, these last two constitute the only real

potential disruption of the all-male world of Ra-

belais’s epic-cum-quest narrative, wherein a

hero—after numerous trials and adventures in

the company of men—embarks upon a journey,

not for himself but for his sidekick, to answer

the question of whether Panurge should marry.

Since the narrative targets precisely that conven-

tion of male questing that consists in cherchez la

femme, it is no surprise that she should remain,

for the most part, an elusive object. Yet, in these

twin chapters—which have, as their source, an

Italian short story by Masuccio Salernitano (Il

Novellino, story 41)—the question of woman’s

subjectivity is both raised and articulated. On the

one hand, the episode of the Haughty Lady of

Paris represents the female voice in direct dia-

logue with Panurge and leaves room in that di-

alogue for difference, especially the difference of

interpretation that arises as a result, in part, of

the gender of each speaker. On the other hand,

the episode of the ring (P 23–24; TLF 14–15)

both thematizes “woman” as resistive inscription

in the text and critiques efforts to force it to yield

up its meaning to masculine acts of reading. Fi-

nally, the episode suggests that “woman” as in-

telligible sign functions as a relay for the mas-

culine unconscious and thus that “woman” per se

is, as Luce Irigaray (Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un)

has argued, nowhere to be found in the economy

of masculine signification.

The lady, whom Pantagruel abandoned when

he left Paris upon hearing of his father’s death,

sends him a message, an inscribed diamond ring

accompanied by a blank letter. Panurge and com-

pany try all manner of decoding techniques to

force the letter to yield letters, but to no avail.

The message, as ultimately decoded, is to be

found in the materiality of the ring and its in-

scription. The false diamond and the phrase, “la-

mah hazabtani” (described as Hebrew in the

text), must be translated (on the one hand, from

matter to meaning and, on the other, from one

language and linguistic context to another) into

“Dy, amant faulx, pourquoy me as tu laissee?”

(“Say, false lover, why did you leave me?”). It-

self this is an untranslatable phrase insofar as

translation must forego the double meaning of

the “false diamond” (“diamant faulx”) conveyed

by the French decoding. The resistive inscription

that is the woman’s message signifies, but the

materiality of the signifier refuses to yield itself

in full.

Lamah hazabtani is also the phrase Jesus

speaks to his father on the cross, and thus, for

Pantagruel, it is an unconscious echo of his own

situation of having lost his father (who has been,

as the text puts it, “translated” to the country of

fairies [P 23; TLF 15]). Pantagruel, like the lady,

has been abandoned by someone he loves, and

whereas for her it is him, for him it is his father.

She thus occupies his place in relation to the lost

object of love. In the encounter with difference,

what Pantagruel finds is an identification. Al-

though readers might therefore wish to point to

this moment as further evidence of Rabelais’s

erasure of or disregard for women, the text nev-

ertheless seems to have anticipated just that per-

ception; for the identification with and erasure of

264 Women

the woman the episode performs occur around

the question of loss, erasure, or, better yet,

“translation.” Ultimately, whatever one may say

about Rabelais’s portrayal of women, his text al-

legorizes the impossibility of either fully effacing

or fully representing (sexual) difference, the dif-

ference that is “woman.”

Readings: Carla Freccero, “The ‘Instance’ of the

Letter: Woman in the Text of Rabelais,” Rabelais’s

Incomparable Book: Essays on his Art, ed. Raymond

La Charite (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986);

Luce Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Min-

uit, 1977), translated as This Sex Which Is Not One,

trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Francois Rigo-

lot, “Rabelais, Misogyny, and Christian Charity: Bib-

lical Intertextuality and the Renaissance Crisis of

Exemplarity,” PMLA 109.2 (March 1994): 225–37;

Masuccio Salernitano, Il Novellino, ed. A. Mauro

(Bari: Laterza, 1940); Michael A. Screech, The Rab-

elaisian Marriage: Aspects of Rabelais’s Religion,

Ethics, and Comic Philosophy (London: Arnold,

1958); Elizabeth Chesney Zegura, “Toward a Feminist

Reading of Rabelais,” JMRS 15.1 (Spring 1985): 124–

34.

Carla Freccero

X

XENOMANES A noble and seasoned explorer

engaged by Panurge at the end of the Third

Book, Xenomanes determines the itinerary of

the Thalamege on its way to visit Bacbuc, the

oracle of the Holy Bottle. His name, meaning

“lover of foreign lands and people,” epitomizes

the outgoing curiosity of Pantagruel and his

companions during their travels recounted in the

Fourth Book. Described as a great “traverseur

de voies perilleuses (passerby of perilous

ways),” Xenomanes is perhaps an oblique refer-

ence to Rabelais’s friend, the poet Jean Bouchet

who gave himself the same title as acknowledg-

ment of his spiritual struggles. As navigator, Xe-

nomanes is the only crew member familiar with

the many alien communities that Pantagruel and

his friends encounter during their voyage. He

thus influences Pantagruel in his choice of stops

on the voyage. In chapters 29–33 of the Fourth

Book, Xenomanes serves as a powerful narrator

in his description of Quaresmeprenant, or

Lentkeeper, whom he discourages Pantagruel

from meeting. This “great snail eater” reigns

over an island community devoted to exagger-

ated and perpetual Lenten practice, devoid of

spiritual intent. Xenomanes assures Pantagruel

that the gaunt ruler’s habit of crying for three-

fourths of the day while maintaining a diet of

dry peas would make him very poor company

for the jubilant Thalamege crew. Xenomanes

nonetheless offers an encyclopedic description

of Quaresmeprenant’s appearance, behavior, and

character, providing both crew and readers a

vivid and diverting account of the island. Pan-

tagruel readily accepts Xenomanes’s warnings in

both incidents, revealing a level of trust in his

advisers unseen by the largely impetuous island

rulers whom Pantagruel encounters during his

travels.

Reading: Francoise Joukovsky, “Les Narres du

Tiers livre et du Quart livre” in La nouvelle fran-

caise a la Renaissance (Paris: Editions Slatkine,

1981).

Margaret Harp

SelectedBibliography

SPECIALIZED

BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Braunrot, Bruno. Francois Rabelais: A Reference

Guide, 1550–1990. New York: G. K. Hall,

1994.

Cabeen, David C., ed. A Critical Bibliography of

French Literature. The Sixteenth Century. Syr-

acuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1956,

817–916.

Cioranescu, Alexandre. Bibliographie de la litterature

francaise au 16e siecle. Paris: Librairie C.

Klincksieck, 1959, 17933–18789.

Cordie, Carlo. “Recenti studi sulla vita e sulle opere

di Francois Rabelais, 1939–1950.” Letterature

moderne I (1950): 107–20.

Plan, Pierre-Paul. Bibliographie rabelaisienne: Les ed-

itions de Rabelais de 1532 a 1711. Paris: Im-

primerie Nationale, 1904.

Plattard, Jean. Etat present des etudes rabelaisiennes.

Paris: Societe d’edition “Les belles lettres,”

1927.

Rackow, Paul. “Der gegenwartige Stand der Rabelais-

Forschung.” Germanisch-romanische Monat-

schrift 17 (1930): 198–211 and 277–90.

Rawles, Stephen, and M. A. Screech. A New Rabelais

Bibliography. Editions of Rabelais before

1626. ER 20 (Geneva: Droz, 1987).

Saulnier, Verdun-Louis. “Dix annees d’etudes rabe-

laisiennes.” Bibliotheque d’Humanisme et Ren-

aissance 11 (1949): 104–28.

Schrader, Ludvig. “Die Rabelais-Forschung der Jahre

1950–1960: Tendenzen und Ergebnisse.” Ro-

manistisches Jahrbuch, 11 (1960): 161–201.

IMPORTANT EDITIONS OF

RABELAIS’S WORKS

Oeuvres. Ed. Charles Marty-Laveaux. 6 vols. Paris:

Lemerre, 1868–1903.

Oeuvres. Ed. Abel Lefranc and Robert Marichal et al.

7 vols. Paris and Geneva: E. Champion and E.

Droz, 1912–65.

Oeuvres. Ed. Variorium. 9 vols. Paris: Dalibon, 1923–

26.

Oeuvres completes. Ed. Jean Plattard. 5 vols. Paris: F.

Roches, 1929.

Pantagruel. Ed. Verdun-Louis Saulnier. Geneva:

Droz, 1946.

The quart livre. Ed. Robert Marichal. Geneva: Droz,

1947.

L’Abbaye de Theleme. Ed. Raoul Morcay. Geneva:

Droz, 1947.

Oeuvres completes. Ed. Marcel Guilbaud. 5 vols.

Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1957.

Oeuvres completes. Ed. Jacques Boulenger and Lucien

Scheler (Bibliotheque de la Pleiade). Paris:

Gallimard, 1959.

Oeuvres completes. Ed. Pierre Jourda. 2 vols. Paris:

Garnier, 1962.

Le tiers livre. Ed. Michael A. Screech. Geneva: Droz,

1964.

Pantagruel. Ed. Verelun-Louis Saulnier. Geveva:

Droz, 1965.

Gargantua. Ed. Ruth Calder, Michael A. Screech, and

Verdun-Louis Saulnier. Geneva: Droz, 1970.

Oeuvres completes. Ed. Guy Demerson. Paris: Seuil,

1973.

Oeuvres completes. Ed. Mireille Huchon. Bibliotheque

de la Pleiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1994.

STANDARD TRANSLATIONS

Francois Rabelais. Gargantua and Pantagruel. Trans.

Jacques Le Clercq (The Modern Library). New

York: Random House, 1936.


John Michael Cohen. Baltimore: Penguin

Books, 1955.


Sir Thomas Urquhart and Peter Le Motteux.

Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1955.

Francois Rabelais. Gargantua and Pantagruel: Selec-

tions. Trans. Floyd Gray. New York:

Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1966.


268 Selected Bibliography

Burton Raffel. New York: W. W. Norton,

1990.

Francois Rabelais. The Complete Works of Rabelais.

Trans. Donald M. Frame. Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1991.

IMPORTANT PERIODICALS

Bibliotheque d’humanisme et Renaissance (1941 to

present).

Bulletin de l’association des amis de Rabelais et de la

Deviniere (1951 to present).

Etudes rabelaisiennes (1959 to present).

Humanisme et Renaissance (1913–32), (1934–40).

Revue des etudes rabelaisiennes (1903–12).

IMPORTANT CRITICAL

STUDIES

Albala, Ken. Food in Early Modern Europe. Westport,

CT: Greenwood, 2003.

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Rabelaisiennes 12. Geneva: Droz, 1976.

Auerbach, Erich. “The World in Pantagruel’s Mouth.”

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in

Western Literature, pp. 262–84. Trans. Willard

Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press, 1953.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Es-

says. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Hol-

quist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

———. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iwol-

sky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968.

Baraz, Michael. Rabelais et la joie de la liberte. Paris:

Jose Corti, 1983.

Beaujour, Michel. Le jeu de Rabelais. Paris: Editions

de l’Herne, 1969.

Berlioz, Marc. Rabelais restitue. Paris, 1978.

Berrong, Richard. Every Man for Himself: Social Or-

der and Its Dissolution in Rabelais. Saratoga,

CA: ANMA Libri, 1985.

———. Rabelais and Bakhtin. Popular Culture in

Gargantua and Pantagruel. Lincoln and Lon-

don: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.

Berry, Alice Fiola. The Charm of Catastrophe. A

Study of Rabelais’s Quart Livre. Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

———. Rabelais: “Homo Logos.” Studies in the Ro-

mance Languages and Literatures. Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 1979.

Bloch, R. Howard. Etymologies and Genealogies. A

Literary Anthropology of the French Middle

Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1983.

Boulenger, Jacques. Rabelais. Paris: Editions Colbert,

1942.

Bowen, Barbara. The Age of Bluff. Paradox and Am-

biguity in Rabelais and Montaigne. Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 1972.

———. Enter Rabelais, Laughing. Nashville, TN:

Vanderbilt University Press, 1998.

———. “L’Episode des Andouilles (Rabelais, Quart

livre, chapitres XXXV–XLIIII), esquisse d’une

methode de lecture.” Cahiers de Varsovie 8

(1981): 111–26.

———. “Lenten Eels and Carnival Sausages.”

L’esprit createur 21 (1981): 12–25.

Brault, Gerard. “ ‘Un abysme de Science.’ On the In-

terpretation of Gargantua’s Letter to Panta-

gruel.” Bibliotheque d’Humanisme et Renais-

sance 28 (1966): 615–32.

Brown, Huntington. Rabelais in English Literature.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1933.

Busson, Henri. Le rationalisme dans la litterature

francaise de la Renaissance. Paris: Vrin, 1957,

pp. 157–68.

Campion, Edmund J. Montaigne, Rabelais, and Marot

as Readers of Erasmus. New York: Edwin

Mellen Press, 1995.

Carpenter, Nan Cooke. Rabelais and Music. Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

1954.

Carron, Jean-Claude, ed. Francois Rabelais: Critical

Assessments. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-

versity Press, 1995.

Cave, Terence. The Cornucopian Text: Problems of

Writing in the French Renaissance. Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1979.

Ceard, Jean. La nature et les prodiges. L’insolite au

XVIe siecle, en France. Geneva: Droz, 1977.

Ceard, Jean, and Jean-Claude Margolin, eds. Rabelais

en son demi-millenaire. Actes du colloque in-

ternational de Tours (24–29 septembre, 1984).

Geneva: Droz, 1988.

Chesney, Elizabeth A. The Countervoyage of Rabelais

and Ariosto: A Comparative Reading of Two

Renaissance Mock Epics. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 1982.

Clark, Carol. The Vulgar Rabelais. Glasgow: Press-

gang, 1983.

Coleman, Dorothy Gabe. Rabelais: A Critical Study in

Prose Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 1973.

Colie, Rosalie. Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renais-

sance Tradition of Paradox. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1966.

Conley, Tom. The Graphic Unconscious in Early


Modern French Writing. Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1992.

Cooper, Richard. Rabelais et I’Italie. Geneva: Droz,

1991.

Costa, Dennis. Irenic Apocalypse. Some Uses of Apoc-

alyptic in Dante, Petrarch, and Rabelais. Stan-

ford, CA: Anima Libri, 1981.

Defaux, Gerard. Le curieux, le glorieux et la sagesse

du monde dans la premiere moitie du XVIe sie-

cle: l’exemple de Panurge (Ulysse, Demosthe-

nes, Empedocle). Lexington, KY: French Fo-

rum, 1982.

———. “A propos de paroles gelees et degelees

(Quart Livre 55–56): ‘Plus hault sens’ ou ‘lec-

tures plurielles’?” Rabelais’s Incomparable

Book: Essays on His Art, ed. Raymond La

Charite. Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986.

———. Pantagruel et les sophistes: Contribution a

l’histoire de l’humanisme chretien au XVIe sie-

cle. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973.

———. Rabelais agonistes: Du rieur au prophete:

Etudes sur Pantagruel, Gargantua, Le quart

livre. Geneva: Droz, 1997.

De Greve, Marcel. L’interpretation de Rabelais au

XVIe siecle. Geneva: Droz, 1961.

Demerson, Guy. Francois Rabelais. Paris: Fayard,

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Index

Abel. See Cain and Abel

Accursius, Franciscus, 143, 218

Aeneas, 108, 147, 229; friendship with Achates, 86,

258

Agrippa, Henry Cornelius, of Nettesheim, 1, 27, 59,

110, 154, 231

Alberti, 63

Alchemy and alchemists, 1–2, 38, 108; association

of Alcofrybas with, 169, 141; in Fifth Book, 2, 38,

78; Thaumaste and, 66, 175

Alciato, Andrea, 64, 65, 186, 261

Alcofrybas, 2–3, 5, 32, 97, 128, 252, 169, 241; as

character in narrative, 84, 91, 163, 166; disappear-

ance of, 221, 223; first recipient of Salmigondin,

48, 221; as healer, 120, 116; narrative style and

stance of, 15, 39, 41, 70, 91–93, 115, 130–31,

141, 166–67, 194–95, 204, 223

Alexander VI (pope), 30, 108

Allegory, 3–5, 17, 37, 131, 158, 217, 230, 235–36,

244; critical attitude toward, 18, 75, 118–19, 155;

of Enigmatic Prophecy, 68, 93; possible use by

Rabelais, 16, 69, 90, 95– 96, 129, 162, 173, 180,

184, 187, 199, 222, 237, 257, 264; in religious

and platonic contexts, 76, 91, 169

Almanachs, 5–6, 13, 167, 194, 197

Alterity or Otherness, 6, 46, 93, 187, 254, 260

Amaurotes, 7, 163, 176, 255, 258

Amazon, 170

Ambiguity and ambivalence, 17, 36, 44, 51, 70, 72,

80, 81, 96, 110, 127, 129, 130, 131, 140, 152,

172, 196, 199, 202, 209, 223, 233, 246; and

Bakhtin, 18; and folly, 81; of Gargantua, when

Badebec dies, 154; of Gaster, 158, 184; mode of

writing, 44, 52, 96, 130, 170, 252; in other Ren-

aissance texts, 172, 229; of Pantagruelion, 177; of

Panurge and his problem, 110, 157, 202, 223; of

Quaresmeprenant, 199; of reactions to Rabelais,

67; of relationship between text or author and

readers, 131; of Sileni, 196

Anarche, King of the Dipsodes, 7, 34, 54, 102, 114,

146, 176, 246

Andouilles, 7–8, 10, 28, 40, 55, 73, 152, 157, 162,

170, 187, 216, 223; as Swiss reformers, 181

Androgyne, 8–9, 65, 104–5, 114, 131, 169

Aneau, Barthelemy, 205

Animals, 9–11, 33, 52–53, 55, 146, 155, 186, 222,

239; talking, 82

Annian, or Annius, of Viterbo (Giovanni Nanni), 20,

101

Anticaritas, 33, 50, 90, 118

Antiphysie, 162, 167, 187, 205

Apedeftes (Island of the Ignorant), 77, 214

Apelles, 12

Apianus, Petrus, 98

Apocalypse, and apocalyptic references, 68, 90, 197,

259

Aquinas, Thomas, 226

Arande, Michel d’, 22

Ariosto, 32, 67, 172

Aristides, 12

Aristotle, 9, 10, 11–12, 20, 48, 58, 86, 87, 139, 146,

151, 162, 186, 187, 203, 210, 213, 226, 233, 240;

linguistic theories, 169

Arsewipe, 10, 18, 20, 114, 123, 127, 224, 234

Art and Architecture, 12, 133, 139, 140, 155, 184;

interest in, among other humanists, 38, 84; of

Renaissance, 127, 140, 243

Arveiller, Raymond, 23

Asclepiades, 12–13

Astrology and astrologers, 13–14, 58, 66, 194, 209;

in Almanachs, 5–6; Herr Trippa and, 1, 110, 223;

humanist fascination with, 187, 76, 169; warnings

against, 65, 93, 175, 187, 209, 227

Astronomy, 13, 24, 63, 164, 227

Atheneus, 228

Atkinson, Geoffroy, 249

Aubigne, Agrippa d’, 205

Augustine, Saint, 101, 102, 161, 185, 186, 229, 236,

243

Authority, challenge of, 224; of individuals and hu-

man reason, 158, 212; judicial and legal, 23, 111;

misplaced, 186, 191; patriarchal, 64, 94, 261; po-

litical, 50, 54, 194; pope’s claims to, 163, 181–82;

quest for, by Panurge, 223; respect for, 232; spiri-

tual, 31, 111, 113, 121, 128, 143, 163, 207, 207,

226, 233–34; textual, 10; of Third Book consult-

274 Index

ants, 110, 116; of tradition and the ancients, 11,

28, 98, 139, 143, 189

Averroes, 187

Avicenna, 187

Bacbuc, 15–16, 21, 35, 38, 77, 80, 138, 209, 236,

259, 262–65

Bacchic furor, 33

Bacchus, 12, 33, 78, 213, 259, 262

Bacon, Francis, 67

Badebec, 16, 47, 163, 173

Badius, Conrad, 225

Baisecul and Humesvesne, 16–17, 34, 41, 140–41,

143, 175, 181, 234

Baker, Mary, 195

Bakers and shepherds, 34, 63, 188, 225

Bakhtin, 17–19, 29, 44, 100, 104–5, 106, 122, 129,

130, 170, 174, 179, 190, 191, 210, 212, 225, 231,

235, 251; Panurge’s trickery as cosmic regenera-

tion, 180; on theory of novel, 170, 200

Banquet, 7, 33, 58, 133, 141, 143, 182, 198, 223,

262; of humanists, to honor Dolet, 56, 153; intel-

lectual and philosophical, 157, 182, 223; religious

connotations of, 33, 42, 125, 143, 182, 157, 182,

198, 223, 262

Baptism, 90, 111, 262

Baroque, 211, 261

Barrault, Jean-Louis, 206

Barrel, 41, 262. See also Tub, of Diogenes

Barthes, Roland, 45

Bartolus of Sassofarrato, 143

Basche, 18, 19, 35, 75, 157, 224

Beauce, forest of, 82, 99

Beaujour, Michel, 129

Beauvais, Vincent de, 10, 97

Beda, Noel, 19–20, 70, 134, 151, 208, 226, 233–34,

241

Bells, of Notre Dame, 93, 95, 134, 209, 218, 234

Belon, Pierre, 10

Bembo, Pietro, 127

Ben Geron, Levi, 15

Berauld, Nicholas, 56

Berengario da Carpi, Jacopo, 20

Beroalde de Verville, 205

Berquin, Louis de, 31, 233

Berry, Alice Fiola, 24, 88, 90

Beza, Theodore, 205

Bien yvres (bien ivres), propos des, 197–98, 212,

262

Birds, 10, 12, 39, 59, 95, 214, 227, 253

Blazons (blasons), 39, 115, 212, 237, 245, 251

Boccaccio, Giovanni, 132, 225

Body, 20–21, 156–59, 163–64, 212, 216, 228; and

alchemy, 2; analogy of, in Praise of Debts, 2;

analogy with state, 49; in Bakhtin, 17–19; 44; of

Christ, 173, 216; female, 91; grotesque, 51–52,

104–5; knowledge of, 74; mutilated, 47; swelling,

103–4

Bon, Francois, 206

Boniface VIII, 50

Bonnivet, chateau de, 12, 243

Books, confiscation of, 31–32

Booth, Wayne, 45, 106, 252

Borrowings, 63, 142, 219, 222; from antiquity, 10,

125, 140, 145, 162, 164; Biblical and ecclesiasti-

cal, 209, 238; from French authors 15, 24, 51, 91,

94, 95, 125, 140, 163, 174, 212, 214; from He-

brew sources, 15, 34, 107; from Italian authors,

32, 38, 52, 172, 187; from medical manuals, 33,

212

Bosch, Hieronymus, 59, 205

Bottle, Divine, 21, 29, 35, 38, 39, 53, 64, 65, 79, 81,

141, 169, 236, 237, 242, 245, 246, 250, 258, 265;

oracle of, 77; temple of, 12, 80

Bouchard, Amaury, 42, 143

Bouchet, Guillaume, 205

Bouchet, Jean, 42, 58, 76, 144, 265

Bourbon, Nicolas, 56

Bourgeoisie, 49, 62, 191, 211

Bowen, Barbara, 7, 55

Boyssonne, Jean de, 42, 133

Bragmardo, Janotus de. See Janotus de Bragmardo

Brant, Sebastian, 40, 76, 81

Brasavola, 132

Braudel, Fernand, 62

Brault, Gerard, 131

Breughel, Pieter (the Elder), 59, 205

Briconnet, Guillaume, 21–22, 70, 144, 185, 208

Bride, Jobelin, 64, 71, 122, 234

Bridoye (Bridlegoose), 22–23, 40, 135–36, 143, 147,

223, 233, 245, 246, 247, 251; farcical elements of,

75; as fool, 81

Brief Declaration, 15, 23–24, 83, 90, 96, 150, 151,

155, 162, 170, 213, 215, 254

Bringuenarilles, 24, 55, 101, 162, 216

Brown, Huntington, 248

Bruegel, Peter. See Breughel, Pieter (the Elder)

Bucer, Martin, 7

Bude, Guillaume, 16, 24–25, 40, 41, 42, 56, 66, 84,

121, 122, 125, 132, 140, 143, 144, 145, 163, 189,

212; as legist, 132, 143; Rabelais’s correspon-

dence with, 41, 42, 144, 145; Rabelais’s debt to,

24, 41, 122, 125

Burckhardt, Jacob, 211

Burlesque, 32, 42, 73, 95, 104, 125, 172, 175, 177,

215, 219, 220, 221

Butor, Michel, 206

Index 275

Cain and Abel, 100–104, 236

Calcagnini, Celio, 187

Calumny, 26–27, 42, 178–79

Calvin, John (Jean), and Calvinism, 27–28, 32, 51,

56–57, 207; attitude toward Rabelais, 73–74, 205;

criticized Catholic practices, 96, 113, 219–220;

Rabelais’s satire of, 26, 74, 152, 162, 205

Capitalism, rise of, 129, 159

Cardanus, Hieronymus, 222

Caritas, 50, 102, 221. See also Charity

Carnival, 2, 17, 28–29, 152, 250–52, 258; as an

agent of change, 141, 149; Bakhtin’s theories of,

17–19, 100, 106, 129, 130, 170, 225, 231, 252;

feasts associated with, 79–80; figures of, 95, 152;

Lent versus, 7, 80, 170; materialism of, 67; rever-

sal inherent in, 67, 131, 160, 229; spirit of subver-

sion and violence, 44, 183

Carpalim, 79, 176

Carpenter, Nan Cook, 164–65

Cartier, Jacques, 10, 29–30, 84, 98, 166, 170, 214,

222, 249

Cassade, Isle de (Isle of Lying Illusions), 82, 214

Castiglione, Baldassare, 30, 36

Catchpoles. See Chicanous

Cave, Terence, 5, 37, 41, 212, 235

Ceard, Jean, 209

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand, 206

Censors, censorship, and censure, 30–32, 109–10,

178, 196, 226; related to charges of heresy and

executions, 57, 110–12, 208; revisions, as a result

of, 26, 134, 210; by the Sorbonne, 19, 26, 39, 73,

109, 148, 183, 234; of texts by other humanists,

19, 22, 39, 57

Cent nouvelles nouvelles, 179, 225

Cervantes, Miguel de, 32, 206

Chambre ardente, 57, 109, 184

Champier, Symphorien, 149, 218

Champlain, Samuel de, 250

Chaneph, 33, 90, 107, 146, 235

Charity, 33–34, 132, 156, 246; cornerstone of evan-

gelism and Pantagruelism, 73, 178, 246, 256;

demonstrated by Turks, 6; linked to borrowing

and lending, in Praise of Debts, 48; neglect of, 49–

50, 72, 118, 221; symbols and emblems of, 8

Charles V (emperor), 34, 59, 132, 194, 253; associ-

ated with Quaresmeprenant, 7, 162, 216, 75, 85;

identified with Picrochole, 92, 188, 235, 257; Ra-

belais’s mockery of, 122; rivalry with French

kings, 59, 109, 253

Charmois, Charles, 12

Charpentier, Francoise, 46

Charron, Pierre, 139

Chastillon (Chatillon), Cardinal of (Odet de Coli-

gny), protector of Rabelais, 193; Rabelais’s dedi-

catory letter to, 26, 42, 53, 83, 109, 195, 196, 213

Chateaubriand, Francois Rene de, 128, 206

Chats fourrez, 63, 65, 135–36, 214

Cheli, 34–35, 107, 135, 219

Chesil. See Trent, Council of

Chicanous, 19, 35, 135, 161, 236

Chinon, 75, 77, 99–100, 128, 161, 259, 260

Chitterlings. See Andouilles

Chivalry, 85, 227

Cholieres, Nicolas de, 205, 225

Christianization, of ancient thought, 48, 93, 173

Chroniques gargantuines. See Gargantuan Chroni-

cles

Church, the (Catholic), 214, 250; Rabelais and, 74;

resistance to reform of, 181

Cicero, 24, 35–36, 118, 139, 145; Ciceronian “quar-

rel,” 127–28, 140, 203; De amicitia, 86; De divi-

natione, 197; De republica, 151, 203, 213, 227,

261; as educational and rhetorical model, in

Renaissance, 63, 127, 139, 145, 213; letters of,

121, 127; and Quintilian, 127; rhetoric of, 134,

199, 201

Clement V (pope), 50

Clothes, 36, 95, 176, 231, 240; of Anarche, 7; color

of, 39; Gargantua’s livery, 9; Panurge’s, 7, 36,

232, 36, 115; symbolism of, 36, 90; at Theleme,

36, 244. See also Codpiece (or Braguette)

Clouzot, Henri, 126

Codpiece (or Braguette), 36, 37, 102, 217, 219;

abandoned, 52, 237; admiration of nursemaids,

171; associated with copia, 41; praise of, as rhe-

torical paradox or satirical eulogy, 72, 104–5, 167,

212; related to rebirth and reproduction, 167

Coligny, Odet de, Cardinal de Chastillon, 126, 83,

213

College de France, 84

College de Montaigu, 19, 151, 241

College des lecteurs royaux, 19, 107, 193, 234

Collin, Jacques, 30

Colonna, Francesco, 12, 37–38, 61, 77, 78, 115, 133,

262

Colors, 8, 38–39, 167; of clothes, 36, 103, 115, 232,

240; of flying pig, 8; of Frozen Words, 87

Comedy and comic elements, 11, 113, 131, 134,

141, 143, 157, 245–46

Commerce, 40, 62–63, 72, 140, 148, 155, 183, 187

Community, 39–40; change and purification of, 82,

111; of Christian humanists and persecuted Protes-

tants, 6, 188; ideal or model, 82–83, 241–42, 258;

of readers, 86, 166–67; return to, by hero, 258

Conscience, 73, 113, 116, 121, 139, 148, 168, 227–

28

Cooper, Richard, 145

276 Index

Copia, 5, 37, 41, 118, 146, 212. See also Cornucopia

Coq-a-l’ane, 17, 40–41, 148, 221

Cornucopia, 5, 37, 41, 118, 140–41, 146, 158, 212

Correspondence, 35, 39, 41–43, 145

Corrozet, Gilles, 65, 99

Cosmography, 98, 210, 227, 228, 249, 260

Cotgrave, Randle, 67, 75, 206

Couillatris, 43, 53, 82, 158–61, 183, 196, 203, 237

Counter-Reformation, 52, 250

Courtier, satire of, 30

Cousturier, Pierre, 226

Crenne, Helisenne de, 61

Cretin, Guillaume, 202

Critical Theory, 43–46

Cuckoldry, 46, 59, 85, 180, 116, 215, 229, 246, 252

Culture, popular, 44, 100, 104, 129, 141, 165, 190–

91, 212, 231–32

Cuspidius, Lucius, will of (Ex reliquiis venerandae

antiquitatis Lucii Cuspidii Testamentum), 132

Dante, 8, 74, 108, 128, 144, 226

Death, 43, 47–48, 141, 150, 151, 154, 181, 189,

197, 202, 228, 237, 241, 252; of Badebec, 16; in

cycle, followed by reproduction, 167; of Guil-

laume du Bellay, 202; of Pan, 173

Deberre, Jean-Christophe, 49

Debt, 36, 102; forgiveness of, 3

Debts and debtors, praise of, 7, 48–49, 70, 76, 160,

212, 245, 222, 223, 260; alchemical analogies in,

2; allusions to deforestation and economics, 82; as

rhetorical paradox or satirical eulogy, 72, 81, 131

Decretals, 49–50, 53, 117, 147, 182, 204, 223; con-

nection to Frozen Words, 87–88; as satirical eu-

logy, 72

Dedications and dedicatory materials, 5; ironic, 218;

in learned editions, 42, 60, 247; for Quart livre

(1552), 26, 83, 109, 132, 143, 144, 145, 195–96,

213; to syphilitics and the gouty, 238; for Third

Book, 153, 193, 245

Defaux, Gerard, 45, 90, 129, 131, 134, 203, 233,

252, 260

Demonet, Marie-Luce, 15, 23

Derrida, Jacques, 44, 115

Deschamps, Eustache, 218

Des Periers, Bonaventure, 51, 225

Desprez, Francois, 205

Devils and Demonology, 26, 51–52, 79, 90, 143,

169, 235, 209; associated with trickster, 179–80;

false accusations of, 73, 221; in episode of Pap-

efigues, 180–82; on Island of Macreons, 47, 150,

151; origins of Pantagruel, 175, 246; powerless in

the face of God’s will, 5

Dialogue and dialogic elements, 10, 18, 30, 131,

140, 141, 245, 251; as approach to problem solv-

ing, 184; inspired by Lucian, 147, 163; Platonic,

140, 141, 190; in theories of Bakhtin, 18; 170;

widespread use of, in Renaissance, 18, 30, 47, 51,

56, 86, 140, 163

Dice, banning of, 89; for fortune telling, 94, 259; in-

vention of, 97; part of Panurge’s wardrobe, 179;

used for judgment and decision making, 22–23,

78, 135–36, 143, 163, 224, 247

Dieguez, Manuel de, 90

Dindenault (Dingdong), 10, 37, 40, 47, 52–53, 62,

180, 223, 251; burlesque, comical, and farcical el-

ements, 72, 75, 123, 157, 224; economic dimen-

sions, 62, 160–61

Diogenes, 49, 53–54, 70, 125, 262

Dionysius, the Pseudo-Aeropagite, 105

Dionysus (Bacchus), 141

Dipsodes and Dipsodie, 7, 54; lawless government

under Anarche, 176; meaning the “thirsty ones,”

borrowed from More, 197, 246, 255; Pantagruel

colonizes and institutes Utopian society, 34, 54,

133, 174–75; war against, by Amaurotes, 69, 146,

163, 224, 258

Disciple de Pantagruel, 24, 54–55, 65, 77, 142, 170,

205, 214

Dissection, medical, 20, 199; practice of, in sixteenth

century, 20; of Quaresmeprenant, 21, 199

Divination, 196–97; disapproval and skepticism to-

ward, 13, 58, 167, 187; methods of, 1, 58, 110,

169, 202, 245–46; as a possible route to knowl-

edge, 139

Dog(s), 4, 6, 55–56,127, 162, 179; Gargantua’s,

named Kyne, 4, 56; gnaw marrowbone, providing

a model for attentive reading, 91, 128; Plato’s

philosophical, 55, 169; pursue Haughty Lady of

Paris, 55, 106–7, 173; Ramus as, 203; in refer-

ences to Turks, 6, 9, 254; young Gargantua eats

from same bowl as, 123

Dolet, Etienne, 27, 56–57, 111, 149, 154, 193, 206;

editing and publishing activities of, 30, 55, 193;

execution of, for heresy, 57, 206; Rabelais and,

42, 153

Donne, John, 67

Don Quijote, 197

Dore, Gustave, 126, 206

Dore, Pierre, 56–57

Doremont, Jacques, 29

Doribus (D’Oribus, Dorisius), 56–57

Dream of Pantagruel (Le Songe de Pantagruel), 57–

58

Dream(s), 37–38, 57–58, 58–59, 190, 245; Hypnero-

tomachia Polyphili, allegorical dream vision (Co-

lonna), 37–38; Plotinus, theories on dream inter-

pretation, 190; as potential guide, 119;

psychoanalytical theory and, 6

Index 277

Dreams of Daniel (Les Songes Daniel), 58

Du Bellay, Guillaume, 59–60, 132, 231, 234, 260,

261; death of, 48, 150, 202; goodness and gener-

osity of, 54

Du Bellay, Jean, 42, 54, 59, 60, 132, 144, 154, 181,

261

Du Bellay, Joachim, 40, 181

Du Bellay family, 26, 59, 60, 71, 150, 181, 188,

194, 208, 234

Duns Scotus, 226, 240

Dupuy Herbault, Gabriel, 205

Duval, Edwin, 33, 45, 50, 87, 90, 109, 177, 179,

194, 202, 203, 225, 236, 245

Ecolier Limousin, 61–62, 192, 200, 228; criticized

and punished by Pantagruel, 102, 134, 173; farci-

cal and comical elements in episode, 75, 175; Lat-

inisms of, 38, 173; satire of, 123, 217

Economy, 62–63; inflationary, 48, 159; life cycle as,

47–48; market, emergence of, 62, 212; monetary,

ills of, 160–161; utopian or idealized, 82, 160

Edict of Chateaubriant, 31

Education, 63–64; encyclopedic, 66, 201; freedom

and pleasure in, 70; Gargantua’s letter on, 131,

138, 201, 217; humanistic, 13, 18, 34, 71, 92,

131, 139, 144–45, 207, 217, 233, 259; regressive,

71, 175; scholastic, 80, 233, 234, 251

Emblems, 38, 64–65, 177, 262

Encomium, mock, 48, 81. See also Eulogy, satirical

Encyclopedism, 66–67, 201, 204; of erudition, in

Renaissance, 110; of genres, in novel, 170; of

Pantagruel’s education, 64

Engastrimythes, 95, 96, 236

England, 67–68

Enigmatic Prophecy, 68, 157, 197, 204, 217, 223,

244

Ennasin, 4, 68–69, 107–8, 123, 182

Ennius, 262

Entelechy, 11, 78

Epic, 118–19, 258; combined with other genres, 170–

71, 197; companion or comes, 86; episodes and

characteristics of, 108, 197, 240; hero or heroism,

79, 86, 113–14, 242; parody of, and deviations

from model, 72, 108, 113

Epistemon, 69–70; death and rebirth of, 197; en-

gaged as humanistic tutor, 64; loss of head, 20,

176; meaning “learned,” 176; netherworld journey

of, 53, 67, 108–9, 127, 147, 160, 171

Epitaph, 215, 239

Erasmus, Desiderius, 11, 24, 31, 33, 34, 37, 40, 41,

48, 50, 57, 69, 84, 70–71, 73, 78, 80, 89, 95, 102,

110, 127, 140, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146, 147, 152,

153, 154, 163, 174, 186, 191, 193, 208, 219, 233,

240, 242; criticism of, 56; dialogism of, 18, 19;

on education, 63; focus on Bible, 66; and folly, 81;

prose style, 62; Rabelais’s correspondence with,

144

Ercole II, Duke d’Este, 57

Estienne, Charles, 10, 99

Estienne, Henri, 205, 220

Estienne, Robert 15, 84

Estissac, Geoffroy d’, 42, 132, 144

Eudemon, 36, 71, 134

Eulogy, satirical, 50, 71–73, 76, 97, 131, 212

Eusthenes, 146, 176, 241

Evangelism, 50, 70, 73–74, 83, 116, 118, 128, 144,

148, 176, 207, 233, 242; and Briconnet, 21; in

Enigmatic Prophecy, 68; as key to Rabelais’s

work, 129

Eyewitness, 2, 145, 166, 250

Fabliaux, 46, 179, 225, 275

Fairs, of Lyon, 100, 148, 155, 159

Fanfreluches antidotees, 41, 68, 75

Fantasy, 9, 11, 12, 24, 67, 99, 104, 147, 172

Farce, 40, 46, 72, 75–76, 140, 157, 170

Farce de Maistre Pathelin, 75, 108, 202, 250

Farel, Guillaume, 22

Farge, James, 31

Farnese, 181

Farouche, Isle, 181

Febvre, Lucien, 44, 105, 108–9

Ferrements, Isle des, 9, 81

Fezandat, Michel (ff. 1538–77), 76

Ficino, Marsilio, 48, 59, 76, 95, 96–97, 114, 144,

169, 187, 190; and androgyne, 9, 83

Fifth Book, 76–78; Bacbuc, 15–16; Bottle, 21; Ring-

ing Island, 213–14; use of Disciple, 54

Flaubert, Gustave, 128

Folengo, Teofilo, 51, 52, 78–79, 132

Folly, 81; associated with death, 47; in Erasmus, 70,

71; in Renaissance, 172

Food, 78, 79–81, 91, 130, 135, 141, 145, 152, 170;

carnivalesque use of, 27, 42; request for, by Pan-

urge, 179

Fool(s), 20, 70, 81,184; associated with carnival, 28;

Bridoye as, 22; Panurge as, 49; in Renaissance,

172; signified by andouille, 7

Forests, 81–82, 150

Foucault, Michel, 44, 159, 191

Fourth Book, 7–8, 19, 54, 66–67, 82–84, 86, 90

Fourth Books, prologues to, 26, 43, 53, 161, 195–96

Fox and lion, fable of, 82

Frame, Donald, 144

Francis I, 19, 34, 59, 60, 84–85, 121, 144, 148, 153,

184, 188, 193; crackdown on heresy, 57; supporter

of Rabelais’s books, 26, 29

Freccero, Carla, 46

278 Index

Free will, 13, 74, 187

Frenzy or furor(s), 4, 33, 78, 80; Bacchic, 76

Frere Jean, 7, 33, 34, 35, 36, 53, 74, 85–86, 92, 125,

152, 160, 204; and army of cooks, 170; criticism

of Panurge, 174; founding of Theleme, 39; inter-

pretation of Enigmatic Prophecy, 68; scorn for

empty vows, 70; strength, wisdom, and heroics,

74

Freres Fredons, 77

Friendship, 18, 28, 34, 86, 94, 141, 153, 154

Frisch, Andrea, 195

Frozen Words, 4, 44, 83, 169; colors, 39; 69, 87–88,

120, 141

Frye, Northrop, 41

Furry Lawcats. See Chats fourrez

Galen, 13, 20, 80, 89, 105, 121, 156, 158, 164, 193,

199, 212, 215

Galland, Peter, 200, 203, 213

Gallet, Ulrich, 261

Gallicanism, 181, 182

Game(s), 191, 204, 244, 68, 89; rhetorical and tex-

tual, 129; tennis, 125

Ganabin, 33, 90, 107, 108, 235

Gargamelle, 79, 90–91, 103, 114, 122, 198, 220, 251

Gargantua, 91–93

Gargantua, 93–94; letter on education, to son Panta-

gruel, 63–64; livery of, 8, 36, 37, 38, 64, 131; ori-

gins, birth, and development of, 20, 34, 79, 91–

92, 100; reaction to wife’s death, 16, 47

Gargantua, prologue, 2, 3, 11, 26, 36, 55, 91, 127

Gargantuan Chronicles, 54, 94–95, 93, 127, 166,

174

Gaster, Messere, 18, 40, 76, 80, 83, 87–88, 95–96,

157, 168, 184

Gastrolastres, 80, 95, 96–97

Gender, questions of, 7–9, 182, 191, 192, 263–64

Genealogy, 75, 97, 185

Geography, 54, 97–100, 148

Gesner, Conrad, 10

Gestures, 169, 173, 180

Giants, 20, 24, 51, 100–101, 130, 173; evil, 147;

natural versus unnatural theories of, 167

Gifts, 94

Gilles, Pierre, 10

Glauser, Alfred, 87, 90

Golden Age, 7, 40, 102, 121, 147, 176

Goldmann, Lucien, 44

Goujon, Jean, 38

Grace and Free Will, 102–3, 113

Grandes Annales, 32

Grandes Chroniques de Gargantua. See Gargantuan

Chronicles

Grandgousier, 34, 103

Gray, Floyd, 90, 194

Greve, Marcel De, 205

Grippe-Minaud, 136

Gross Medlars (P 1), 103–4

Grotesque, the, 20, 44, 104–5, 155, 158, 162, 199

Grotesque realism, 104–5, 164

Gryphius, Sebastian, 56, 64, 193

Guise, Cardinal de, 42

Guise, Claude de, Duke of Lorraine, 57

Gymnaste, 47, 53

Habert, Francois, 57–58, 67, 96

Hampton, Timothy, 6

Haughty Parisian Lady, 6, 52, 55, 75, 185, 192, 106–

7, 173, 175, 179, 183; defined by “otherness,” 6;

farcical elements of episode, 75; Petrarchist over-

tones and parody, 185; pursued by dogs, 55

Hearsay. See Ouy-Dire (Hearsay)

Heath, Michael, 24

Hebrew, 15, 19, 34, 69, 84, 107–8, 134–35, 144,

148, 170

Hell, 51–52, 53, 108–9, 160, 132, 188; Epistemon

in, 69

Henry II, 34, 57, 60, 109–10, 133, 196

Henry VIII, 19, 59, 85, 132,

Heresy, 30, 110–13, 144, 160, 163, 184, 196; accu-

sations against Rabelais, 26; related to humanism,

19; witch hunt to eradicate, 50, 84

Herodotus, 162

Hero(es) and heroism, 79 , 86, 113–14, 144, 150,

151, 197; death or deflation of, 167, 171, 172

Heroet, Antoine (1492?–1568?), 114

Her Trippa, 13, 110, 167; identification with Henry

Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, 1

Hesiod, 40, 95, 96

Hieroglyphs, 8, 24, 37, 38, 65, 114–16, 151, 155,

169, 195

Higman, Francis, 31

Hippocrates, 20, 58, 116, 132, 156, 193

Hippocrenas, 90

Hippothadee, 70, 73, 116–17, 144, 174

Holoferne, Thubal, 39, 64, 71, 73

Homenaz, 50, 53, 72, 117–18, 161, 182–83

Homer, 59, 87, 118–20, 127, 204

Horace, 157, 179

Horapollo, 115

Horns, 59

Hotel-Dieu, hospital, 89, 120, 149, 156

Huchon, 23, 94

Huguenots, 27

Hullot, Antoine, 42, 144, 145

Humanism, 37, 39, 44, 114, 118, 120–22, 134, 143,

175, 189; evangelical elements, 73; role in work,

17

Index 279

Humor, 2, 30, 44, 74, 76, 122–24, 174, 194; Bakhti-

nian, 17–19; mixed with monstrosity, 83; as vehi-

cle for serious message, 74, 186

Hypocrisy, 33, 90, 202

Idleness, 125–26

Illustrations, 64, 126

Imitation, 126–27, 142, 155, 191

Indulgences, sale of, 69–70, 173, 182

Initiation, 90

Innocent VIII, 30

Interpretation(s), 8, 26, 44, 68, 96, 102, 127–30,

141, 144, 147, 151, 157, 158, 169, 170, 176–77,

194, 204

Inventions, 39, 197; gunpowder, 96

Irony, 130–32, 135, 183, 196

Isidore of Seville, 140

Italy, 30, 42, 132–33; influence, on Renaissance, 63

Jacobson, Roman, 141

Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples, 11

Janotus de Bragmardo, 70, 134–35; farcical elements

of, 75

Janus, 8

Jeanneret, Michel, 44, 96

John XXII, 50

Judaism, 185

Judiciary, 135–37

Juste, Francois, 76, 137, 192, 193

Kabbala, 34–35, 66, 107, 138, 135, 187

Kaiser, Walter, 7

Kissarse. See Baisecul and Humesvesne

Knowledge, 66, 138–39, 156, 158, 168, 179, 187;

and Aristotle, 11; concept of, 44; in evangelism,

74; as remedy for ills, 34; zoological, 9

Krailsheimer, Alban, 7

Kristeva, Julia, 6

Kyne (Gargantua’s dog), 56

La Bruyere, 128

Lacan, Jacques, 45

La Fontaine Jean de, 202

Landscape/Geography, 191

Language(s), 24, 23, 35, 41, 44, 50, 95, 75, 115,

127, 130, 138, 139, 140–42, 143, 146, 155, 179,

193, 200, 204; Baisecul and Humevesne, 17; and

difference, 6; on Ennasin, 68–69; explored in

Fourth Book, 83; in Folengo, 79; foreign, study

of, 63, 175; in Frozen Words, 87–88; gestures as,

169; Hebrew, 107; as hero of novel, 170, 199; to

impress others, 173; of Limousin schoolboy, 62;

of narrator, 3; of Panurge, 69, 179; of Sorbonne,

39

Lanternes, country of, 77

Lanternois, 55, 142

Lantern Queen, 36

Latin, misuse of, 62, 134, worship of, 140

Laughter, 5, 11, 80, 83, 106–7, 141

Laurel, 185

Lavatori, 160

Law, 24, 42, 49, 127, 135–37, 142–44, 183, 184,

186, 187; Baisecul and Humevesne, 16–17, 175;

Bridoye, 22–23; Rabelais’s own study of, 143;

study of, 63

Le Clerc, Nicolas, 32

Lecteurs royaux, 19, 123

Lefebvre, Henri, 44

Lefebvre d’Etaples, 19, 22, 40, 70, 73, 84, 144–45

Lefranc, Abel, 29, 44, 128, 202

Lemaire de Belges, Jean, 20, 96, 101, 104, 140, 202

Lent, 7; as carnival figure, 28

Leonardo da Vinci, 84

Le Rouille, Guillaume, 143

Letter(s), 35, 41, 86, 139, 144; between Pantagruel

and his father, 10, 13, 35, 47, 71, 73, 129, 144,

154, 187, 175, 204; Rabelais to Bude, 24

Library. See Saint-Victor, Library of

Limousin schoolboy. See Ecolier Limousin

Lists, 23, 89, 118, 145–46, 199

Losse, Deborah N., 194

Loup Garou (Werewolf), 101, 146, 176

Love, 114; in marriage, 1; and Neoplatonism, 4, 76,

95, 96, 114

Lucian, 40, 67, 70, 71, 78, 108, 118, 125, 140, 142,

147–48, 157, 163, 164, 166; in Renaissance, 172

Luther, Martin, 8, 69, 102, 148, 147, 154, 181, 185;

justification by faith alone, 185

Lutherans and Lutheranism, 7, 79, 84, 109, 148, 171,

202

Lying Illusions, island of. See Cassade, Isle de (Isle

of Lying Illusions)

Lyon, economy of, 62; other humanists in, 56;

publications in, 42, 54, 65, 148–49, 156, 192

Machiavelli, 150, 188

Macreons, Isle of, 12, 24, 38, 47, 82, 150–51, 197;

and Pan, death of, 173

Macrin, Salmon, 42, 56, 60

Macrobe, 150, 151, 197

Macrobius, 151; Dream of Scipio, 58

Madness, and Neoplatonism, 4

Magic, 59, 66, 76, 110; in writings of Agrippa, 1

Magnus, Olaus, 11

Maillezais, monastery of, 147

Major (Maioris, Mair), John (1467–1550), 151–52

Manardi, Giovanni, 132, 144

Manetti, Giovanni, 64

280 Index

Manutius, Aldus, 38

Marcourt, Antoine, 188

Mardigras, 8, 28, 152

Marguerite de Navarre, 19, 22, 32, 39, 47, 56, 73,

114, 144, 148, 153, 185, 193

Marliani, 60

Marliani, Giovanni, 132

Marot, Clement, 40, 56, 73, 84, 140, 148, 149, 153–

54, 185

Marrache-Gouraud, Myriam, 90

Marriage, 13, 46, 56, 85, 153, 154–55, 174, 157, 181;

analogous with government, 9; and androgyne, 9;

based on love, 1; clandestine, 94; of clergy, 57;

consultations on, 22–23; in Ennasin, 68–69; ra-

tionale of, 49; versus masculine friendship, 86

Marrow, 5, 18, 55, 79, 91, 118, 127, 130, 155, 169,

183, 204

Martin, Jean, 38

Marx and Marxist criticism, 49, 129

Mass, 7, 33, 85, 95

Masters, G. Mallary, 9, 169

Masuccio, 132

Mayerne, Jean de (Turquet), 77, 78

McLuhan, Marshall, 203–4

Meaux, 21, 22, 144, 185

Medamothi, 12, 40, 155–56

Medici family, 181

Medicine, 20, 42, 59, 66, 80, 120, 127, 139, 140,

156–57, 183, 186, 199; and alchemy, 1–2; Ascle-

piades, 12–13; Galen, 89; Hippocrates, 116; study

of, 63; text and reading as, 159, 204

Medigo, Elia del, 187

Mediocritas. See Moderation (mediocritas)

Melanchthon, 71, 116

Menippean paradox, 157–58

Menippus, 147

Mercury, 43, 58, 173

Messere Gaster. See Gaster, Messere

Metz, 42, 60, 111, 193

Meung, Jean de, 140

Michelangelo, 127

Michelet, Jules, 128, 140

Mock epic, 64, 78, 126–27, 172, 174

Moderation (mediocritas), 8, 13, 27, 43, 53, 80, 158–

59, 162, 196, 253

Money, 24, 48–49, 62, 159–61, 184, 240, 257; cri-

tique of, as immoral, 48; as sign, 159; Rabelais’s

request for, from patron, 144–45

Monks, as fearful, 39, 84; as gluttonous and greedy,

39, 92; for their idleness, 74, 84, 96, 125; satire

of, 76, 79, 85, 202, 204, 209, 257

Monsters, 20, 51–52, 69, 74, 77, 98, 101, 146, 147,

152, 162, 161–63, 167, 181, 186, 187, 189, 19; as

allegories of Rabelais’s enemies, 269; Gargantua’s

mare, 9; and otherness, 6

Monstrelet, Enguerrard de, 119

Montaigne, 24, 41, 74, 128, 139, 194, 200, 205, 210–

11, 227–28, 255

Montaigu, College de, 19, 151, 241

Montpellier, 56, 75, 135, 156, 215, 260

Moon, journey or ascent to, 168, 172, 176

More, Sir Thomas, 40, 54, 73, 89, 141, 147, 163,

174

Motteux, Peter A., 67, 247–48

Mouth, World in Pantagruel’s, 29, 163–64, 166, 176,

189; Bringuenarilles, 24; meaning of Badebec’s

name, 16

Music, 140, 164–65; divine, 87; instruments, 59; part

of education, 63

Myrelingues, 22, 23

Narrative, 147; development of, in Renaissance, 32

Narrator, 166–67, 169, 185, 191, 194–95, 204; Al-

cofrybas, 2–3, 91; as character, 166, 176; unrelia-

ble, 172

Natural history, 33

Nature, 162, 167–69, 187, 189; and animals, 9; per-

version of, 74

Navigation, 55

Nazdecabre, 53, 169

Neoplatonism, 59, 65, 76, 96, 114, 131, 138, 139,

169–70, 190; and alchemy, 1; and allegory, 3

Niphleseth, 7, 98, 152, 170, 182

Noah, 101, 104

Noses, 2, 68–69, 182

Notre-Dame, bells of, 134, 218

Nourry, Claude, 56, 143, 170

Novel, development of in Rabelais, 170–71, 200

Numbers, symbolism of, 8

Nursemaids, 3, 171

Obscenity, 32

Occult, the, 168, 172; and Agrippa, 1; knowledge, 66

Odes, Isle of, 77, 99

Odysseus, 175

Olivetan, Pierre, 51

Orlando furioso (Roland Furieux), 172

Orme, Philibert de l’, 12, 126

Orpheus, 87

Ory, Matthieu, 31, 56–57

Ouy-Dire (Hearsay), 98, 222–23

Ovid, 71, 204

Pagnino, Sante, 15

Pan, death of, 24, 48, 150, 173; in Songe, 58

Panigon, 34

Pantagruel, 173–74; advice of, 59; advice to Pan-

urge, 54; birth, 16, 20, 127; as Christ figure, 3; as

contrasted with Panurge, 174; education and learn-

ing of, 66; exploits of, 143, 181; as King of the

Index 281

Thirsty, 7; meeting with Panurge, 131; Paradise,

false, 96; plea to God and work during storm, 74;

relationship with Panurge, 86; ships of, 21; in

Songe, prospective marriage of, 58; tears of, 173

Pantagruel, 174–76

Pantagruel, prologue to, 172, 194–95

Pantagrueline Prognostication, 5, 13

Pantagruelion, 50, 70, 101, 176–78; as laurel, of self-

glorification, 177, 186; as satirical eulogy, 72, 81;

symbolic of control over nature, 168

Pantagruelism, 27, 34, 68, 82, 178–79, 186

Panurge, 52, 179–80; advice to, from Frere Jean, 85;

as antipode of Gargantua, 93; in Bakhtinian criti-

cism, 18; clothing of, 36; and Dindenault, 52–53;

dreams, 59; education of, 63–64; fear, 74, 90;

feats of, 175–76; and Haughty Lady, 55; hero of

Disciple, 55; meeting with Pantagruel, 131; name,

24; obscene gestures of, 66; praise of debts, 48–49;

receives Salmagundi, 54; relationship with Panta-

gruel, 86; resuscitates Epistemon, 176; revives Ep-

istemon, 108; in Songe, 57–58; as sophist, 173;

stories, 146; tricks (Haughty lady), 106–7, 175,

179; as trickster, 251–52; weakness, fear, and

flaws, 74, 103

Papacy, 101, 148, 180–81

Papefigues, 40, 53, 73, 83, 181

Papimanes and Papimanie, 40, 50, 53, 73, 83, 117–

18, 133, 152, 161, 181–83

Paracelsus, 78

Paradox, 4, 44, 71, 147, 158, 177, 182; in Renais-

sance texts, 172; and revelation, 183

Pare, Ambroise, 10

Paris, Jean, 44, 48

Paris: Pantagruel’s exploits in, 16; printing in, 64, 65;

satire of, 134; students in, 61–62; walls of, 4, 18,

183–84, 188, 192

Parlement, 16, 19, 21, 109, 148, 184, 195, 196; ban

on sales of books, 26; effort to reform, by Francis

I, 84; persecution of “heretics,” 57; restrictions on

printing, 31; satirized by Rabelais, 73

Parnassus, Mount, and Antiparnassus, 90

Parody, 32, 50, 62, 80, 94, 96, 123, 126–27, 128,

147; of alchemical model, in Praise of Debts, 2;

of courtly love, 106; in Gaster episode, 83; in

prognostications, 5

Pasquier, Estienne, 62, 202

Pathelin, Farce of, 202

Patriarchy, 93–94, 131

Paul, St., 8, 33, 70, 71, 72, 96, 102, 131, 144, 184–

85

Paul III, 60

Pavia, Battle of, 34, 85

Pellicier, Guillaume, 42

Perriere, Guillaume de la, 65

Petrarch/Petrarchism, 63, 84, 127, 151, 185–86

Pharmakon athanasias. See Philosopher’s Stone

Philautia, 70, 110, 186

Philosopher’s Stone, 1, 2, 176

Physetere, 4,11, 69, 162, 181, 186–87; and Pliny, 10

Physis and Antiphysie, 186, 187

Picaresque elements, 175

Picart, 126

Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 5, 13, 105, 135,

138, 144, 187

Picrochole, 10, 85, 103, 128, 184, 188; as Charles

V, 34; as Noel Beda, 19

Picrocholine War, 18, 82, 92, 99

Pig, flying, 8, 182. See Mardigras

Pilgrims, 4, 73

Placards, Affair of, 128, 152, 183, 188; effect on

Francis I, 84; repercussions of, 31

Plague, 189

Plato, 8, 11, 40, 49, 55, 63, 76, 86, 87, 96, 114, 115,

118, 129, 131, 139, 140, 141, 155, 177, 187, 190;

linguistic theories, in Cratylus, 169

Platonism, 78, 152

Play, of signs and text, 160, 169, 194

Pliny, 10, 13, 101, 140, 162, 168, 176, 189

Plotinus, 169, 190

Plutarch, 40, 48, 118, 140, 150, 173, 197

Poliziano, Angelo, 66

Polycletus, 12

Ponocrates, 71, 80, 89

Postel, Guillaume, 51

Poverty, 96

Power and disempowerment, discourses of, 191–92,

196

Priapus, 43, 203

Primaticcio, 12

Prince, Christian, ideal of, 9

Printing and publishing, 56, 76, 95, 98, 137, 148,

167, 188, 192–93, 204; and censorship, 30–32;

and circulation of ideas, 30; promotes reassess-

ment of dogmas, 107

Prisoners, treatment of, 150, 193

Procuration, 35

Prognostications, 5, 13, 167, 194, 197, 202

Progress, 176, 193

Prophecy, 4, 196–97, 202. See also Divination

Propos des Bien Ivres, Les, 197–98

Providence, 22, 23

Psychoanalytical theory, 6

Ptolemy, 5, 11, 97, 162

Puy-Herbault, Gabriel de, 26, 27, 73

Puy-Saint-Martin, Monastery of, 143

Quaresmeprenant, 7, 21, 28, 39, 40, 73, 146, 152,

157, 162, 173, 181, 187, 199–200

Quart d’heure de Rabelais, 42

Queneau, Raymond, 63, 200

282 Index

Querelle des femmes, 46, 114, 154

Quintessence, abstractor of, 3; in alchemy, 1, 28;

kingdom of, 2, 24, 77; Queen, 38, 77

Quintilian, 66, 200–201, 203

Rabelais, Theodule, 133

Raminagrobis, 40, 47, 202–3, 203

Ramus, 200, 202, 203

Reading, 2, 26, 44, 55, 65, 68, 106, 125, 130, 131,

146, 151, 156, 180, 189, 197, 203–4

Realism, 9, 44, 53, 99, 104–5. See also Grotesque

realism

Reception and influence, in England, 67–68

Reception and influence, in France, 205–6

Recreation. See Game(s); Idleness

Reform, 21, 22, 182

Reformation, 57, 73–74, 102–3, 109, 121, 154, 181,

183, 188, 206–7; and witchcraft, 52

Religion, 21, 22, 24, 27, 57, 73, 85, 102–3, 110–13,

117–18, 121, 127, 142, 154, 163, 188, 190, 207–

10; critique of, 51; of Frere Jean, 85; and medi-

cine, 156; of Rabelais, 74; relationship to science,

168; in upheaval, in sixteenth-century France, 173

Renaissance, 20, 38, 183, 189, 210–12; economy of,

62; education in, 63; love of emblems, 66

Renee de France, 57, 153

Reuchlin, Johann, 15, 135, 240

Rhetoric, 36, 37, 48, 49, 50, 55, 66, 71, 72, 106,

118, 129, 131, 134, 166, 179, 194–95, 196, 199,

200, 203, 212–13; Latin, 42; of Pantagruelion epi-

sode, 177; Petrarchist, 185; scholastic, 63

Rigolot, Francois, 45, 129–30, 131, 141, 195

Ringing Island, 77, 133, 213–14; colors of birds on,

39

Rodilardus, 51, 90

Romance, 170

Roman de la rose, 3, 46

Romantic era, 128

Rondelet, Guillaume, 10

Rondibilis, 40, 214–15

Ronsard, 41, 196, 215

Roussel, Gerard, 19

Royal privilege, 26, 193, 196

Ruach, 34, 107, 135, 138, 162, 215–16

Saint-Gelais, Mellin de, 30, 68, 75, 84, 217

Saint-Maur-les-Fosses, secularization of, 39

Saints, 73, 100, 113, 184, 185, 189

Saint-Victor, Library of, 32, 56, 67, 78, 127, 132,

143, 149, 175, 217–18

Saints, imaginary, 218–19

Saints, real, 219–21

Salmigondin, Chastellany of, 7, 48, 54, 221–22

Satin, pays de, 77, 222–23; animals, 10–12

Satire, 10, 11, 13, 16, 20, 40–41, 49, 70, 72, 79, 92,

95, 127, 147, 152, 162, 174, 223–24; antimonacal,

79; of justice system, 76; linguistic, 62; new hy-

brid form of, 76; in Renaissance mock epics, 172;

Saturn, 102

Saulnier, Verdun-Louis, 33, 54, 71, 90, 129, 150,

177, 223

Saussure, Ferdinand de, 45, 115

Savanarola, Girolamo, 187

Scaliger, 59

Scatology, 18, 35, 67, 72, 76, 79, 90, 100, 104, 179,

224–25

Sceve, Maurice, 185

Scholasticism, 12, 19, 37, 118, 144, 151, 183, 189,

226–27; education of, 63, 71; satire of, 16

Schwartz, Jerome, 9

Science, 44, 139, 140, 152, 168, 203, 227–28; ad-

vances in, effect on society, 82; meaning of, in

sixteenth century, 168; in Renaissance, reflected in

Rabelais’s study of, 63

Sciomachie, 39, 42, 133

Screech, M. A., 9, 30, 48, 87, 91, 129, 144, 198

Sebillet, Thomas, 40

Servetus, Michael, 57

Seuilly, Abbey of, 3, 85

Shakespeare, 68, 128

Shrovetide. See Quaresmeprenant

Sibyl, 52, 53, 186, 229–30

Sidney, Philip, 67

Signs, 13, 38–39, 141, 159, 169, 180, 197; ambigu-

ous, 48, 441

Sileni, 2, 11, 155, 157, 169, 195, 204, 230; and

Erasmus, 70; and Neoplatonism, 169

Sisyphus, 54

Skepticism, 158, 230–31

Smith, Pauline, 30

Smith, Paul J., 90

Social Class, 231–32

Socrates, 91

Songe de Pantagruel (Dream of Pantagruel), 57–58

Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel, 126

Sophist(s), 232–33; Panurge as, 49, 173

Sorbonne, 6, 19, 22, 48, 60, 70, 111, 134, 144, 148,

153, 183, 184, 189, 193, 195–96, 233–34; and

censorship, 30–32; conflict with Francis I, 31; ef-

fort to control, by Francis I, 84; independence

from Rome, 181; lambasted by Rabelais, 26, 39,

73; Socrates, 182

Soul, immortality of, 173

Spitzer, Leo, 44, 128

Sporades, 234–35

Standonck, Jan, 19

Starobinski, Jean, 45

Sterne, Laurence, 68

Stones, precious, 8, 12, 50, 59

Stratagemes, Les, 133

Index 283

Swift, Jonathan, 68

Symbolic System, 235–38

Symbolism, 68–69; of colors, 38–39; in Fifth Book,

38; of Mardigras, 8; of numbers, 8

Symbols, 169; and allegory, 3; colors, 38–39

Syncretism, 157, 187

Syphilis (la verole), 43, 156, 158–59, 238

Tahureau, Jacques (1527–55), 239

Taine, Hippolyte, 44

Tapinois, 173

Tarande, 10, 239–40

Tartareti (Tartaret, Tateret), Pierre (c. 1460–1522),

240

Tempest or Storm, 33, 69, 74, 79, 150, 168, 181,

197, 240; debt to Erasmus, 70; different reactions

to, 174

Tempete, Pierre, 151–52, 241

Tetel, Marcel, 87, 90, 159

Thalamege, 24, 40, 82, 142, 160, 241–42

Thamous, 150–51, 173

Thaumaste, 13, 37, 66, 86, 163, 168, 173, 175, 180,

242; farcical elements of episode, 75, 190

Theatrical elements, 19, 75

Theleme, 38, 45, 74, 92, 128, 154, 160, 161, 204,

243–44; architecture of, 12; carnivalesque and, 18;

clothing, 36, 39; as community, 39; exclusions

from, 4; geography of, near forest, 82; illustra-

tions, 65; recreation at, 125; utopian elements, 54

Thenaud, Jean, 107

Theology, Faculty of. See Sorbonne

Thevet, Andre, 10, 98

Thibault, Jean, 58

Third Book, 245–46; printing and editions of, 76;

prologue to, 11

Thirst, 13, 130, 246–47

Till Eulenspiegel, 175, 179

Tilley, Arthur, 87

Tiraqueau, Andre, 11, 41–42, 132, 144, 247

Tobit, book of, 4, 56,

Tocquedillon, 103

Tohu and Bohu, 34

Toolmaking Island, 9

Torchecul. See Arsewipe

Tory, Geoffroy, 24, 38, 62, 74

Tournes, Jean de, 185

Tournon, Francois de, Cardinal, 42

Tours, Pierre de, 82, 137

Translations, Dutch and German (16th–17th Centu-

ries), 247–48

Translations, English, 245, 255

Travel Literature, 10, 39, 98, 166, 214, 249–50

Trent, Council of, 133, 142, 148, 152, 153, 181, 250

Triboullet, 21, 40, 53, 70, 75, 81, 85, 245–46, 250–

51

Trickster, 52, 79, 119, 131, 157, 175, 179–80, 251–52

Trinquamelle, 22–23, 247

Tripet, 47

Trithemius, 1, 110

Trouillogan, 22, 75, 139, 157, 231, 252–53

Tub, of Diogenes, 49, 54, 104, 125

Turks, 6, 9, 57, 109, 175, 179, 253–54, 257

Underworld, journey to, 20, 108–9

Unicorns, 9, 10, 222, 239

Urquhart, Thomas, 67, 247, 248, 255

Utopia, 29, 54, 92, 176, 255–56

Utopia, 54

Vachon, Francois de, 1

Valla, Lorenzo, 200

Vatable, Francois, 22

Vergerius, 63

Vesalius, Andreas, 20

Villanovanus, Simon, 56

Villon, 19, 140, 151, 257

Violence, 19, 79, 106, 176, 257–58; of Pantagruel,

62; of Panurge, 180; of text, 195

Virgil, 59, 127, 258–59

Virtues, cardinal, 48; theological, 48

Vives, Juan Luis, 59, 63, 154

Voltaire, 128

Voyage, 29, 48, 53, 54. 98, 138, 146, 155, 186, 197,

259–60; accounts of, 10; of exploration, commis-

sioned by French crown, 84; as narrative premise

of Fourth Book, 82; and otherness, 6

Walls, of Paris, 4, 18, 20, 150, 183

War, 34, 62, 92, 188, 261; Pantagruel and, 174–75;

waged by France, 84

Wars of religion, 27, 83, 109

Wechel, Chretien, 64, 192, 193, 261–62

Werewolves, 147. See also Loup Garou (Werewolf)

Wind, 24, 33, 41, 107, 138

Wine, 80, 85, 101, 134, 262–63; advocated by As-

clepiades, 12, 13; in allegory, 3, 21; in Fifth Book,

15; and Neoplatonism, 4

Witchcraft, 52

Women, 45, 91, 106–7, 130, 154, 263–64; in

Agrippa, 1; and alterity, 6; in Aristotle, 11; exclu-

sion, 30; Panurge and, 174

Word, of the Bottle, 15, 21, 87, 141

World in Pantagruel’s Mouth. See Mouth, World in

Pantagruel’s

Xenomanes, 265; as narrator, 90, 146, 162, 199

Zegura, Elizabeth Chesney, 45, 49, 159

Zeuxis, 12

Zwingli, Ulrich, 7

Aboutthe Contributors

KENNETH ALBALA is Associate Professor and Chair of the History Department at the

University of the Pacific. He is the author of Eating Right in the Renaissance and Food

in Early Modern Europe and is currently working on a culinary history of the sixteenth

century.

MARY J. BAKER is a Professor of French at the University of Texas at Austin.

CATHLEEN M. BAUSCHATZ is Professor of French at the University of Maine, where

she teaches courses in French literature and civilization. She has published numerous

articles on French Renaissance literature.

JONATHAN BECK is Professor of French at the University of Arizona and Chercheur

associe at the Centre d’etudes superieures de la Renaissance (Tours).

EDWARD BENSON wrote a dissertation thirty years ago on Rabelais’s martial meta-

phors, for the eponymous Harcourt Brown. Since then, he has taught at the universities

of Rhode Island and New Mexico, and will end his career in the foreseeable future at

the University of Connecticut, where he teaches French and film, and directs the Critical

Language Program. He wrote a book on money and magic in Montaigne, and is now

working on one on Henri-Georges Clouzot.

DOUGLAS L. BOUDREAU is Assistant Professor of French in the Department of World

Languages and Cultures at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pennsylvania. He received his

Ph.D. in 1999 from the Ohio State University. He has delivered conference papers on

both Francophone and Renaissance topics and has previously published an article on

Rabelais and one on Quebecois author Anne Hebert.

BARBARA C. BOWEN is English by birth but spent her entire teaching career in the

United States. She has published on Rabelais, Montaigne, and many other Renaissance

topics. After twenty-five years at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and

fifteen at Vanderbilt University, she is now retired and happily pursuing research into

different aspects of Renaissance comedy, including theatrical farce, humanist satire, scat-

ological jokes, and of course Francois Rabelais.

BRUNO BRAUNROT was born in Warsaw and educated in Paris and Montreal. He

holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from McGill University and received his Ph.D. from Yale

University in 1970. Dr. Braunrot has taught at McGill University and the University of

Virginia, before joining the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at Georgia

State Unversity, where he is presently Professor of French and Director of Graduate

286 About the Contributors

Studies. He is the author of L’imagination poetique chez Du Bartas and, more recently,

Francois Rabelais, a Reference Guide 1950–1990 (1994).

POLLIE BROMILOW holds a B.A. and M.A. from Royal Holloway, University of

London, and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. She was recently appointed to

a permanent lectureship in French at the University of Liverpool.

EMILY BUTTERWORTH is Lecturer in French at the University of Sheffield, UK. She

has published on seventeenth-century polemic and satire and is currently working on a

book on slander in the early modern period.

KATIA CAMPBELL, who completed her Ph.D. at Princeton University, is Associate

Professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She writes on Hebrew and

Jewish elements in Rabelais’s epic novels.

EDMUND J. CAMPION is a Professor of French at the University of Tennessee, Knox-

ville, where he has taught since 1977. His research interests deal with classical French

literature and the influence of Erasmus on French Renaissance writers. His major

publications include his 1995 book Montaigne, Rabelais, and Marot as Readers of Eras-

mus and three critical editions of tragedies by Philippe Quinault.

CAROL CLARK is Fellow and Tutor in French at Balliol College, Oxford. She has

published on Rabelais and Montaigne, and recently also on Baudelaire. She is the trans-

lator of “La Prisonniere” in a new edition of Proust.

TOM CONLEY, author of The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern

France (1996) and L’inconscient graphique: Essai sur la lettre a la Renaissance (2000),

teaches in the departments of Romance Languages and Visual/Environmental Studies at

Harvard University.

MEGAN CONWAY is a Professor of French at Louisiana State University in Shreveport.

Her major interests include women writers of the French Renaissance. She is currently

editing the upcoming volume on Sixteenth Century French Writers for the Dictionary of

Literary Biography.

RICHARD COOPER is Professor of French at Oxford University and a Fellow of Bra-

senose College. His particular field of interest is relations between France and Italy in

the Renaissance. He has published on the principal authors of the French Renaissance,

especially Rabelais, Marot, Marguerite de Navarre, du Bellay and Montaigne, and is

bringing out a book on antiquities in Renaissance France and editions of Marguerite and

Montaigne.

ROGER CRAIK teaches English at Kent State University Ashtabula Campus. Although

his doctoral work was on Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty, he now writes mainly about

contemporary poetry.

JOANN DELLANEVA is an Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures

at the University of Notre Dame. She has a particular interest in Renaissance love poetry,

Franco-Italian literary relations in the Renaissance, women writers of the Renaissance,


the theory and practice of literary imitation, and the phenomenon of European Petrarch-

ism. She has written on a number of Renaissance poets (including Marot, Sceve, Du

Guillet, du Bellay, Ronsard) as well as on imitation theory.

PHILIPPE DESAN is Howard L. Willett Professor in the Department of Romance Lan-

guages and Literatures and the Committee on the History of Culture at the University of

Chicago. Among other titles, he has published Les commerces de Montaigne (1992),

Montaigne dans tous ses etats (2001), L’imaginaire economique de la Renaissance

(2002) and the Dictionnaire de Montaigne (2004). He is also the editor of the journal

Montaigne Studies and the director of the Chicago Renaissance Center.

DIANE DESROSIERS-BONIN, William Dawson Scholar in Renaissance Studies,

teaches sixteenth-century French literature at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Her

numerous publications on Rabelais include Rabelais et l’humanisme civil (1992), “Ra-

belais et la nature feminine” (ER 31), and “Macrobe et les ames heroıques (Rabelais,

Quart Livre, chapitres 25 a 28)” (RAR 11). Since 1992, she has also supervised a research

team on French women writers of the sixteenth century.

LANCE DONALDSON-EVANS has taught sixteenth-century French literature at the

University of Pennsylvania since 1968. He has published books on the poetry of Jean

de La Ceppede and eye imagery in the poetry of the Ecole de Lyon. He has also done

critical editions of four late-sixteenth–early-seventeenth-century devotional poets and

written articles on travel literature and its influence on Rabelais and on clothing in French

Renaissance literature.

EDWIN M. DUVAL is a Professor and Chair of French at Yale University. He has

written many articles on French Renaissance authors, including Rabelais, Marot, Mar-

guerite de Navarre, Sceve, Montaigne, and d’Aubigne. His books include a three-volume

study of form and meaning in the works of Rabelais. His current research is devoted to

the relation between musical form, poetic structure, and logical articulation in French

Renaissance lyric.

JAMES K. FARGE is Senior Fellow and Librarian of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval

Studies, Toronto. He has published several books concerning the University of Paris, its

personnel, and its interaction with religious and cultural changes in early modern France.

CARLA FRECCERO is Professor of Literature, Women’s Studies, and the History of

Consciousness at the University of California Santa Cruz. She is the author of Father

Figures: Genealogy and Narrative Structure in Rabelais (1991) and Popular Culture:

An Introduction (1999); and has published numerous articles on early modern culture,

feminist and queer theory, and U.S. popular culture. She is currently completing a book

on early modernity and queer theory.

ANDREA FRISCH teaches French and Comparative Literature at the University of

Southern California. Her book, The Invention of the Eyewitness (2003) is a study of the

rhetoric of testimony in the sixteenth century.

MAX GAUNA is Emeritus Professor of French Studies at the University of Sheffield.

He has published critical editions of Jacques Tahureau’s Dialogues and Bonaventure des

Periers’s controversial Cymbalum Mundi. He has also written books on Montaigne’s


religion and on his ethics, on the interpretation of Rabelais’s myths, and on free thought

in the literature of the French Renaissance.

AMY C. GRAVES is a Ph.D. candidate in Romance Languages at the University of

Chicago and a Junior Fellow at the Franke Institute for the Humanities. Her thesis on

the memoires of Simon Goulart (1543–1628) explores Calvinist Renaissance historiog-

raphy during the Wars of Religion to ascertain their function as propaganda, as a juridical

praxis of history writing, and as the new model of time and information that inspired

the transition from occasionnel to the periodique in the early seventeenth century.

MATTHEW GUMPERT is an Assistant Professor at Bilkent University and Coordinator

of the Program in Cultures, Civilizations, and Ideas. He received his B.A. in Comparative

Literature from Princeton University (1984) and his M.A. and Ph. D., also in Comparative

Literature, from Harvard University (1992). He has taught in departments of Comparative

Literature and Classics at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of

Wisconsin–Madison. Professor Gumpert’s book Grafting Helen: The Abduction of the

Classical Past, has recently been published.

MARGARET HARP is Associate Professor of French at the University of Nevada, Las

Vegas. Her current research project is on illustrated editions of Rabelais’s works.

E. BRUCE HAYES is an Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Italian at

the University of Kansas. He is completing a book project that examines contemporary

farce and its function in Rabelais’s work.

MICHAEL J. HEATH is Professor of French Literature at King’s College London. He

has produced a student edition of the Quart Livre (1990) and a monograph, Rabelais,

for the MRTS Renaissance Masters series (1996). He is a major contributor to the To-

ronto University Press Collected Works of Erasmus.

FRANCIS HIGMAN studied modern languages at Oxford University, where he presented

his thesis on John Calvin’s French style. His research interests center on the French

Reformation and its contribution to the modern French language, questions of bibliog-

raphy and of censorship. From 1988 to 1998 he was director of the Institute for the

History of the Reformation in Geneva University. In retirement he continues to prepare

editions of Calvin’s works and some bibliographical studies.

MIREILLE HUCHON is Professor of French at the Universite de Paris–IV Sorbonne.

Her numerous publications on Rabelais and sixteenth-century literature include Rabelais

grammarien: De l’histoire du texte aux problemes d’authenticite, ER 16 (1981). She is

also the editor of Rabelais’s Oeuvres completes, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade (1994).

WILLIAM H. HUSEMAN, who received his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, is an

Associate Professor at the University of Oklahoma in the Department of Modern Lan-

guages, Literature, and Linguistics. He is the author of La personnalite litteraire de

Francois de la Noue (1985) and his research focuses upon sixteenth-century prose and

poetry, the French Wars of Religion, religious tolerance and intolerance, and conceptual

metaphors and iconography used by Latin Christian writers to describe and combat heresy

from the Apostolic era to the Renaissance.


ROBIN IMHOF is a Reference Librarian at the University of the Pacific in Stockton,

California. She holds an M.A. in Comparative Literature.

NEIL KENNY teaches early modern French literature and intellectual history at the

University of Cambridge. He is the author of The Palace of Secrets: Beroalde de Verville

and Renaissance Conceptions of Knowledge (1991), Curiosity in Early Modern Europe:

Word Histories (1998), and The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany

(forthcoming).

VIRGINIA KRAUSE is Associate Professor of French Studies at Brown University. She

is the author of Idle Pursuits: Literature and Oisivete in the French Renaissance and is

presently working on confessional practices during the Renaissance.

CLAUDE LA CHARITE is a Professor of French literature of the ancien regime at the

University of Quebec at Rimouski. His research focuses on the rhetoric and poetics of

genres, especially in Rabelais, and on women writers of the Renaissance, particularly

Marie de Romieu. He is affiliated with the Sixteenth-Century Workshop directed by

Mireille Huchon and is the author of La rhetorique epistolaire de Rabelais (2003).

DAVID LAGUARDIA is an Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature

at Dartmouth College. His first book, The Iconography of Power, was a study of

sixteenth-century French nouvelle collections. He has published articles on Rabelais, Mar-

guerite de Navarre, Blaise de Monluc, and other writers of the Renaissance. Among other

projects, he is currently coediting a volume of essays on the study of material culture in

early-modern France.

GERARD LAVATORI received his Ph.D. in French literature from Brown University.

His doctoral dissertation, “Language and Money in Rabelais,” was published in 1996.

Since 1991, he has been teaching French language, literature, and civilization at the

University of La Verne, near Los Angeles.

JOHN LEWIS is a Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the Queen’s University of Belfast.

He is the author of numerous articles on the French Renaissance, particularly on Rabelais.

His last book was Adrien Turnebe, A Humanist Observed (1998), and he is currently

completing a study of French reactions to the theories and trial of Galileo, due to be

published in 2004.

KATHLEEN PERRY LONG is an Associate Professor of French at Cornell University.

She has published the book, Another Reality: Metamorphosis and the Imagination in the

Poetry of Ovid, Petrarch, and Ronsard, as well as articles on the Huguenot poet Theodore

Agrippa d’Aubigne and on hermaphrodites. She is currently revising a book-length study

on hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe.

DEBORAH NICHOLS LOSSE, the elected disciplinary representative for French in the

Renaissance Society of America, completed her M.A. and Ph.D. in French at the Uni-

versity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently chair of the Department of

Languages and Literatures and professor of French at Arizona State University. Her

publications include Rhetoric at Play: Rabelais and Satirical Eulogy and Sampling the

Book: Renaissance Prologues and the French Conteurs.


LOUISA MACKENZIE is an Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Italian

Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her research is focused principally on

the French sixteenth century, including notions and representations of nature and land-

scape, travel writing, and images of Julius Caesar. She has articles published or forth-

coming on Ronsard, Jean Parmentier, Montaigne, and Don DeLillo, and is working on

a book project on French Renaissance poetic landscapes.

ERIC MACPHAIL is an Associate Professor of French at Indiana University, where he

has taught for fifteen years. His research focuses on the intersection of literary form and

historical consciousness in the European Renaissance.

FRED W. MARSHALL, an Officier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques, is Professor

Emeritus at Waikato University (NZ), where he served as the Chair of French from 1970

until his retirement in 1994. He has published on Jean Bodel, Le jeu de St. Nicolas,

Maurice Sceve, and Rabelais.

DOUGLAS MCFARLAND received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berke-

ley, and is the Manning M. Pattillo Professor in the Liberal Arts and Chair of the De-

partment of English and Comparative Literature at Oglethorpe University, where he

teaches Renaissance literature, Latin, and Attic Greek. He has published articles on Spen-

ser, Rabelais, and Montaigne and is currently working on a metrical analysis of the verse

of Caliban in The Tempest.

JACQUES E. MERCERON is Associate Professor of French at Indiana University, Bloo-

mington. He is the author of Le message et sa fiction. La communication par messagers

dans la litterature francaise des XIIe et XIIIe siecles (1998) and Dictionnaire des saints

imaginaires et facetieux du Moyen Age a nos jours (2002). He specializes in medieval

French studies and Comparative Folklore and Mythology.

JENNIFER MONAHAN is an independent scholar living in Berkeley, California, where

she obtained her Ph.D. Her current work focuses on sixteenth-century reception of the

Roman de la rose and its connection to Renaissance shifts in hermeneutic practice. Pre-

vious publications include articles on preciosite and on Christine de Pizan.

IAN R. MORRISON is a lecturer in French at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne

(UK). His publications include Rabelais: “Tiers Livre,” “Quart Livre,” “Ve Livre”

(1994).

JOHN PARKIN is Professor of French Literary Studies at the University of Bristol where

he has taught since 1972. He has published on a variety of sixteenth-century authors

including Pasquier, Bodin, Montaigne and Machiavelli, but his fullest contributions are

on Rabelais, including, most recently, Interpretations of Rabelais (2002).

JEFF PERSELS is Associate Professor of French at the University of South Carolina.

He is the author of articles on Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, and French Reformation

polemic. His most recent project and volume of essays, co-edited with Russell Ganim,

is Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies in Scatology.


ANNE LAKE PRESCOTT, who is Helen Goodhart Altschul Professor of English at

Barnard College, is the author of Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England (1998)

and a co-editor of Spenser Studies.

SHEILA J. RABIN is Chair of the History Department at St. Peter’s College, where she

teaches medieval and Renaissance subjects. She writes on science and the occult in the

Renaissance.

CATHARINE RANDALL is Professor of French at Fordham University and former

Chair of the Department. She has published five books and over fifty articles on Calvinism,

literature, and related topics including architecture. Her most recent book, Building Codes:

The Calvinist Aesthetic of Early Modern Europe, was published in 1999. She is currently

completing manuscripts on Marguerite de Navarre and the Camisard genocide.

LESA RANDALL is an independent scholar living in Tucson, Arizona. In 1999 she

completed her dissertation on Renaissance literary representations of syphilis, with a

chapter devoted to Rabelais.

STEPHEN RAWLES retired from Glasgow University Library in 2001. He is the coau-

thor, with M. A. Screech, of A New Rabelais Bibliography: Editions of Rabelais before

1626 (1987) and, with Alison Adams and Alison Saunders, of A Bibliography of French

Emblem Books (1999–2002). He is currently working on French printers’ decorated in-

itials of the sixteenth century, and on the 1691 shelf catalogue of Glasgow University

Library.

TODD REESER is Assistant Professor of French at the University of Utah. His research

focuses on gender and sexuality in the sixteenth century, and he has published on Mon-

taigne, Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, Bourdieu, French cultural studies, and Renais-

sance travel narratives. He is completing a book on Aristotelian masculinity in the Ren-

aissance.

LEVILSON C. REIS is an Assistant Professor of foreign languages at Otterbein College,

Westerville, Ohio. He teaches French language and literature and pursues research inter-

ests in medieval, Renaissance, nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature.

BERND RENNER is currently an Assistant Professor of Modern languages at Brooklyn

College (CUNY). He earned his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 2000. His dissertation

examined different forms of satirical expression in Clement Marot and Francois Rabelais.

Previous publications include articles on Rabelais, Montaigne, and Beroalde de Verville.

FRANCOIS RIGOLOT, Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French Literature, chairs

the Program in Renaissance Studies at Princeton University. His major books include

Les langages de Rabelais (1972); Les metamorphoses de Montaigne (1988); L’erreur de

la Renaissance (2002); and Poesie et Renaissance (2003). He is also the editor of Louise

Labe’s complete works and Montaigne’s Journal de voyage. He was knighted into the

Ordre National du Merite in 2002.

MARIAN ROTHSTEIN holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and

teaches French at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. She is the author of Reading


in the Renaissance: Amadis de Gaule and the Lessons of Memory (1999). Her current

projects focus on the Androgyne in the Renaissance and cultural changes in the decade

around 1540.

JEROME SCHWARTZ is Professor Emeritus of French at the University of Pittsburgh.

PETER SHARRATT An honarary Fellow of the University of Edinburgh, he has pub-

lished extensively on Renaissance literature and thought in Latin and French and also on

art. He was co-author with France Sharratt of Ecosse romane (1985), and co-editor, with

Keith Aspley and Elizabeth Cowling, of From Rodin to Giacometti: Sculpture and Lit-

erature in France 1880–1950 (2000). He is currently working on a book on Salomon.

SANDRA SIDER’s 1978 dissertation was entitled “Emblematic Imagery in Rabelais.”

She has published on Rabelais and numerous other Renaissance topics. An Assistant

Vice President in Books and Manuscripts at Sotheby’s, she currently is studying art

history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.

PAUL J. SMITH is Professor of French literature at the University of Leiden (Nether-

lands). He is the author of Voyage et ecriture. Etude sur le Quart Livre de Rabelais

(1987), co-author of Francis Ponge: lectures et methodes (forthcoming), and Fabuleux

La Fontaine (1996).

KAREN SORSBY is Associate Professor of French at California State University, Chico.

She received her Ph.D. in 1992 from the University of California, Davis, and is the

author of Representations of the Body in French Renaissance Poetry (1999). She cur-

rently is working on a book on representations of the body in film and literature of the

French penal colonies.

AGNIESZKA STECZOWICZ is a doctoral student at Lincoln College, University of

Oxford, having previously studied in Paris and at the Ecole Normale Superieure (Fon-

tenay). She is writing a thesis on paradox in the Renaissance disciplines of medicine,

theology, law, and philosophy. Her academic interests are centered on medieval and

Renaissance literature and intellectual history.

WALTER STEPHENS is the Charles S. Singleton Professor of Italian Studies at the

Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient

History, and Nationalism (1989); and Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of

Belief (2002).

EMILY E. THOMPSON is an Associate Professor of French at Webster University (Saint

Louis). She has published articles on Bonaventure Des Periers and is currently working

on a book on alternate discourses in the French nouvelle tradition.

ANDREA WALKDEN is a graduate student in Renaissance Studies and English at Yale

University.

FLORENCE M. WEINBERG, Professor Emerita at Trinity University in San Antonio,

is the author of The Wine and the Will: Rabelais’s Bacchic Christianity (1972), Gar-

gantua in a Convex Mirror: Fischart’s View of Rabelais (1986), and Rabelais et les

lecons du rire: paraboles evangeliques et neoplatoniciennes (2000). Her works of fiction


include the seventeenth-century mysteries Sonora Wind, Ill Wind (2002) and I’ll Come

to Thee by Moonlight (2002), as well as an historical novel on Louise Labe.

ELIZABETH CHESNEY ZEGURA is Associate Professor of French and Italian at the

University of Arizona and has published on Rabelais, Ariosto, and Garnier. She is cur-

rently exploring issues of class, politics, and gender in Marguerite de Navarre’s Hepta-

meron.

Documents

The Rabelais encyclopedia