The Rabelais Encyclopedia

THE RABELAIS ENCYCLOPEDIA

THE

RABELAIS ENCYCLOPEDIA 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, Franc¸ois, 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 Pantagruel 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 Renaissance 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 combine 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, authoritative 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 Pantagrueline 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” (“cagotz”) 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 understanding: “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 surrounding 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 complete 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 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 primacy 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 Ce´ard, Ge´rard Defaux, and Michel Simonin; and the highly regarded critical editions of Pantagruel (1959), Gargantua (1970), the Third Book (1964), and the Fourth Book (1947) in the Textes Litte´raires Franc¸ais 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 (Encyclopedia Britannica “Great Books” 1955), Jacques LeClercq (Everyman’s Library: Random House), John Michael Cohen (Penguin Classics 1955), Donald Frame (University 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 translation, 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 collection. 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 printing. 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

xi

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 Ple´iade edition of the Oeuvres comple`tes; 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 inconsistent, this typically stems from Rabelais’s own fluid orthography, a tendency that is common 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, unfinished 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! Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

Chronology c. 1483–94

Franc¸ois Rabelais, the fourth son of a successful lawyer named Antoine, is born at La Devinie`re 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 Franc¸ois 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. Franc¸ois makes his second trip to Rome with Jean du Bellay, who is appointed to the College of Cardinals in May. Rabelais’s son The´odule 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, Franc¸ois 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’Orle´ans, 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 Devinie`re

BHR

Bibliothe`que d’humanisme et Renaissance

CI

Critical Inquiry

CL

Comparative Literature

CLS

Comparative Literature Studies

EC ER

Esprit cre´ateur E´tudes 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 e´tudes rabelaisiennes

RHLF

Revue d’Histoire litte´raire de la France

RHR

Re´forme, Humanisme, Renaissance

RN

Romance Notes

RQ

Renaissance Quarterly

RR

Romanic Review

SCJ

Sixteenth Century Journal

SEDES

Socie´te´ d’Edition d’Enseignement Supe´rieur

SF

Studi Francesi

THR

Travaux d’humanisme et Renaissance

TLF

Textes litte´raires franc¸ais

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 comple`tes, ed. M. Huchon

Alphabetical List of Entries Agrippa, Henry Cornelius, of Nettesheim

Chaneph (4BK 63–64)

Alchemy

Charity

Alcofrybas (Alcofribas) Nasier

Charles V

Allegory

Cheli (4BK 10)

Almanacs (Almanachs)

Chicanous (Chiquanous) (4BK 12–16)

Alterity or Otherness

Cicero, Marcus Tullius

Anarche

Clothes

Andouilles (Chitterlings, Sausages)

Codpiece (Braguette)

Androgyne

Colonna, Francesco

Animals

Colors

Aristotle

Community, portrayal of

Art and Architecture

Coq-a`-l’aˆne

Asclepiades

Cornucopia

Astrology

Correspondence

Bacbuc

Couillatris (4BK prol.)

Badebec

Critical Theory

Baisecul and Humevesne

Cuckoldry, fear of

Bakhtin, Mikhail

Death, treatment of

Basche´ (4BK 12–15)

Debt or Debtors, praise of (3BK 2–5)

Be´da, Noe¨l

Decretals (Les De´cre´tales) (4BK 48–54)

Body, representations of

Des Pe´riers, Bonaventure

Bottle, Divine or Holy (Dive Bouteille)

Devils and Demonology

Bric¸onnet, Guillaume

Dindenault (4BK 5–6)

Bridoye

Diogenes the Cynic

Brief Declaration (Briefve De´claration)

Dipsodes

Bringuenarilles (4BK 17)

Disciple of Pantagruel (Le Disciple de Pantagruel)

Bude´, Guillaume

Dogs

Calumny

Dolet, Etienne

Calvin, Jean or John

Doribus (D’Oribus, Dorisius)

Carnival

Dream of Pantagruel (Le Songe de Pantagruel)

Cartier, Jacques

Dreams

Castiglione, Baldassare

Du Bellay, Guillaume

Censors and Censorship

Du Bellay, Jean

Cervantes, Miguel de

Ecolier Limousin (Limousin schoolboy) (P 6)

xviii

Alphabetical List of Entries

Economy, in Renaissance France Education

Haughty Parisian Lady (Haulte Dame de Paris) (P 21–22)

Emblems

Hebrew Language and Culture, references to

Encyclopedism

Hell, depiction of

England

Henry II

Enigmatic Prophecy (E´nigme en Prophe´tie) (G 58)

Her Trippa

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

Heresy

Episte´mon

Hero

Erasmus, Desiderius

He´roe¨t, Antoine

Eude´mon

Hieroglyphs

Eulogy, Satirical (E´loge Paradoxal)

Hippocrates

Evangelism

Hippothade´e (3BK 30)

Fanfreluches Antidote´es

Homenaz (4BK 49–54)

Farce, elements of

Homer

Fezandat, Michel

Hoˆtel-Dieu de Lyon

Ficino, Marsilio

Humanism

Fifth Book (Cinquiesme Livre)

Humor

Folengo, Teofilo

Idleness

Food

Illustrations

Fools and Folly

Imitation and Parody

Forests

Interpretations

Fourth Book (Quart Livre)

Irony

Francis (Franc¸ois) I

Italy

Fre`re Jean (Fre`re Jan, Friar John, Brother John)

Janotus de Bragmardo

Friendship

Jews

Frozen Words (Paroles Gele´es) (4BK 55–56)

Judiciary

Galen

Juste, Franc¸ois

Games

Kabbala (Cabala, Qabbalah)

Ganabin (4BK 66–67)

Knowledge

Gargamelle

Language

Gargantua

Lanternois

Gargantua

Law

Gargantuan Chronicles (Chroniques Gargantuines)

Lefe`vre d’Etaples, Jacques

Gaster, Messere (4BK 57–62)

Letters

Gastrolatres

Lists

Genealogies

Loup Garou

Geography

Lucian

Giants

Luther, Martin

Golden Age

Lyon

Grace and Free Will

Machiavelli, Niccolo`

Grandgousier

Macreons

Gross Medlars (P 1)

Macrobe

Grotesque Realism

Major (Maioris, Mair), John

Alphabetical List of Entries Mardigras

Plague

Marguerite de Navarre

Pliny, the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus)

Marot, Cle´ment

Plotinus

Marriage

Popular Culture

Marrow or Marrowbone

Power, discourses of

Medamothi (4BK 2)

Printing

Medicine

Prognostications

Menippean Paradox

Prologue, to Pantagruel

Mercury

Prologues, Fourth Book

Moderation (Mediocritas)

Prophecy and Divination

Money

Propos des Bien Yvres, Les (G 5)

Monsters

Quaresmeprenant

More, Sir Thomas

Queneau, Raymond

Mouth, World in Pantagruel’s

Quintilian

Music

Raminagrobis (3BK 21–23)

Narrator, figure of

Ramus, Peter

Nature

Reading, portrayal of

Nazdecabre (3BK 19–20)

Reception and influence in France

Neoplatonism

Reformation

Niphleseth

Religion

Nourry, Claude

Renaissance

Novel

Rhetoric

Nursemaids

Ringing Island (L’Isle sonante)

Orlando Furioso (Roland Furieux)

Rondibilis (3BK 31–34)

Pan, death of

Ronsard, Pierre de

Pantagruel

Ruach

Pantagruel

Saint-Gelais, Mellin (or Merlin) de

Pantagruelion (3BK 49–52)

Saint-Victor, library of (P 7)

Pantagruelism

Saints, imaginary

Panurge

Saints, real

Papacy

Salmigondin

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

Satin/Ouy-Dire (Hearsay)

Paris

Satire (satyre)

Parlement

Scatology

Paul, Saint

Scholasticism

Petrarch and Petrarchism

Science

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

Shakespeare

Physetere (4BK 33–34)

Sibyl (3BK 16–18)

Physis and Antiphysie (4BK 32)

Sileni (G prol)

Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni

Skepticism

Picrochole

Social Class

Placards, affair of (L’Affaire des Placards, October 17–18, 1534)

Sophists Sorbonne

xix

xx

Alphabetical List of Entries

Sporades

Travel Literature

Symbolic System

Trent, Council of

Syphilis (La Ve´role)

Triboullet (Triboulet)

Tahureau, Jacques

Trickster

Tarande (4BK 2)

Trouillogan (3BK 29, 35–36)

Tartareti (Tartaret, Tateret), Pierre

Turks

Tempest, or Storm (4BK 18–24)

Urquhart, Sir Thomas

Tempeˆte, Pierre

Utopia

Thalame`ge

Villon, Franc¸ois

Thaumaste (P 18–20)

Violence

The´le`me, Abbey of (Abbaye de The´le`me)

Virgil

Thenaud, Jean

Voyage

Third Book (Tiers Livre)

Warfare

Thirst

Wechel, Chre´tien

Tiraqueau, Andre´

Wine

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

Women

Translations, English

Xenomanes

Topical List of Entries BROAD CATEGORIES

Nazdecabre Niphleseth

Characters

Nursemaids

Alcofrybas

Pantagruel

Anarche

Panurge

Andouilles or Chitterlings

Papimanes and Papefigues

Bacbuc

Picrochole

Badebec

Quaresmeprenant

Baisecul and Humevesne

Raminagrobis

Basche´

Sibyl

Bridoye

Sophists

Bringuenarilles Chicanous

Episodes

Couillatris

Andouilles

Dindenault

Baisecul and Humevesne

Dipsodes

Bridoye

Ecolier Limousin

Bringuenarilles

Episte´mon

Chaneph

Eude´mon

Cheli

Gargamelle

Chicanous

Gargantua

Debts or Debtors, praise of

Gastrolastres

Dindenault

Giants

Ecolier Limousin

Grandgousier

Enigmatic Prophecy

Her Trippa

Ennasin

Hippothade´e

Frozen Words

Homenaz

Ganabin

Janotus de Bragmardo

Gastrolastres

Lanternois

Gross Medlars

Loup Garou

Haughty Parisian Lady

Macreons

Her Trippa

Macrobe

Hippothade´e

Mardigras

Homenaz

Mercury

Janotus de Bragmardo

xxii

Topical List of Entries

Lanternois

He´roe¨t

Medamothi

Hippocrates

Mouth, World in Pantagruel’s

Homer

Pan, death of

Juste

Pantagruelion

Lefe`vre d’Etaples

Papimanes and Papefigues

Lucian

Physetere

Luther

Physis and Antiphysie

Machiavelli

Propos des bien yvres

Major

Quaresmeprenant

Marguerite de Navarre

Raminagrobis

Marot

Ruach

More

Satin/Ouy-Dire

Nourry

Sibyl

Paul

Sophists

Petrarch

Tempest, or Storm

Pico della Mirandola

The´le`me

Pliny the Elder Plotinus

Historical Figures

Queneau

Aristotle

Quintilian

Asclepiades

Ramus

Be´da

Ronsard

Bric¸onnet

Saint-Gelais

Bude´

Shakespeare

Calvin

Tahureau

Cartier

Tartareti

Castiglione

Tempeˆte

Cervantes

Thenaud

Charles V

Tiraqueau

Colonna

Triboullet

Des Pe´riers

Urquhart

Diogenes

Villon

Dolet

Virgil

Doribus

Wechel

du Bellay, Guillaume du Bellay, Jean

Literary Figures and Devices

Erasmus

Allegory

Fezandat

Body, representations of

Ficino

Colors

Folengo

Coq-a`-l’aˆne

Francis I

Cornucopia

Galen

Encyclopedism

Henry II

Eulogy, satirical

Topical List of Entries Farce, elements of

Lyon

Genealogies

Money

Grotesque Realism

Music

Hero

Neoplatonism

Humor

Papacy

Imitation and Parody

Paris

Irony

Parlement

Language

Petrarchism

Letters

Placards, affair of

Lists

Popular Culture

Menippean Paradox

Printing

Narrator, figure of

Religion

Novel

Renaissance

Prologues

Scholasticism

Rhetoric

Science

Satire

Social Class

Scatology

Trent, council of

Symbolic System

Turks

Trickster

Texts and Books Renaissance Culture and Civilization

Almanacs

Alchemy

Brief Declaration

Art and Architecture

Correspondence

Astrology

Decretals

Calumny

Disciple of Pantagruel

Carnival

Dream of Pantagruel

Censors and Censorship

Fifth Book

Clothes

Fourth Book

Devils and Demonology

Gargantua

Dreams

Gargantuan Chronicles

Economy, in Renaissance France

Illustrations

Emblems

Orlando Furioso

Encyclopedism

Pantagruel

Evangelism

Printing

Food

Prognostications

Fools and Folly

Ringing Island

Games

Third Book

Genealogies

Translations

Humanism Italy

Themes

Judiciary

Alterity or Otherness

Knowledge

Astrology

Law

Calumny

xxiii

xxiv

Topical List of Entries

Charity

Medicine

Community, portrayal of

Asclepiades

Cuckoldry

Galen

Death

Hippocrates

Debts or Debtors

Hoˆtel-Dieu de Lyon

Dogs

Medicine

Education

Mercury

Food

Plague

Fools and Folly

Syphilis

Forests Friendship

Navigation, Exploration, and Invention

Genealogies

Andouilles

Giants

Animals

Golden Age

Bringuenarilles

Grace and Free Will

Cartier

Idleness

Dindenault

Marriage

Forests

Moderation

Frozen Words

Money

Geography

Pantagruelism

Lyon

Philautia

Medamothi

Power, discourses of

Monsters

Reading, portrayal of

Nature

Religion

Pantagruelion

Skepticism

Paris

Social class

Physetere

Thirst

Physis and Antiphysie

Violence

Pliny the Elder

Voyage

Printing

Warfare

Ruach

Women

Salmigondin Science

SMALLER CATEGORIES

Sporades Tarande

Magic and the Occult

Thalamege

Alchemy

Travel Literature

Astrology

Utopia

Devils and Demonology

Voyage

Dreams Enigmatic Prophecy

Reception, Influence, and Interpretations

Hieroglyphs

Bakhtin

Monsters

Censors and Censorship

Prophecy and Divination

Critical Theory

Topical List of Entries Interpretations

Symbolic System

Queneau

Thaumaste

Reception and Influence, in France

Wine

Translations, Dutch and German Translations, English

Community, Society, and Politics Calumny

Religion

Censors and Censorship

Be´da

Charles V

Bric¸onnet

Community, portrayal of

Bude´

Debts or Debtors

Calvin

Dipsodes

Censors and Censorship

Economy

Decretals

Francis I

Evangelism

Friendship

Grace and Free Will

Henry II

Hell, depiction of

Judiciary

Heresy

Law

Homenaz

Marriage

Kabbala

Moderation

Luther

Money

Papacy

More

Papimanes and Papefigues

Panurge

Reformation

Parlement

Religion

Picrochole

Saints, imaginary

Power, discourses of

Saints, real

Social Class

Sorbonne

Thalame`ge

Turks

The´le`me Utopia

Symbols and Symbolism

Warfare

Allegory Androgyne

Exploring Otherness

Bottle, Divine

Alchemy

Clothes

Alterity

Codpiece (Braguette)

Andouilles

Colors

Androgyne

Cornucopia

Animals

Emblems

Astrology

Frozen Words

Bacbuc

Hieroglyphs

Badebec

Marrow and Marrowbone

Baisecul and Humevesne

Sibyl

Bringuenarilles

Sileni

Carnival

xxv

xxvi

Topical List of Entries

Cartier

Plague

Chicanous

Popular Culture

Devils and Demonology

Power, discourses of

Dreams

Ruach

Fools and Folly

Scatology

Geography

Sibyl

Giants

Sileni

Grotesque Realism

Syphilis

Hell, depiction of

Tarande

Jews

Travel Literature

Loup Garou

Triboullet

Monsters

Trickster

Mouth, World in Pantagruel’s

Turks

Nature

Violence

Physetere

Voyage

Physis and Antiphysie

Women

A AGRIPPA, HENRY CORNELIUS, OF NETTESHEIM (1486–1535) One of the most elusive figures of the Renaissance, Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim (Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim), a magus and skeptic philosopher born near Cologne, is chiefly associated 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 divination 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 Uncertainty of Arts and Sciences (De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium [1526]), a declamation 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 Declamation on the Sacrament of Marriage (De sacramento 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. References to Agrippa’s works abound in the Third Book, and Abel Lefranc claims that the two men, both free thinkers who had sympathies for reformed ideas, may have met in Lyon or in Grenoble, when both took refuge from persecution in Franc¸ois de Vachon’s household.

Readings: Jean Ce´ard, La nature et les prodiges. L’insolite au XVIe sie`cle, en France (Geneva: Droz, 1977); Abel Lefranc, “Rabelais et Cornelius Agrippa,” Me´langes offerts a` M. Emile Picot (Paris: Librairie Damasce`ne Morgand, 1913); Charles Nauert, Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965). Agnieszka Steczowicz

ALCHEMY The pseudoscience of transforming 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 ordinary 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 sixteenth century. By this time the practice had also come under the influence of Christian Neoplatonism and had become associated with the redemption of fallen matter and transubstantiation. Alchemy offered the promise of producing a fifth essence, or quintessence, in the form of a precious metal or a life-giving elixir known as the philosopher’s stone (pharmakon athanasias). Although 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 throughout 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 alchemy, the Kingdom of Quintessence or Land of the Fifth Essence, and encounter a group of royal abstractors. Some are drawing water from pumice by pounding it in a marble mortar. A spodizateur 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 spending 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 justification 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 production 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 essence.” This suggests that the text is the end product of an alchemical distillation. This implicit 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 philosopher’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 children 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 me´decine (Geneva: Droz, 1976); Carl G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968); Douglas McFarland, “Rabelais and Alchemy,” 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 published under the pseudonym of Alcofrybas Nasier. This anagram of Franc¸ois Rabelais was wonderfully well suited to the character of the works, with its combined suggestions of mystification 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 (frying, lowness). Nasier suggests noses (Latin nasus), a traditional subject for humor. Maistre Alcofrybas first presents himself to us (P prol.) as a trusted retainer of the Grandgousier/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 history, family documents, folk tales, or even archaeological 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 acquired inside information from Gargantua’s nursemaids). On the title page of the second edition of Gargantua, the work is ascribed to “l’abstracteur de quinte essence,” a phrase normally meaning an alchemist, and later title pages make reference to “Maistre Alcofribas, abstracteur 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 veracity 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 replaced by Maistre Franc¸ois Rabelais, but the style of this new narrator, particularly in the prologues, shares many features with that of Alcofrybas. Readings: Dorothy Gabe Coleman, Rabelais: A Critical Study in Prose Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Ge´rard Defaux, “Sophista loquitur: Rabelais et son masque comique,” ER 11 (1974): 89–135; Pierre-Paul Plan, Bibliographie rabelaisienne: les e´ditions 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. Christian’s journey enacts the passage of the Christian through life to salvation. Rabelais’s giants and the multitude of symbols in his chronicles correspond to this type. Second, there is the exegetical allegory, devised as an instrument to interpret the Bible. The story (historia) is subjected to three or more interpretative processes: allegory, or doctrinal extensions (quid credas—what you believe); tropology, or moral considerations (quid agas— what you do); and anagogy, the implications of the story for salvation (quo tendas—where you

3

are heading). Rabelais indicates in the prologue to Gargantua that this type of allegory is applicable 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 interpreted in like manner. The third traditional type of allegory is prefiguration, consisting of words and acts in the Old Testament which, according to Christian theology, prefigure the coming of Christ. From this perspective, Moses leading the Israelites across the Red Sea prefigures the action of Jesus in redeeming humanity. In Rabelais, the incidents of the fabula look back in the person of the replicate Christ, Pantagruel, to the acts of Jesus, particularly the forgiving of Panurge’s debts/sins (3BK 5), the surviving of a storm (4BK 18–24), and the overcoming of death (4BK 34). Rabelais’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 Gargantua the Abbey of Seuilly is a part of Rabelais’s environment in the fabula; at a higher level of significance (allegory and tropology) the attack 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 return. (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 qualities 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 selfpreoccupied 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 simultaneously. Often one level of text is paradoxically opposed to another. A relatively simple example 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 Fre`re Jean who brings them into the giant’s household. They are given a good sermon 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 contrived to expose, superstition about saints, and the uselessness of pilgrimages—are garnered from the allegorical (doctrinal) and tropological (moral) levels. But the pilgrims’ naı¨ve attitude to the Bible, which is ridiculed at the lower levels, is affirmed and praised in the anagogy (pertaining to salvation). The ignorance of these common 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 surface of the text, to exclude those who are unworthy from that same kernel of significance (see the exclusions from The´le`me and in the prologue to the Third Book), and to give delight in the solving of riddles. Paradoxes are frequent in Rabelais’s chronicles and a key tool in their decipherment. 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 Pantagruel. Numerous signs point to the presence of allegory. For example, the walls of Paris, constituted of human genitalia (P 15), are revoltingly obscene 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. Similarly, the brutal butchery effected by Fre`re 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 appropriate. The exegetical tradition within which Rabelais 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 de´livre” (“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 appearances of Gargantua’s little dog in the Third Book direct the reader to the Book of Tobit, which describes the program of the Fourth and Fifth Books. A triangle links the condemnation of factionalism 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 attentive reader to make comparisons and draw conclusions. Other episodes are grouped in proximate 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, Papefiguie`re and the Papimanes. As relationships between episode and episode are established, themes such as materialism, 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 important. No single meaning is to be derived from a biblical (and by analogy Rabelaisian) text. Ra-

Almanacs belais says as much in the prologue to Gargantua. 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 “mysteries” 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 unworthy. 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 exemplify the dedicatory assertion (G) that “laughter 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 Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970); Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Henri De Lubac, Exe´ge`se me´die´vale: 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. Marshall, “Les symboles des alle´gories 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 consulted 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-

5

tagruelian chronicles for which he is better known. Ptolemy of the second century initially distinguished 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 contains no prose but consists instead of an iconography 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. Rabelais’s satirization of predictive astrology was most likely influenced by Pico della Mirandola’s fifteenth-century, twelve-volume opus entitled Arguments against Astrology. Rabelais’s Pantagrueline Prognostication (1533) is a concise six-page tract narrated by his pseudonym Master Alcofrybas Nasier. Its introduction and ten chapters treat the same topics addressed in prophetic almanacs: the predominant 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 influence, 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 powerful 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. Rabelais was attracted to the medieval tradition as a literary source while still critical of the ignorance 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 allowed him to simultaneously challenge lax theological tenets and to expand his experimentation with French prose. Readings: Eugenio Garin, Astrology in the Renaissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983); Margaret Harp, “Franc¸ois Rabelais’s Almanachs,” Halcyon 16 (1994): 223–34; Franc¸ois Rabelais, Pantagrueline prognostication (1533), Almanach de 1533, Almanach de 1535, Almanach pour 1541, Pronostication nouvelle pour 1544. Margaret Harp

ALTERITY OR OTHERNESS The concept of “alterity” or “otherness” originates in psychoanalytical 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, geographical, and ethnic differences are therefore not so much represented as reconstructed from the repressed and subsequently rediscovered experience of writer and reader. Recent criticism has enabled Rabelais to be reevaluated in the light of theories such as alterity, signaling a shift in critical 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 (Pantagruel), 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 describe the position of the female reader. In his first meeting with Pantagruel (P 9) Panurge alludes briefly to his imprisonment in Turkey,

where we later (16) learn he was placed on a spit, wrapped in bacon, and almost roasted alive before escaping. For Timothy Hampton, Panurge’s escape shows the language difficulties experienced by the Christian humanist community when faced with cultural difference. The anecdote 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 transformation from figurative to literal dogs at the end of Panurge’s account, highlighting the dangers 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 describe the wonders of foreign lands as give shape to the “excess” that originates in the dreams and political conflicts of the reader’s world. Furthermore, Rabelais succeeds in provoking a sense of strangeness and disquiet in the reader, which prefigure Freud’s work on the “Unheimliche” (uncanny). 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 resist description or are excluded from the narrative. Freccero has also used “otherness” to elucidate 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 (Pantagruel, 14),” JMRS 15 (1985): 57–67; Timothy Hampton, Inventing Renaissance France: Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Timothy Hampton, “ ‘Turkish Dogs’: Rabelais, Erasmus, and the Rhetoric of Alterity,” Representations 41 (1993): 58–82; Julia Kristeva, E´trangers a` nous-meˆmes (Paris: Folio, 2001). Pollie Bromilow

Andouilles ANARCHE From the Greek a¬narxoz (“without 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 liberated countries, Panurge, inspired by Episte´mon’s account of the inverted destinies in the underworld (P 30), is bent on humiliating Anarche by taking away his splendid clothes, marrying 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, foreshadows 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 management 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 future wife. The trickster’s new clothes in the Third Book provide an additional hint: as in Anarche’s new garb, the predominant colors blue and green (pers et vert) seem to indicate the diminished status of both characters. They no longer fit in the respective “new worlds” and represent a ridiculed, perverted example of outdated modes of ruling, thinking, and behaving. Readings: Ge´rard Defaux, “De Pantagruel au Tiers livre: Panurge et le pouvoir,” ER 13 (1976): 163–80; Edwin Duval, “Anarche in Utopia: The Political Dimension,” The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel, ch. 5 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). Bernd Renner

ANDOUILLES (CHITTERLINGS, SAUSAGES) Chapters 35–42 of the Fourth Book are devoted to the Pantagrueline encounter with the Andouilles. Literally tripe sausages, metaphorically andouille designates the phallus and/

7

or a fool. Probably because andouille is grammatically feminine, Rabelais’s warlike, phallic creatures are all females, including Niphleseth, their queen, whose Hebrew name means “phallus.” These creatures, hereditary enemies of Quaresmeprenant, attack Pantagruel’s company, mistaking them for their foe. An earlier peace treaty between Quaresmeprenant and the Andouilles was frustrated when Quaresmeprenant refused to accept the “Boudins saulvaiges” (“selvaticques”) and the “Saulcissons montigenes” (4BK 35) as allies of the Andouilles. Alban Krailsheimer identifies the boudins or blood sausages as inhabitants of the Black Forest; Bucer’s adherents, the saulcissons or large sausages as the Swiss, or Zwingli’s adepts; Quaresmeprenant, 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 ⫽ andouilles). 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 common to Carnival. Pantagruel’s ships, after defeating the Physetere, land on the Isle Farouche, where they celebrate a thanksgiving banquet. Rabelais’s banquets 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 Fre`re Jan and the cooks appear on the battlefield in a huge Truye (sow), a tanklike vehicle like the Trojan horse, containing two hundred combatcooks (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 Minerva” (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 identified with precious stones: eyes like rubies, ears like emeralds, teeth like topazes, tail like Lucullian marble, feet like diamonds. These colors and stones contain religious symbolism: ruby ⫽ divine love, emerald ⫽ hope, diamond ⫽ faith, black stones and the color black ⫽ penitence and humility. Topaz (yellow) is an antivenom, perhaps 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 battlefield. This mustard acts as a healing and resurrecting balm for the Andouilles—their “sangre´al” (holy or royal blood—another Eucharistic 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 participate in bodily life and its pleasures. However, the Andouilles represent a fleshly extreme; the Pantagruelistes embody moderation. Readings: Barbara C. Bowen, “L’Episode des Andouilles (Rabelais, Quart Livre, chapitres XXXV– XLIIII), esquisse d’une me´thode de lecture,” Cahiers de Varsovie 8 (1981): 111–26; Barbara C. Bowen, “Lenten Eels and Carnival Sausages,” L’Esprit cre´ateur 21 (1981): 12–25; Edwin M. Duval, “La messe, la ce`ne, 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,” Franc¸ois Rabelais: Ouvrage publie´ pour le 4e centenaire de sa mort, 1553–1953 (Geneva: Droz, 1953); Robert Marichal, “Rabelais et les censures de la Sorbonne,” Le Quart livre de 1548, ER 9 (1971): 138–41; Florence M. Weinberg, “Strates de prose emble´matique: L’Isle des Andouilles,” Rabelais et les lec¸ons du rire (Orle´ans: Paradigme, 2000): 181–93. Florence M. Weinberg

ANDROGYNE The first use in French literature and the only direct reference to the Androgyne in the works of Rabelais occurs in the description 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 original 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, “caritas 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-representation, 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 1535 was a way of severely limiting those who could interpret the badge. The altered head position 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 Ficino’s commentary (4.3) dismisses the physical, and nothing suggests that Rabelais was influenced 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 mystic beginning” (G 8). On Gargantua’s hat, alongside 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 intended 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 evangelical Christian faith, based on the principle of charity; as a ruler, he will be married to his people, 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, Franc¸ois 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 The´le`me,” FF 26.1 (2001): 1–19; Marian 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

9

14 (1977): 265–75; Jerome Schwartz, “Gargantua’s Device and the Abbey of The´le`me: A Study in Rabelais’ Iconography,” YFS 47 (1972): 232–42. Marian Rothstein

ANIMALS The standard definition of “animal” 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 animals 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 Ferrements (Toolmaking Island [5BK 9]). Ongoing teratological debates also influence many of Rabelais’s animal scenes—Gargantua’s mare is certainly a monster both in its size and appearance. 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, biblical, fabled, literary, or scientific, vacillating between 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 contradictions of the discourses on animals in the sixteenth century. Rabelais seems to delight in the narrative possibilities offered by the confluence of different systems of zoological knowledge, 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 structures: rational-observational, theological, classical, teratological, occult. Rabelais’s animal world is refracted through all of these lenses. Classical zoological works were widely available in sixteenth-century France, including Aristotle’s treatises on animals and Pliny’s Natural History, although sometimes subject to challenges based on direct observation. Also widely read were Christian moralizing treatises on the animal world, such as the Natural Mirror of Vincent de Beauvais or the many bestiaries. Teratological 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 example, Charles Estienne’s On Greek and Latin Names of Trees, Fish . . . (1536). This etymological quest is an important component of Rabelais’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 Guillaume 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 almost certainly read. Another important development was the influence of accounts of New World voyages, in which creatures were described whose very existence was nowhere posited in classical texts: Andre´ Thevet, The Singularities 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 challenges Pliny’s assertion that no man has ever seen a live unicorn (4BK 4). (It is typical of Rabelais 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 contemporary zoological knowledge, opinions, and legends. A description of elephants that borrows from Pliny is also used to refute Pliny and Aristotle on the question of elephants’ joints; a contemporary 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 tapestry but are nevertheless invoked as evidence against the opinions of those who have only seen such creatures “in the land of tapestry.” Described as being “just like” familiar animals “except for” some more or less incredible difference, these creatures—like the Tarande (4BK 2), a sort of reindeer-moose with chameleonlike properties—are suspended indefinitely in the Rabelaisian 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 Andouilles (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 flying fish (4BK 3), almost a cliche´ of New World travel writing, are mentioned by many explorers, from Jacques Cartier to Jean de Le´ry. Pantagruel’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 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 possible with a boat. Even the physetere (4BK 33– 35), which partakes not so much of contemporary 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 History on the utility of certain animals to humankind, 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 encouraged 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 readers 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 presentation of multiple discourses, animals, then, are also coterminous with the “ugly surface” of Rabelais’s text, whose amusing aspect hides the serious hidden content. Readings: Marie Madeleine Fontaine, “Une Narration biscornue: Le Tarande du Quart Livre,” Poe´tique et narration: Me´langes offerts a` Guy Demerson, ed. Franc¸ois Marotin and Jacques-Philippe Saint-Ge´rand (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 Saine´an, L’histoire naturelle et les branches connexes dans l’œuvre de Rabelais (Paris: Champion, 1921); Verdun-Louis Saulnier, Rabelais dans son enqueˆte. Etude sur le “Quart” et le “Cinquie`me” livre (Paris: SEDES, 1982); Paul J. Smith,

11

“Aspects du discours zoologique dans le Cinquiesme Livre,” ER 40 (2001): 103–14; Marcel Tetel, “Le physete`re bice´phale,” Writing the Renaissance (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1992); Florence Weinberg, “Layers 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 Aristotle was the “paragon of all philosophy, and first among men” (GP 563; 5BK 19), and Aristotelian thought patterns inevitably suffused his writing. Aristotle’s emphasis on man’s natural desire for knowledge which opens the Metaphysics seems to have appealed to him (Almanach 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.” Aristotle 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 insatiability of women [3BK 27], the origin of sperm [3BK 31]), optical questions (G 10), and metaphysics (Entelechy, GP 5BK 19; OC 5BK 18). The references are at times purely facetious, such as a nonexistent text on the art of invisible writing (G 1) or Gargantua’s assertion that the problem 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 Lefe`vre d’Etaples’s translation, compendia such as Erasmus’s Adages, or secondary authors such as Andre´ Tiraqueau. Moreover, his knowledge of

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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: Ge´rard Defaux, Rabelais agonistes: Du rieur au prophe`te. Etudes sur Pantagruel, Gargantua, Le Quart livre (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Alban J. Krailsheimer, Rabelais and the Franciscans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963); Jean Plattard, L’oeuvre de Rabelais (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 manner derived from Italy, and, in painting, the establishing 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, monuments, and tombs on the Isle des Macreons (4BK 25) reflects exactly the contemporary artistic ethos. Rabelais includes painting and sculpture in the school curriculum (at a time when they were still considered to be sordid and mechanical arts) and advocates that pupils should visit craftsmen’s workshops (G 24). He was also interested in the applied arts, writing knowledgeably and copiously about furniture (G 55), costume (G 8 and 56), jewelry and precious stones (G 8, 56; 5BK 38, 42), silverware (4BK 13), mosaics (GP 5BK 38–40; OC 5BK 37–39) and tapestry (4BK 2, 4; GP 5BK 24, 30, 31; OC 5BK 23, 29, 30). In his architectural descriptions Rabelais is resolutely modern. He first links The´le`me 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 tessellated pavement of precious stones, with cor-

responding mosaics in the emble´mature over the door, and in the vaulted ceiling, and the fantastic fountain, is derived in part from Francesco Colonna’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 ecphrasis coupled with the enargeia or vivid representation characteristic of such a visual writer, as does his account of the Pays de Satin in which the reader enters the marvelous world depicted in tapestries (GP 5BK 30–31; OC 5BK 29–30). He was concerned, too, with optical theories 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, E´cho, 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, SaintMaur-les Fosse´s, 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´le`mites’: Reˆve et Re´alite´s,” Rabelais pour le XXIe sie`cle, ed. Michel Simonin (Geneva: Droz, 1998); Mireille Huchon, “The´le`me et l’Art Ste´nographique,” Rabelais pour le XXIe sie`cle, ed. Michel Simonin (Geneva: Droz, 1998); Antoinette Huon, “Alexandrie et l’Alexandrisme dans le Quart Livre: L’escale a` Medamothi,” ER 1 (1956): 98–111; Paul J. Smith, Voyage et e´criture. E´tude sur le Quart Livre de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1987) (originally in Neophilologus, 70 [1986]: 1–12). Peter Sharratt

ASCLEPIADES Ancient doctor who, in addition to extolling the therapeutic benefits of wine and passive exercise, reformed traditional

Astrology 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 knowledge of Asclepiades by way of other Greek authors including Galen and Pliny the Elder, who give testimony to the value of his theories. Echoing 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 prologue to the Fourth Book. The passage relates Asclepiades’s pact with Good Fortune that, as a doctor, his reputation should stand on the example of his own health—required to be excellent from the time any physician begins practicing 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 Asclepiades’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 cycle 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 Asclepiades of Bithnya (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Lesa Randall

ASTROLOGY A distinction between “astronomy” and “astrology” did exist during Rabelais’s time, and a vigorous debate arose about the validity of “astrology.” Nonetheless, until the middle of the seventeenth century, most astronomers accepted the validity of at least some astrological prediction, the words “astronomy” and “astrology” were often used interchangeably, and the more important distinction was between “natural astrology” and “judicial astrology.” Natural astrology 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 bodies influenced both individual and public health. They believed that the birth chart, or horoscope,

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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 disease, 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 heavenly bodies. Most opponents of astrology were motivated primarily by religious reasons: astrology 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 sinfulness. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Disputations against Judicial Astrology (1494), the most widely discussed work against astrology, was motivated by the religious belief in an absolute contradiction between human free will and astrological prediction. In Gargantua’s letter to Pantagruel, Rabelais suggested that the humanist education should include astronomy but should leave off judicial astrology (P 8). Rabelais’s disapproval of divination 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 people 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). Rabelais’s Pantagrueline Prognostication (1533) is an extended satire of astrological divination in almanacs. But in his satires Rabelais showed familiarity with the specifics of astrological prediction even as he mocked it. He also published almanacs, possibly every year, though only four survive, and the almanac for 1541 gives serious advice to physicians about the best times to perform various medical procedures during the year. Furthermore, his Pantagrueline Prognostication suggests that the problem with astrological prognostication is that people trust in it rather than trusting in God. Thus, Rabelais rejected judicial

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Astrology

astrology, at least partly for religious reasons, but accepted natural astrology. Readings: G. Mallary Masters, Rabelaisian Dialectic 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 Europe, 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 Bottle, and pontiff of all mysteries.” She has them drink from the fantastic fountain, which transforms the taste of wine according to the drinker’s imagination. After dressing Panurge in sacramental habits, making him execute a series of ritual gestures and sing a Bacchic ode (represented in the text as verses in the form of a bottle), and pronouncing conjurations in Etruscan, she invites him to receive the “word” of the sacred bottle (“garbed in pure crystal, half immersed 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 contrast to the 1548 edition, Rabelais substituted the term “Bacbuc” for “Bottle” and added a reference 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 definition, which assimilates Bacbuc with the Bottle, may be compared to the Thesaurus by Sante Pagnino 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 bottle “Bacbuc,” and it seems that Bacbuc and bouteille (“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 person; however, in the Fifth Book the Bottle and the priestess Bacbuc are very distinct. Since the second part of the Fifth Book was drafted contemporaneously with the Third Book, we can surmise 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 following definition: “A hard or brick-colored (testaceum) vessel that is almost throat-shaped, taking its name from the sound heard when it is immersed in water.” Further, the textual reference to boiling water may derive from the explanation of R. Estienne in his Dictionnaire franc¸oislatin (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 Provenc¸al parody of the fourteenth century, attributed to the philosopher Levi ben Geron. This book, intended to be read during

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Badebec

the period of Jewish carnival, plays upon the words Habakuk (a book of the Bible) and habaqbuc (“bottle”), and “is founded upon a mystico-carnivalesque conception of wine.” Readings: Michel Bastiaensen, “L’he´breu chez Rabelais,” 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 describe 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 characteristics: 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 response to Pantagruel’s birth. Similarly, Gargantua’s grief at his wife’s death is quickly replaced by joy at his newborn son. Readings: Franc¸oise 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 episode 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 defeated the most exalted French legal brains. Rabelais 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 specifically that the litigants address the court in person rather than have their case assessed through documents, and generally that good legal expertise is based on classical philology and philosophy, not medieval ignorance. The points are supported by Du Douhet, a member of the panel of experts, but one clearly identifiable as a humanist, 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), although 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 inasmuch 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, apparently deep in thought, before delivering a judgment 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 assembled 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 allegory of his theories on law, which supported Guillaume Bude´’s historical approach and attacked the traditional mos italicus. In that case the speeches become irrelevant nonsense into which Rabelais has inserted various encoded references (for example, to the Gallican policies of various French kings). They may alternatively see the satiric material as merely preluding a

Bakhtin, Mikhail piece of theatrical farce consonant with the traditions of the basoche, whereby court procedures become distorted parodies of themselves, as here a judge crowns gibberish with gobbledygook and is lionized for his triumph. Further options reside in the way one assesses the main figures. Are Baisecul and Humevesne to be condemned 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’aˆne? 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 Pantagruel’s thoughts (before delivering sentence, is he actually reflecting “deeply” [“bien profundement, comme l’on povoit estimer”]?) are crucial to Rabelais’s technique. One reads as one chooses, provided other readings are granted appropriate respect. Readings: Ge´rard Defaux, Rabelais agonistes (Geneva: 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; Franc¸ois 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: Duckworth, 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-

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old spirit of opposition to the fixed social and ideological hierarchies of the Middle Ages, and which reached its apex in the communal festivities of Carnival and the literature of the Renaissance, where it penetrated high culture for the last time. As revealed in his comic verbal creations, 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 celebration in an ambivalent matrix of creativity and destruction equally apparent in the comic counterculture of the people, but lost to a modernity whose humor was predominantly satiric. Previous analyses of Rabelais’s work had either concentrated on his ideas rather than his humor, or else had reduced that humor to a mere facetiousness devoid of philosophical meaning. Though never denying it, Bakhtin diminished the significance 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 immense range and imaginative power, together with an infectious force of argument that succeeds 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 popular spirit, his relegation of Rabelais’s humanism, including his erudite wit, to secondary importance, and a bland disregard of historical theories countering his own. In fact, these theories have disproved much of Bakhtin’s sociology. For instance, the carnival was for him the expression of the people’s indomitable and rebellious free spirit as reflected in numberless passages 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

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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 middle classes who perpetuated set traditions of an essentially conservative nature. The debate has deep philosophical implications 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 Rabelais’s humor as an epitome of that of the people 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 (Rabelais’s included)—hence, Bakhtin’s own examples which, despite his argument, spread back from the Renaissance to ancient Greek drama and forward into twentieth-century fiction. Second, he appears to confuse a state of mind (the carnival spirit, which does imply complete liberation, “contrary to all existing forms of . . . organization” [Rabelais and His World 255]), with a social reality, namely, the actual events of carnival, 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 responsibility 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 involved not merely a relaxation of various restrictions and sanctions, but the entire collapse of order. 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 questioning and dialogic rather than assertive and predetermined: the associated debate remains lively among his students and followers. At the same time, his detailed readings of various comic episodes (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 fiction (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 “sustantificque mouelle” or marrow symbol and is easily explained via Bakhtin’s notion of comic ambivalence 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 discourse be to some degree dialogic, and the fact that he was constantly revising his own conclusions and perspectives, it is more than appropriate that his approach and conclusions be questioned, even radically. Although detractors still abound, the reinsertion of dialogism and plurivocity into Rabelais studies has led to interesting advances. Among many instances, one may cite the importance of discussion in the humanist education of Gargantua, the dialogic cast of mind apparent in Rabelais’s mentor Erasmus, carnivalesque interpretations of The´le`me (which Bakhtin actually excludes from study), Michel Jeanneret’s notion of the noninterpretability of scenes like the Gaster episode where the author’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 redeemed. Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. He´le`ne Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968); Michae¨l Baraz, Rabelais et la joie de la liberte´ (Paris: Corti, 1983); Richard M. Berrong, Rabelais and Bakhtin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986); Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist,

Be´da, Noe¨l Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Michel Jeanneret, Le De´fi des signes (Orle´ans: Paradigme, 1994); Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); John Parkin, Interpretations of Rabelais (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002). John Parkin

BASCHE´ (4BK 12–15) Panurge recounts the story of Lord Basche´ in the Fourth Book, chapters 12–15. In this episode, the fat prior of SaintLouant 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 wedding celebration. As part of the festivities, guests playfully hit each other. The Chicanous participate 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 Episte´mon express reservations about Basche´’s methods (see 4BK 16). The description of Basche´’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 Franc¸ois 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 comple`tes de Franc¸ois Rabelais (Paris: Gallimard, 1994); Robert Marichal, “Rene´ Du Puy et les Chicanous,” BHR 11 (1949): 129–66. E. Bruce Hayes

BE´DA, NOE¨L (c. 1470–1537) A scholastic theologian and leader of the Paris Faculty of Theology, Be´da 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 prote´ge´ of the Flemish theologian Jan Standonck, who reformed the Colle`ge de Mon-

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taigu in Paris for the purpose of producing disciplined clergy to reform the Church, Be´da succeeded 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, Be´da proposed reviving the office of syndic in the Paris Faculty of Theology to improve its ability to deal with controversial issues and was elected to it. For the next fifteen years he implemented a policy of censorship and repression 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 Be´da as the author of De optimate triparum (On the Excellence of Tripe). One author sees Rabelais’s character Picrochole as, at a symbolic level, a depiction of Noe¨l Be´da. The Parlement of Paris allied itself with Be´da and the Faculty to form a conservative party that opposed reformers, humanists, and the tolerant stance of King Francis I (who forbade the sale of Be´da’s Annotationes [1526] against Erasmus and Lefe`vre d’Etaples). Undaunted, Be´da led a Faculty censure of Erasmus and published his Adversus clandestinos Lutheranos (1529). Be´da’s opposition in 1530–31 to the French king’s support for King Henry VIII’s annulment, his campaign in 1533 to silence the preaching of Ge´rard Roussel (a prote´ge´ 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., “Noe¨l Beda and the Humanist Reformation at Paris, 1504–1534” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University 1967); Walter Bense, Jr., “Noe¨l Beda’s View of the Reformation,” Occasional Papers of the American Society for Reformation Research 1 (1977): 93–107; James K. Farge, “Beda, Noe¨l,” Biographical Register of Paris Doctors of Theology (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980): 31–36; James K. Farge, Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Reformation France. The Faculty of Theology of Paris, 1500–1543 (Leiden: L. J. Brill, 1985); Jean Larmat, “Picrochole, est-il Noe¨l Beda?” ER 8 (1969): 13–25; Erika Rummel, Erasmus and His

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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 reassessments in all fields of learning. Correspondingly, humanist physicians amplified the anatomical teachings bequeathed to the Renaissance from antique sources (Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen), to produce a more accurate representation 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 Fabric of the Human Body (1543) by Andreas Vesalius 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 demonstrated a medical and anatomical interest in the body, which he readily transferred to his writings. 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 representations incline toward scatological or epistemological musings delivered in hyperbolic form, all exhibit rather remarkable forms of physicality. Rabelais was fond of incorporating corporeal themes such as birth, death, growth, deformation, dismemberment, castration, mutilation, outrageously 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 contemporary political, philosophical, or religious disputes. In his Gargantua (G 3, 6) where the themes of birth and the growth of giants prevail, Rabelais presents physiological reflections on a preposterous 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 question 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 examined. Self-absorbed in the physicality of childhood activities, the young prince is seen drinking, 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 development and satire of scholastic argumentation. In the opening chapters describing Pantagruel’s birth (P 1–2), Rabelais continued to focus on gigantification and on the genetic mutation that engendered the race of giants. Clearly, Rabelais was inspired by the wide popular interest in giants circulating in the early sixteenth century, 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 develops 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 Episte´mon’s decapitated head (P 30). This combat injury had allowed Episte´mon to glimpse life in a postmortem 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 considered as potential building material as Panurge discourses on his fantasy of rebuilding the walls of Paris using women’s genitals (P 15). Generally, the female body is not physically visible in Rabelais’s work but commonly appears as miscellaneous 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 marriage 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

Bric¸onnet, Guillaume 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, political, and religious assumptions of his time and to appeal to the diverse readers for whom the books were ultimately destined. Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. He´le`ne Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968); Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival; Text, Context, Metatext (Berkeley: University of California 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 BOUTEILLE) Oracular goal of Panurge’s matrimonial quest in the Fourth and Fifth Books. Seeking to know whether he should marry and, if so, whether his wife will be faithful, Pantagruel’s roguish companion consults a variety of expert opinions to no avail. He does attribute meaning, however, to the empty bottle—originally 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 drunkenness. Lending its form in the Fourth Book to the insignia on Pantagruel’s ship (4BK 1), the

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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 Dialectic and the Platonic-Hermetic Tradition (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1969); Raymond Mauny, “La Dive Bouteille et autres boutilles a` vin,” BAARD 3 (1973): 23–26; Flora Samuel, “Le Corbusier, 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). Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

BRIC ¸ ONNET, 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 Bric¸onnet began his career with a position at the Cour des Comptes (Court of Auditors) of Parlement and as the bishop of Lode`ve. In 1507, he was named as abbot of Saint Germain des Pre`s. 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 diplomat, Bric¸onnet 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 Bric¸onnet’s time, few high-ranking church officials remained in their dioceses, preferring a comfortable life at court. Thwarting convention, the new bishop of Meaux took up residence in Meaux. Leading by example, he encouraged his parish priests to do the same. He denounced clerical depravity, promoted those with a taste for learning, and created official posts for preachers. Bric¸onnet’s vision of reform was a complete program that touched the people, places, and things around him. Bric¸onnet garnered support from the French

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Bridoye

court for his reforms. Letters to his protector Marguerite de Navarre show a sensitive spiritual guide. As he glosses Bible passages for his royal correspondent, the sacred text springs to life; each verse gains meaning for personal development and the establishment of a relationship with God through Christ. But Bric¸onnet’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, Lefe`vre d’Etaples, Ge´rard Roussel, Franc¸ois Vatable, and Michel d’Arande to assist him. Along with a dynamic intellectual life, Bric¸onnet nurtured service and spiritual stewardship in his diocese. Preaching formed the core of his program, but he also fought the Franciscans who responded with accusations of heresy. Bric¸onnet 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 Lefe`vre 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 ide´es religieuses de Guillaume Bric¸onnet, e´veˆque de Meaux,” Revue de the´ologie et des questions religieuses de Montauban (1900): 318–58, 377–416; Guillaume Bric¸onnet and Marguerite de Navarre, Correspondance (1521–1524), 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1975–79); Lucien Febvre, Le cas Bric¸onnet: ide´e d’une recherche (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1945); Henry Heller, “Marguerite de Navarre and the Reformers of Meaux,” BHR 33 (1971): 271–310; Michel Veissie`re, Autour de Guillaume Bric¸onnet (1470–1534) (Provins: Socie´te´ d’histoire et d’arche´ologie, 1967); Michel Veissie`re, L’e´veˆque Guillaume Bric¸onnet (1470–1534): contribution a` la connaissance de la Re´forme catholique a` la veille du Concile de Trente (Provins: Socie´te´ d’histoire et d’arche´ologie, 1986). Amy C. Graves

BRIDOYE An aging provincial judge, designated by Pantagruel as a representative of legal learning to counsel Panurge (along with the theologian Hippothade´e, 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 presumably 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 sentence against a certain Toucheronde. Questioned by the president of the Parlement, Bridoye reveals 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 revelation creates a judicial dilemma for the Parlement and its president, Trinquamelle: should Bridoye 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 speculations by Episte´mon 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 represents the self-satisfaction of a falsely learned fool. Over the course of four dense and difficult chapters (39–42) Bridoye flaunts an immense legal 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 example, he understands the common legal expression “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 always 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 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 conviction and acquittal would be equally justified. Bridoye himself cites (without understanding) many authentic laws on this subject, but the cases he decides do not meet any of their criteria for recourse to dice. Nor does his method correspond to the one supposed by Episte´mon. 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 importance 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 expression for a “silly goose” or a fool. A “brideoie” (“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 solution 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 Bridoye: Rabelais et le De Nobilitate de Tiraqueau,” BHR

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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 (⫽ Clarification) 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 anonymous list attached to some copies of the 1552 edition of the Fourth Book. It contains 178 entries, 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 appears 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 contradictory to the significance the words have in the text, the most problematic ones being paralle`le, 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 contend that it is inauthentic, whereas for Mireille Huchon its author is Rabelais. Marie-Luce Demonet considers the list to be a satirical pastiche by Rabelais on contemporary glossators and lexicographers. 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 during his stays in Rome (see the entry on Catadupes du Nil). Readings: Raymond Arveiller, “La Briefve Declaration est-elle de Rabelais?” ER 5 (1964): 9–10; Marie-Luce Demonet, “Rabelais me´talinguiste,” ER 37 (1999): 115–28; Mireille Huchon, Rabelais grammairien (Geneva: Droz, 1981): 406–11, 491–95; Andre´

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Bringuenarilles

Tournon, “La Briefve Declaration n’est pas de Rabelais,” ER 13 (1976): 133–38. Paul J. Smith

BRINGUENARILLES (4BK 17) One in a series of swallowing mouths and Fourth Book monsters, Bringuenarilles is a superficially benign and farcical enemy of the wind eaters who consumes windmills and other detritus before falling ill of a stomach ailment and dying. Ironically, his death results not from the hardware he has consumed, but rather from the cure prescribed by doctors: a pat of butter, probably intended to lubricate the pots and pans he has swallowed, suffocates the giant. Linked by Alice Berry to the “archetypal myth of the male made pregnant by what he eats” (149–51), Bringuenarilles 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 veneer of fantasy, then, Rabelais links the theme of unbridled consumption, which served in 1532 as a positive figure of humanistic curiosity, to inequities of class and power. Readings: Alice Fiola Berry, The Charm of Catastrophe: A Study of Rabelais’s Quart Livre (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Michael J. Heath, Rabelais (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1996); Elizabeth Chesney Zegura and Marcel Tetel, Rabelais Revisited (New York: Macmillan/Twayne, 1993). Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

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 because 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 important are the “Annotations on the Pandects” (Digest), 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 disparaged 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 humanists 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 supporters 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 literature, and the glory of France. Bude´’s specialized 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, ancient funerals, gardens, ships, and much, much more. We may learn in passing about such disparate subjects as the price Marc Antony paid for the severed head of Cicero, the boundaries of the Roman Empire, the measurement of the earth, French bread, and the lack of owls in Crete. Bude´ is fond of underlining the lack of structure in his book (“Veru`m 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 Rabelais’s debt to him is more obvious than that and has yet to be thoroughly explored. Bude´ supplied 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 Ucalegon, Arimaspien, Otacuste, celeusma, and the Trojan Pig). And high on the list of both authors’ aims is publicity for the intellectual superiority of France. Readings: Guillaume Bude´, Gulielmi Budaei Parisiensis, Consiliarii Regii, De asse et partibus eius libri V (Lyon: Sebastien Gryphe, 1542); M.-M. de La Gar-

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anderie, Christianisme et lettres profanes (1515– 1535): essai sur l’humanisme franc¸ais (1515–1535) et sur la pense´e 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 relation to Rabelais in two ways: first, with reference 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 prologue to the first version of the Fourth Book (1548) and in the dedicatory letter of the 1552 version, Rabelais attacked his critics whose accusations of heresy had almost stopped his writing. In chapter 32 of the 1552 Fourth Book, Pantagruel explicitly condemns the “Demoniacles Calvins imposteurs de Geneve,” “les enraigez Putherbes” and “Maniacles Pistoletz”—three real and virulent critics, John Calvin, the monk Gabriel 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 condemnation of Rabelais’s books, although all three retained the royal privilege and were indeed reprinted, 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 subsequently 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 Chaˆtillon, a powerful protector of Christian humanists. In this letter, Rabelais claimed that his books were simply “folastries joyeuses” (joyful sport) that had been misinterpreted 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. Calumny represents another term in the reader’s interpretation 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 separates and divides (4BK ded.). If it was in the Fourth Book that Rabelais most explicitly denounced those who attacked and calumniated his work, the link between calumniators and the diabolical 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 Pantagrueline principle of interpreting all things in the best and most charitable spirit: Pantagruel “toutes choses prenoit en bonne partie, toute acte interpretoit a` bien” (“took all things in good part, interpreted all actions favorably” [3BK 2]). Calumny, false accusation, equally raises the question of intention. Laughter at Rabelais’s equivocations was never straightforward: Rabe-

Calvin, Jean or John lais was himself accused of calumny against the monastic orders by Puy-Herbault, who clearly read the “folastries joyeuses” as more biting satire. The continuing polemic over the Gargantua prologue demonstrates that the question of intention and interpretation is still far from resolved. Readings: Michel Charles, Introduction a` l’e´tude des textes (Paris: Seuil, 1995); Natalie Zemon Davis, “Rabelais among the Censors (1940s, 1540s),” Representations 32 (1990): 1–32; Diane Desrosiers-Bonin, Rabelais et l’humanisme civil, ER 27 (Geneva: Droz, 1992); Lucien Febvre, Le proble`me de l’incroyance au seizie`me sie`cle: la religion de Rabelais (Paris: Albin Michel, 1947); Franc¸ois Rigolot, L’erreur de la Renaissance (Paris: Champion, 2002). Emily Butterworth

CALVIN, JEAN OR JOHN (1509–64) French-born reformer who was a prolific theologian, preacher, and polemicist. His major work, the oft-revised and expanded Institutio christianœ religionis or Institutes of the Christian Religion (first Latin edition, 1536; first French edition, 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 epicenter 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 conflict, starting in 1562. As Calvin was fifteen years Rabelais’s junior, his considerable influence began 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” Franc¸ois Juste edition of these works (Lyon, 1542), however, Rabelais does include derisive topical references 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 confrontation) between Rabelais and Calvin came in 1550 with the publication of the Traite´ des scandales, Calvin’s own vernacular translation of his De scandalis (On Scandals), a virulent attack, as its full title indicates, on those “who today pre-

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vent many people from coming to the pure doctrine of the Gospels and lead others astray from it.” Although by no means taking him as his principal 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 Gospels” and “vomiting up their execrable blasphemies against Jesus Christ and his teachings,” before 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 “moyenneurs” (moderates or moderators). However critical they were of contemporary Catholic institutions, doctrine, and conduct, their relative moderation was as unacceptable to Calvin as Catholicism itself. Rabelais’s works were, in addition, 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 Calvin’s attack and even set its terms in the 1546 Third Book, with his definition of Pantagruelism, arguably the overarching and unifying moral philosophy of the chronicles, the tenets of which include the injunction never to “se scandalizer” (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, Rabelais and Calvin each viewed the other and the other’s understanding of and efforts toward reform as “scandalous.” Rabelais responded directly 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

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Carnival

in 1553 (see also Evangelism; Reformation; Religion). Readings: Jean Calvin, Des scandales, ed. Olivier Fatio (Geneva: Droz, 1984); Lucien Febvre, Le proble`me de l’incroyance au XVIe sie`cle. La Religion de Rabelais (Paris: Albin Michel, 1942); Alban J. Krailsheimer, Rabelais (Les e´crivains devant Dieu) (Paris: Descle´e de Brouwer, 1967); Michael Screech, Rabelais and the Challenge of the Gospel: Evangelism, 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 preparation for Easter. But in the observances of laypeople 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 devoted to celebrations and physical indulgence of various kinds. In many places, similar celebrations marked the twelve days between Christmas and the Feast of Kings (January 6), and a good number of the rituals discussed in modern writing as examples of Carnival in fact belonged to the winter celebration. Carnival food ideally consisted of meat, particularly fat meat, sausages, eggs, butter, and cheese—all the foods forbidden in Lent, when the faithful were supposed to subsist on fish, cereals, and vegetables. Carnival observances 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 performed a parody of the usual rites. The text for the Boy Bishop’s sermon was usually “Stultorum numerus infinitus” (“the number of fools is infinite” [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 respective 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 wisdom (for a few days, children and madmen will be allowed to teach adults and the sane), and normal decorum and common sense (men may dress as women or animals, women as men, “indecent” acts are permitted, food is consumed in unaccustomed 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 historians, however, have questioned how subversive these rituals actually were, and some have argued that by confining reversals of power to a limited season and to these well-established traditional forms, Carnival in fact acted as a safety valve which helped ensure the survival of traditional authority. In the Fourth Book, chapters 29–42, Rabelais gives a lengthy description first of Quaresmeprenant (Lent, or more accurately, “Lentcoming-on,” the beginning of Lent) represented as a bizarre, forbidding hybrid monster, and then of his traditional enemies, the Andouilles (tripesausages). 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 intervention of the flying pig the conflict is resolved and a new friendship established. These chapters are plainly based upon traditional Carnival rituals, but some critics, most notably Mikhail Bakhtin, have argued that many more elements in the book are inspired by a car-

Cartier, Jacques 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 (Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable, written between 1935 and 1940 but not published until 1965 in Russian, 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 considerable influence in recent critical writing in English. Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. He´le`ne Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968); “Carnivalization/carnivalesque,” A Dictionary 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 becomes a major theme of his work only in the Fourth Book, Rabelais displays considerable interest in voyages of exploration as early as the Pantagruel (1532) where, at least until its final stage, Pantagruel’s return journey to Utopia replicates 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. Indeed, throughout this and the Fifth Book, Pantagruel and his companions sail from island to island in search of the Oracle of the Dive Bouteille 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 Canada (1534, 1535, 1541), since the ships of Pantagruel’s fleet sail from Saint-Malo in search of a shortcut to Cathay. This was precisely the goal

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of Cartier’s expeditions, since he wanted to give the French an advantage over the Portuguese and Spanish who were deriving considerable economic 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 earlier (Paris, 1545), although a manuscript version of this text also exists and was perhaps given to Francis I before this date. Cartier’s second voyage also departed from Saint-Malo and, like that of Pantagruel, was preceded by a service of worship. In his analysis of the relationship between Rabelais 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 franc¸aises de la Re´volution maritime du XIVe au XVIe sie`cle [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 Rabelais’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 sailing and navigational terms that would subsequently appear in the Fourth Book (Lefranc 1984: 59–60). This would certainly help to explain the extensive nautical knowledge Rabelais 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-

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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); JeanPhilippe Beaulieu, “La Description de la nouveaute´ dans les re´cits 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 capitaine Jaques Cartier . . . (Rouen, 1598); Jacques Doremont, 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 e´tudes canadiennes 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 discovered it when visiting Italy. The classical scholar Jacques Collin penned the first surviving French translation (1537), and Mellin de SaintGelais and Etienne Dolet collaborated on the revised Lyonnais edition of 1538. The work generated intense interest, both favorable and hostile. While Rabelais quotes it at least once (3BK 29), Pauline Smith opines correctly that his work contains little anticourtier satire such as the Cortegiano stimulated and may indeed have sought to nullify via the ideal figure it portrays. Nevertheless, the Third Book passage is significant both as prefacing the erudite symposium to follow and as cueing yet another hostile judgement on Panurge. 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 universally abhor medication, and (c) from lawyers, who never sue one another. Such words are those of a courtisan, says Pantagruel, who (going beyond Castiglione) combines seriousness and ingenuity in answering the charges. Good theologians 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 reduced status as Pantagruel’s sycophant with attitudes 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 adding 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 elsewhere in the text, which perspective appeals more: Panurge’s irreverence or Pantagruel’s conscientiousness. Undeniably, however, the dialogues orchestrating the Cortegiano and Rabelais’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 relaxation. 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 Renaissance and Changing Ideals,” The Courts of Europe, ed. Arthur G. Dickens (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977); Richard Cooper, “Les lectures italiennes de Rabelais: une mise au point,” ER 37 (1999): 25–49; Michael 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 circulation 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, consolidated 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 tor of the University of Paris, instructed the Parlement to forbid the printing of books on religious questions without inspection by the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris (the “Sorbonne” to those who did not like it); the Parlement 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 Parlement 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, censorship could work; but when Francis I favored humanists like Erasmus, Louis de Berquin, or Lefe`vre 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 conflicts is a subject of debate: James Farge argues that the Faculty was always the respected guardian 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 Higman 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 frequently printed without the necessary permission, and foreign printings could not be controlled in this way. Already by 1526 edicts were issued demanding that copies of vernacular translations of Scripture and certain other texts be handed in to the authorities. A new step in 1531 was the practice of searches in suspect bookshops. The Affaire 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

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the problem changed dramatically, and the process of censorship evolved accordingly. The theologians took to drawing up lists of titles, without detailed explanations. A first list, made “at the request of the Parlement” between Christmas 1542 and March 2, 1543, involved forty-three titles in French and twenty-two in Latin. This list remained in manuscript form; however, its existence 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 Theology (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 premie`re of a printed Index of forbidden books was backed by the spiritual authority of the Faculty; but there was no means of enforcing that authority. In 1545 the Inquisitor Matthieu Ory proposed that the list be republished with the backing of an edict from the Parlement; the edict appeared on June 23, 1545, and the related edition of the Catalogue on July 20, 1545 (with contents 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 appeared in 1547, with eighty-four new condemnations (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 (seventytwo new titles in Latin, sixty in French). No new lists were published in France after this date, though the Faculty decided individual condemnations; the Catalogues were replaced by the Roman Index from 1557 on. In France, the Edict of Chaˆteaubriant (1551) comprehensively summarized censorship dispositions 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 bookshops 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

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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 coincides 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 religious superiors. This was an internal matter to the Franciscan order, not based on an official ecclesiastical 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 Franc¸ois Daniel of Orle´ans (October 1533), reports on the row within the University concerning Marguerite de Navarre’s Miroir de l’ame pecheresse; Nicolas Le Clerc, representative of the theologians, protests that Marguerite’s work was not condemned by the Faculty deputies, 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 concerns the Saint-Victor library rather than Panurge’s pranks. In any case, no censure of Rabelais’s work dates from this period. Third, the first certain evidence of a condemnation of Rabelais’s works is in the list of 1542/ 3, where the final item (apart from a later addition) is: “Grandes Annales tres-veritables des gestes merveilleux du grand Gargantua et Pantagruel 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 “Sorbonagres” and so on have been watered down. In 1544, the same title is transcribed; in addition, there is the condemnation of “Pantagruel et Gargantua” (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 Rabelais, does not appear on any of the lists of censured 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 (Sherbrooke: Centre d’E´tudes de la Renaissance, 1985); James K. Farge, Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Reformation France: The Faculty of Theology of Paris, 1500–1543 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985); Francis Higman, Censorship and the Sorbonne. A Bibliographical Study of Books in French Censured by the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris, 1520–1551 (Geneva: 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. Although Cervantes is unlikely to have had any direct knowledge of Rabelais, both authors shared an enthusiasm for Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and both made crucial contributions to the development of Renaissance comic narrative. Criticism has acknowledged the prominent role of proverbial speech in both authors as well as their predilection for lexical experimentation and linguistic 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 implausible and fantastic events with rigorous precision and an indignant pretension to the strictest veracity. This parodic technique, known in Ariosto studies as the Turpin method, allows Rabelais and Cervantes to assert the autonomy of fiction from historical criteria of truth and falsehood. 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 Cervantes,” 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 CHANEPH (4BK 63–64) Chaneph (meaning “hypocrisy” in Hebrew) is the name of the penultimate island encountered in the Fourth Book. The episode begins by relating a moment of deathly calm (the lack of wind causing a stagnation of the joyful quest, Pantagruel and his companions dozing in lethargy). Fre`re 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). Episte´mon informs the Pantagruelists on the Island of Chaneph and its sinister habitants. During a copious banquet-lunch, the initial lethargy quickly disappears; the habitual joy and linguistic virtuosity are returning as is clear from the insertion of other discourses: anecdotes, rhymes, and a long, alphabetic list of venomous animals (4BK 64). Finally, Pantagruel answers the question asked by Fre`re Jean, by pointing the attention 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 Pantagruel’s cheerful reflexion on Bacchic furor (4BK 65). For Edwin Duval, this episode belongs to the threefold sequence of increasingly dangerous anticaritas (Gaster, Chaneph, Ganabin) which concludes the Fourth Book. The episode itself is based on the opposition of the banqueting companions and the dreadful habitants of Chaneph. Modern critics of the episode are largely indebted to V.-L. Saulnier’s seminal interpretation of this opposition: Chaneph represents an “antiThelema” opposed to the merry company of the Pantagruelians whose feasting echoes the departure’s banquet, related in the opening chapter of the Fourth Book. Saulnier also stresses the allusion to the Last Supper and the christological impact 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.

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Duval) with Pentecostal undertones: the (twelve) companions assembled sadly together, their gladness caused by the raising of the wind (spiritus), their apparent drunkenness and their linguistic inspiration (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 (borrowings from medical manuals on poisonous animals), and classical mythology (the myth of the Winged Bacchus). Readings: Paul Delaunay, “Les animaux venimeux dans Rabelais,” Me´langes Abel Lefranc (Paris: Droz, 1936); Edwin M. Duval, “La messe, la ce`ne, et le voyage sans fin du Quart Livre,” ER 21 (1988): 131–40; Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1998); Verdun-L. Saulnier, Rabelais II: Rabelais dans son enqueˆte. Etude sur le Quart et le Cinquie`me livre (Paris: SEDES, 1982); Michael A. Screech, “The Winged Bacchus (Pausanias, Rabelais and Later Emblematists),” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 43 (1980): 259–62; Paul J. Smith, Voyage et e´criture. 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 tradition 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 expressions of the single law of charity. Much in Rabelais’s books is predicated on the

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Charles V

ideal of Christian charity, including Pantagruel’s role in restoring friendship to the feuding litigants Baisecul and Humevesne and in replacing the fratricidal reign of Anarche with a utopian reign of brotherly love in Dipsodie (Pantagruel), Grandgousier’s attempts to buy peace from his aggressive neighbor Picrochole and Gargantua’s institution of the Abbey of The´le`me 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 enemies and to broker peace between antagonistic forces (Fourth Book). Although all of Rabelais’s books promote the ideal of a tolerant, allinclusive 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 Pantagruelism. 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); Franc¸ois Rigolot, “Rabelais, Misogyny, and Christian Charity: Biblical Intertextuality and the Renaissance Crisis of Exemplarity,” PMLA 109.2 (1994): 225–37. Edwin M. Duval

CHARLES V (1500–58) Considered the greatest of the Hapsburg emperors, Charles V developed an empire on which “the sun never set.” Spain, South America, the Low Countries, Naples, 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 Catholic reform and his fight against Protestantism. The conquest of Mexico and Peru became arguably his most lasting legacy. Having abandoned 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 Pavia, his subsequent imprisonment, and finally the taking of his two oldest sons as hostages. Picrochole (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 (Institutio 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 Gargantua 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 developed 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 between 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.” Indeed, the seemingly culinary chapter recounts Fre`re Jean’s enthusiastic visit to King Panigon’s kitchens. Under the guise of setting up an argument 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 can envision that beyond the immediate translation 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 elaborations about Creation. It is associated with the various steps of the creation of beings and forms in the Divine plan and their ideal hierarchy. According 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 ultimate goal of the Fourth Book is to reach Bacbuc, 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 mystique juive (Paris: Payot, 1983); Franc¸ois Secret, Les Kabbalistes chre´tiens 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 damages 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-

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ous arrive. As part of the festivities, guests playfully hit each other. This tradition is taken to extremes, and on three different occasions, the “wedding guests” gruesomely beat the Chicanous. While Pantagruel and Episte´mon condemn Basche´’s excessive actions, Fre`re 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 comple`tes de Franc¸ois 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 Gargantuan 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, periodic 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 particularly evident in his neo-Latin correspondence 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 interpretive quarrel yields radically different readings of key texts: taken seriously, Gargantua’s letter on learning (P 8) represents a manifesto of humanistic pedagogy; but its inflated style, similar in many ways to Rabelais’s “mock serious” dis-

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Clothes

course, leaves open the possibility that he is either parodying or interrogating the aging giant’s ambitions for his son. Textual allusions to Ciceronian rhetoric do little 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 Gargantua “cry like a cow.” The veiled satire of this episode sets the stage for overt mockery in chapter 39 of Gargantua where Fre`re 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 function, 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, Franc¸ois Rabelais. A Study (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977); Ann Vasaly, Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Neal Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

CLOTHES From Panurge’s initial appearance 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 Franc¸ois Rabelais” (2), who devotes three chapters to Gargantua’s lavish livery and its symbolism (G 8-10), focuses at length on Panurge’s decorative codpiece, and regales 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 (formfitting 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 The´le`me. In the prologue to Gargantua, of course, Rabelais focuses on the frequent discontinuity between 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). However, Rabelais more frequently seems to revel in the symbolic and aesthetic possibilities of clothing, 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 eccentricities, 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: ‘Comment on vestit Gargantua,’ ” Illinois Classical Studies 9 (1984): 183–95. Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

Colonna, Francesco CODPIECE (BRAGUETTE) Taking their origin from plated suits of armor, Renaissance braguettes or codpieces exaggerated the size of the male member underneath and were often decorated. 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 authenticated books and representing aspects of masculinity such as sexual and military virility. Implying the noble giant’s future virility, Gargantua’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 magnificently decorated. The narrator states that it could be compared “to one of those grand Horns of Plenty” because of its fertility and fullness (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 interpretation, this abundant braguette is generally taken to represent a textual copia (or abundance), a rhetorical and humanist commonplace requiring a brand of linguistic versatility and richness discussed in Erasmus’s well-known De Copia (1512). In this case, male sexual potency represented by the braguette corresponds to textual copia, a link confirmed by the narrator’s reference 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), Panurge asserts what he sees as his masculinized individuality 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

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Romanesque style” (P 21). As Panurge moves toward victory in his debate by signs with Thaumaste (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 Persels, 1997). In the Third Book (3BK 7), Panurge’s quandary as to whether he should marry is symbolized by what he does with his braguette. Having decided to give up a life of war, he disguises himself, removing his “fine and magnificent braguette on which [he] had once relied, as on a holy anchor.” The following chapter (3BK 8) details 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 family (see Russell, 1977). He also describes removing 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 decision 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 importance accorded to Panurge’s missing braguette 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 textual/sexual “anchor,” Panurge is devoid of any kind of textual fertility and of any stable, nonsuperficial meaning. Readings: Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Jeffery C. Persels, “Bragueta Humanı´stica, 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 me´tamorphoses d’une braguette,” Litte´rature 26 (May 1977): 72–93. Todd Reeser

COLONNA, FRANCESCO (1433–1527) Fifteenth-century Venetian friar whose allegorical dream vision Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

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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 illustrations. 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 Hypnerotomachia twice, both times in relation to hieroglyphs, 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 certain 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 commentator Leduchat, criticism has gradually acknowledged Rabelais’s debt to Colonna. Those who have studied the presence of Colonna in Rabelais usually focus on the episode of the Abbey of The´le`me in Gargantua, the Island of the Macreons in the Fourth Book, and two lengthy borrowings in the Fifth Book: the chess ballet at the court of Queen Quintessence and the Temple of Bacbuc, priestess of the Holy Bottle. The assessment 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 ekphrastic impulse that Rabelais shares with Colonna, whose lengthy descriptions of art and architecture, 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 Colonna’s temple of Venus Physizoe in which Polifilo and Polia are initiated into the mysteries of love. The ekphrastic passages found in both authors may even possess some occult significance, since critics or enthusiasts have discerned alchemical symbolism in the architecture and accessories 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 received so far is the impact of Colonna’s very distinctive and unusual diction on Rabelais’s verbal 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 experiments with this same procedure in the episode of the Ecolier Limousin (P 6), who constructs his phrases from Latin words with French endings arranged in vernacular word order. Rabelais returns to this hybrid style in his portrayal of Queen Quintessence (5BK 18–24), whose esoteric diction and contorted syntax seem to point directly to Colonna. Therefore, among the various inspirations that Rabelais drew from Colonna’s work, we may include the stylistic exercise of relatinizing the vernacular to the limit of its capacity. Readings: Le´on Dorez, “Des origines et de la diffusion du Songe de Poliphile,” Revue des bibliothe`ques 6 (1896): 239–61; Gilles Polizzi, “The´le`me ou l’e´loge du don: le texte Rabelaisien a` la lumie`re de l’Hypernotomachia Poliphili,” RHR 25 (1988): 39–59; Gilles Polizzi, “Le voyage vers l’oracle ou la de´rive des intertextes dans le Cinquie`me livre,” Le cinquiesme 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 symbolic meaning that feature so prominently in Rabelais’s books. A subject that aroused much interest 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 colors. 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 nifies faith and blue firmness. The narrator attributes this view to the anonymous (as he has it) Blazon of Colors (Blason des couleurs). Behind this apparent target of Alcofrybas’s criticism lie all similar treatises, guilty of arbitrarily conferring meanings on colors and devices. Unlike words (3BK 19), colors have natural rather than imposed meanings. Alcofrybas promises to devote a long treatise to colors and their real significance (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 philosophical 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 effect, 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 gele´es episode of the Fourth Book, where the words take on the guise of heraldic 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 Abbey of The´le`me, nuns and monks sport fashionable outfits in a wealth of colors (G 56), in striking 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 increases markedly in the final books which, as travel narratives, contain lavish descriptions of places, curiosities and wonders such as the colorchanging 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: Ge´rard Defaux, “Rabelais et son masque comique: Sophista loquitur,” ER 11 (1974): 113–127;

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Franc¸ois Rigolot, “Cratylisme et Pantagruelisme: Rabelais et le statut du signe,” ER 13 (1976): 115–32; Michael A. Screech, “Emblems and Colours. The Controversy over Gargantua’s Colors and Devices,” Me´langes d’histoire du XVIe sie`cle offerts a` Henri Meylan (Geneva: Droz, 1970). Agnieszka Steczowicz

COMMUNITY, PORTRAYAL OF A strong unifying theme embodied in the concept of Pantagruelists, 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 monasteries, characterizing monks as timorous gluttons seeking refuge from worldly hazards and responsibilities rather than isolation for devout prayer and meditation. Like many humanists, Rabelais believed that the Apostles and other early Christians constituted the ideal community, with the monastical system having distanced itself over time from their model. It is apparent that Rabelais was not entirely comfortable with his own role as a monk: first a Franciscan, then a Benedictine, he and the other members of his Benedictine abbey at Saint-Maur-les-Fosse´s eventually became secularized. Rabelais’s utopian Abbey of The´le`me, described at the end of Gargantua, offers, perhaps, a counterpoint to the traditional monastery. Founded by Gargantua and led by the vigorous Fre`re Jean, it is a community 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 theologians invoked its royally sanctioned powers to censor humanist books and to exile their authors. Rabelais saw his own works criticized and censored as well as those of Francis I’s sister, Marguerite de Navarre (see Censors and Censorship). Even more damaging was the Sorbonne’s influence in spearheading campaigns of persecution and oppression, often leading to the autosda-fe´s of prominent scholars. Humanists such as Rabelais not only found the Sorbonne’s actions

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Coq-a`-l’aˆne

reprehensible but deemed its very practice of learning and language to be retrograde and pernicious. In Gargantua, Rabelais ridicules at length the pompous manner and corrupt Latin of the ubiquitous Sorbonnicoles with his presentation of Gargantua’s bumbling and ineffective tutor, Thubal Holoferne. Humanists in general offered Rabelais a rich and positive communal example. The noun humanista 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 learning and the practice of virtue as distinctive to man. The late fifteenth- and early sixteenthcentury humanists Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas More, Jacques Lefe`vre d’Etaples, and Guillaume Bude´ concentrated their intellectual efforts on the study of classical works which emphasized the dignity of man. Not only did these scholars’ writings exert a great influence on Rabelais’s intellectual development, but their close friendships and regular correspondence gave Rabelais a standard for communal excellence. Small but influential groups in Rabelais’s society 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, doctors, charlatans, and seers as their representatives such as Raminagrobis, Bridoye, Triboullet, and Rondibilis offer their opinions to Panurge. The portrayal of community is most prominently demonstrated in the Fourth Book. The text’s narrative consists of successive encounters of various communal island groups by Pantagruel’s own community on his ship, the Thalame`ge. The chronicle provides the modern reader with a view of the microcosm of cultural issues and conflicts predominant in mid-sixteenthcentury France. For instance, the widespread development and increasing importance of international 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 (Chitterlings) (35), the Papefigues (45), and the Papimanes (48) episodes. Rabelais’s reading and his knowledge of diverse 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 imaginary communities in his True History, along with Plutarch’s tales in The Moralia, inspired Rabelais’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 communities 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 satirical 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 Community in Rabelais’s Quart Livre (New York: Peter Lang, 1997). Margaret Harp

` -L’A ˆ NE Originally a form of poetry COQ-A that commented critically on current events behind 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’aˆne as a truly French form of the satire, invented by Cle´ment Marot, in his Art poe¨tique franc¸oys (1548), an assessment that Joachim du Bellay confirms in his Deffense et Illustration de la langue franc¸oyse (1549). Marot’s first Epıˆtre du coq a` l’aˆne dates from 1530, shortly before the publication of Pantagruel. We find similar incoherent structures in medieval farce and

Correspondence sottie-plays as well as in the lesser known genres of the fatras and the fatrasie, the fatrasie providing a prose model for the non sequitur. Technically, the coq-a`-l’aˆne therefore falls in the category 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 antidote´es” (G 2) constituting 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’aˆne: De´finition—Invention—Attribution,” FS 16 (1962): 1–13; Bernd Renner, “Du coq-a`-l’aˆne a` la me´nippe´enne: la satire comme forme d’expression litte´raire chez Rabelais” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2000); Franc¸ois Rigolot, “Dichotomie linguistique. Le mot et la syntaxe,” Les langages de Rabelais, ER 10 (Geneva: Droz, 1972): 41–48; Thomas Sebillet, Art poetique franc¸ois, ed. Felix Gaffe and Francis Goyet, Societe´ des textes francais modernes 6 (Paris: Nizet, 1988). Bernd Renner

CORNUCOPIA Cornucopian imagery in Rabelais frequently functions as a vehicle for selfconscious 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 description of the child Gargantua’s codpiece, where Alcofrybas uses the simile of a horn of plenty in asserting that the bejeweled exterior accurately represents the value of the contents. The passage ends with a negative counterexample of codpieces “full only of wind,” however, and parallel passages in Pantagruel (8) and the Third Book (7) likewise evoke the threat of mere repetition 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-

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ages of unattainability and lack. The motif of empty proliferation plays out on a structural level as well. The repetitiveness of Panurge’s consultations makes the Third Book appear as a dramatization 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 examines 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 Rabelais’s correspondence survives, and such as does exist is rather due to the distinction of the receiver than to that of the sender. The young monk at Fontenay-le-Comte sought to make contact with major humanist scholars, as witness his earliest surviving letter of March 4, 1521 (BnF, ms. Rothschild, arm. 1510), the surviving fragment of his correspondence with Guillaume Bude´, which earned him two replies from Bude´, of which one was in Greek. Rabelais tries to impress by imitating Bude´’s style and ideas, including the mixture of Greek and Latin, images of darkness and madness, and elaborate legal jokes. Another surviving autograph humanist letter was sent ten years later to Erasmus on November 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

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Correspondence

with Tiraqueau and others, but the next firm evidence 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 continues the art of panegyric and remains faithful to the hellenizing Latin of Bude´, full of unusual vocabulary, of numerous quotations from or allusions 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 tricolon, parallelism, wordplay, and climax. Gone is the humility of the letters to Bude´ and Erasmus, replaced by the confident advocacy by a published author of the new humanist philology and fierce denunciation of its opponents. A verse epistle to Jean Bouchet dated September 6, [1527?], and its reply, suggest that Rabelais participated in the exchange of letters in verse common under Francis I. Rabelais’s surviving 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 autograph 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 famous quart d’heure de Rabelais, or short brush with the law, during which he was reportedly arrested and interrogated by Cardinal Franc¸ois de Tournon. During his stay in Turin (1540–42) he

also exchanged letters with the ambassador in Venice, Guillaume Pellicier, of which three replies 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 Orle´ans, Antoine 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 autograph letter, sent from Metz on February 6, [1547?] to Jean du Bellay (formerly in the Barrett collection in Chicago): reduced to exile, indigence, 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 rhetoric (P 8; G 29; 4BK 3–4), as well as an admirable example of Rabelais’s own formal letterwriting in the epıˆtre 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 calumniateurs or detractors. As was common with contemporary 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 epistolary 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 e´crites d’Italie par Franc¸ois Rabelais,” RER 1 (1903): 97–121; Victor-Louis Bourrilly, ed., Rabelais, lettres e´crites d’Italie, (Paris: Champion, 1910); Henri Clouzot, “Les amitie´s de Rabelais en orle´anais 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 Renaissance France, ed. Grahame Castor and Terence Cave (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); R. A. Cooper, Rabelais et l’Italie (Geneva: Droz, 1991); R. A. Cooper, “Rabelais ‘architriclin dudict Pantagruel,’ ”

Critical Theory Rabelais-Dionysos: Vin, carnaval, ivresse, ed. Michel Bideaux (Montpellier: J. Laffitte, 1997); Arthur Heulhard, Rabelais, ses voyages en Italie, son exil a` Metz (Paris: 1891); Librairie de l’art, Fritz Neubert, “Franc¸ois Rabelais’ Briefe,” Zeitschrift fu¨r franzo¨sische 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 moderation and sexual temperance in Rabelais’s fantastic version of an Old Testament miracle story (2 Kings 6.1–7). Though the biblical story involves 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 request for restoring the axe blade; that is, the woodcutter’s source of livelihood, was reasonable and moderate. From this claim Rabelais develops a parable whose message is expanded to encourage moderation and temperance specifically 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 losing 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 primary theme of the prologue. As Jupiter considers the request, enters Priapus, a god of fertility and viticulture typically represented with a large virile 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 (coigne´e), citing popular poetry and song to authenticate 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,

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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 silver. 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 woodcutter 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 results 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 structuralism and poststructuralism on the intellectual scene in the 1960s and beyond, in a sense the critical attitude of professional readers of Rabelais has always been grounded in the literary theories of the day. The hostility manifested toward Rabelais’s work in the seventeenth and eighteenth 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 Bruye`re, and to their persistence in neoclassical guise in the age of Voltaire. Conversely, the enthusiasm of the Romantic generation had obviously much to do with their conviction that a hallmark of great literary works

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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 experience. The correlation between critical approach and dominant theory is even clearer at the turn of the century, when the prevailing positivistic mentality and more specifically the deterministic literary theories of Hippolyte Taine, with their stress on social milieu and historic moment, led Abel Lefranc and his academic followers 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 “Rabelais 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 independent of any contextual considerations, situates itself at the crossroads of Russian Formalism, 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 attempts to challenge the traditional interpretation of Rabelais’s fictional work as a document promoting the religious and cultural values of Renaissance 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 proble`me de l’incoyance au XVIe sie`cle, Lucien Febvre’s historical, psychological, and sociological study of what Lucien Goldmann was to call the “mental structures” at the time of Rabelais, had previously sought to replace the concept 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 ideology underlying Rabelais’s fictional text. Minimizing in the extreme the role of official high culture as its source of inspiration, the Marxist readings present Rabelais’s work as reflecting either the totality of human experience at a particular 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 dogmatic contention that Rabelais can only be understood in the context of popular culture and folk humor, his emphasis on Rabelais’s use of the language of the marketplace, and his valorization 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 hitherto excessive stress on the intellectual content of Rabelais’s fiction. But all would no doubt acknowledge that in its new semiotic orientation, and in its emphasis on the text as a polyphony of alternative voices free from any authorial interference, Rabelais and His World played a determining 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 Gargantua and the episode of the Frozen Words in Book 4, that Rabelais had anticipated the theories of structural linguistics about the essential ambiguity 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 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 literary texts: Ferdinand de Saussure’s notion of the arbitrariness of verbal signs and their frequent inability to signify; Roland Barthes’s proclamation of the Death of the Author, and his contention 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 configuration 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 intended meaning, in view of the role of the unconscious in literary expression; and Derrida’s similar contention, grounded in his deconstructionism, that authors always say something different 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 episode 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 viewpoints within any given episode, but rejecting the notion of “rectification” as implying an unwarranted belief in authorial intervention, later Rabelaisian structuralists postulated such binary oppositions 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 attempt at coherent interpretation. The extremism of this position, and the contention that it was authorized by Rabelais’s own reflection on language and interpretation, were bound to engender, as indeed they did in the 1980s, one of the

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most heated controversies in the turbulent history of Rabelais criticism. Viewing poststructuralist criticism of Rabelais as fundamentally wrongheaded in its adoption of an antihumanistic approach to an essentially humanistic work, relatively traditionalist scholars like Ge´rard Defaux, Franc¸ois Rigolot, and Edwin Duval saw the modern critics’ insistence upon the polyvalence of Rabelais’s text as stemming from their adherence to the fashionable tenets of poststructuralist theory rather than from a careful reading of Rabelais’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 pretensions. 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 indecisive. For those who believe that Rabelais did not mean to withdraw from the debate but chose to express himself through his fictional characters, 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 unwarranted 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 development 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 proposed some intriguingly new interpretations, such as Elizabeth Chesney Zegura’s attempt to reconcile Rabelais’s frequently unflattering portrayal of women with their egalitarian treatment at the Abbey of The´le`me. She proposes an anaphrastic reading of the seemingly misogynous texts and suggests that they may have been in-

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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 commonly taken to be. Other scholars have enlarged the scope of the investigation by subjecting to a feminist reading a number of aspects not primarily related to women. (Franc¸oise Charpentier’s psychoanalytic approach in her study of the near-exclusion of women from the anthropological structure of the giants’ kingdoms, and Carla Freccero’s similarly oriented study of the theme of paternity in her Father Figures: Genealogy 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 inherently 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; Terence Cave, Michel Jeanneret, and Franc¸ois Rigolot, “Sur la pre´tendue transparence de Rabelais,” RHLF (July–August 1986): 709–16; Ge´rard Defaux, “D’un proble`me l’autre:Herme´neutique de l’ ‘altior sensus’ et ‘captatio lectoris’ dans le prologue de Gargantua,” RHLF (March–April 1985): 195–216; Edwin M. Duval, “Interpretation and the ‘Doctrine Absconce’ of Rabelais’s Prologue to Gargantua,” ER 18 (1985): 1– 17; Michel Jeanneret, “Signs Gone Wild: The Dismantling of Allegory,” Franc¸ois Rabelais: Critical Assessments, 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 Panurge is unable to decide whether or not he should marry, and if he does, whether he will be cuckolded, 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 necromancer, a poet, a philosopher, a doctor, a theologian, and a couple of fools, Panurge remains in the same state in which he began. Fear of cuckoldry is a familiar theme in misogynistic literature, from the Romance of the Rose (Roman de la rose [1225–78]) to The Fifteen Joys of Marriage (Les XV joies de marriage [early fifteenth 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 cuckoldry, the dangers of being browbeaten, and the impossibility of satisfying the insatiable lust of his wife. Such sentiments contributed to what became 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 hypothe´tique 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 treatment 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 exhaustive 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 Pantagruel (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 dilemma 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 Gargantua (P 8), where the ability to produce children is presented as part of a cycle of ge´ne´rations 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 physician at an autopsy. These graphic descriptions echo the artwork of the period, especially portrayals 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 passing 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 traditional piety is highlighted by Raminagrobis’s characterization of the clergy as vultures swarming around the dying and Panurge’s shocked reaction to this characterization. The Island of the Macreons (4BK 25–28), populated by elderly humans and dying heroes and demons with ruined monuments filling its center, illustrates the mortality of all created things. In a carefully crafted conversation between Pantagruel and the Macrobe, Rabelais’s treatment of death and dying unifies classical thought and Christian orthodoxy. Ancient beliefs regarding natural phenomena signaling the departure of great souls is supported

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Debts or Debtors, Praise of

by the testimony of those who witnessed the death of Guillaume du Bellay in 1543. The suggestion that some souls come to a finite end, a view posited by Plutarch’s De defectu oraculorum, is corrected by Pantagruel’s assertion of Christian teaching regarding the soul’s immortality. 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 Macreons 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 repre´sentation de la mort dans la litte´rature franc¸aise 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 Panurge’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 specious arguments in favor of outlandish spending pointedly recall the rhetoric of the priests of the Sorbonne and appear to convey Rabelais’s criticism of Church practices (Screech 227). In chapter 2 of the Third Book, Pantagruel gives the wardenship of Salmagundia or Salmigondin to Panurge after the war with the Dipsodians. Jean Paris (1970) surmises that, since Pantagruel had earlier given the manor to Alcofrybas Nasier, anagram for Franc¸ois Rabelais, in chapter 32 of Pantagruel, Rabelais seems to be indicating to the reader that in some ways Panurge 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 accumulate 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 contradictory to the maxims of the oracle of Delphi and yet claiming he is following the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance 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 impossible according to philosophers (3BK 3). Significantly, in this regard, Rabelais and Panurge are similar, with each effecting a creation ex nihilo. By definition, Panurge’s spending beyond his means implies the possibility of credit. This productive use of signs had been condemned in the previous (medieval) era. Scholastic economists, following Aristotle, had believed that the generation 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 monarchy used ultimately worthless banknotes to finance wars. This borrowing, combined with the influx of precious metals from the Americas, produced an inflationary economy that wreaked havoc on the finances of ordinary citizens. In placing the praise of debt in the mouth of the

Decretals apparent fool, Panurge, Rabelais appears to be obliquely critiquing royal and Church policies and at least bringing some humor to a phenomenon that most likely troubled his readers (Zegura and Tetel 1993: 94–95). However, following Aristotle’s comparison of the composition of the state with the parts of the human body in Politics V, Panurge naturalizes debt and compares 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 microcosm 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 process 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, historically before the credit system is established (qtd. in Lavatori 1996: 73). Thus, through Panurge, Rabelais can present credit as a naturally occurring phenomenon. Nevertheless, identifying debts with lies, Pantagruel 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 resort 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 ultimately 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

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French monarchy’s obliging and yoking of the country’s middle class in order to control the country and its productivity. According to Deberre’s logic, in order to deserve his gift and repay 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 defense of debts is a depiction of the new opportunities offered by the creative economic practice of credit, just as the book itself is a representation of the productivity of verbal signs from its identification 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 perpetuation through the eventual creation of offspring. Similarly, Zegura (1993) indicates that debt itself can be seen as a metaphor for the literary borrowing characteristic of the Renaissance, which allowed sixteenth-century writers to interact profitably with ancient texts in the renewal of antiquity and the generation of new meanings (95–96). Readings: Jean-Christophe Deberre, “La ge´ne´alogie du pouvoir dans les trois premiers livres de Rabelais,” Litte´rature 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 Zegura and Marcel Tetel, Rabelais Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1993). Gerard Lavatori

DECRETALS (LES DE´CRE´TALES) (4BK 48– 54) The power of canon law and its application to the practice of everyday life in France provides 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

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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 become 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 develop an elaborate satirical eulogy of the Decretals, 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. Homenaz posits a world held in harmony by the Decretals. However, it is not the vision of Christian harmony set forth by Erasmus and the evangelists who would reform the Church from within, but, as Edwin Duval has shown, an anticaritas, based on the witch hunt against heresy. Hyperbolic 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 parodic intention (Duval 1998: 74). The vision seems to illustrate the image of Christian charity, 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 Decretals, by putting them to unseemly use: toilet paper, wrapping for medicine, patterns for dressmaking, 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: emperor, 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 pretentiously kisses his thumbs, arranged in the form of a cross. The substantive authority in the Papimanie episode 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 inappropriate substitute (the Decretals) for the true word of God as reflected in the Holy Scriptures, Episte´mon runs straight to the toilet (“selle perse´e”), 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 developed 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 practice true caritas, to be accorded even to sinners and heretics. Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, L’oeuvre de Franc¸ois Rabelais et la culture populaire au moyen aˆge et sous la renaissance, trans. Andre´e Robel (Paris: Gallimard, 1970); Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1998); Deborah

Devils and Demonology Losse, Rhetoric at Play, Rabelais and Satirical Eulogy (Bern: Peter Lang, 1980). Deborah Nichols Losse

DES PE´RIERS, BONAVENTURE (c. 1510–c. 1544) Bonaventure would be known only as a talented but minor poet and as the equally talented 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´ Ze´be´de´e, a Protestant cleric, denounced the Cymbalum as the work of an Epicurean who had been a collaborator on Pierre Olive´tan’s Protestant translation of the Bible: only Des Pe´riers can possibly fit the bill. However, this letter was only discovered in the twentieth century. In 1543 Guillaume Postel dismissed 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 Pe´riers followed thick and fast, but all of them were much later than the date of Des Pe´riers’s death: no conclusions could therefore be drawn about the authorship of the Cymbalum until the discovery of Ze´be´de´e’s letter. The book itself remained notorious, legendary even, until the surviving editions were discovered and copies were clandestinely circulated. An edition eventually followed in 1711, quickly followed by three others. There have been no fewer than three modern critical editions, whose interpretations vary sharply. The critical debate still rages, and the question is, and always was, is the book a satire of Christianity? On balance, it is difficult to deny the accusation. The Cymbalum is a work of savage yet delicate irony denouncing the cruelties and idiocies 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 interpretation. Born of the absolute necessity for its author

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to veil his meaning in order to avoid horrible punishment, it is truly a unique masterpiece. Readings: Le Cymbalum Mundi, ed. Franco Giacone (Geneva: Droz, 2003); Max Gauna, “Pour une nouvelle interpretation du Cymbalum Mundi,” Lettre Clandestine 6 (1997): 157–72; Max Gauna, Upwellings: First Expressions of Unbelief in the Printed Literature 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, Rabelais’s demonological references have been traced to medieval folklore and theater: Pantagruel borrows his name from a diminutive theatrical demon who tormented drunkards by filling their throats with salt. Panurge claims familiarity with devils, and the language of Rabelais’s characters, particularly Panurge and Fre`re 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). Similar exploits are in Teofilo Folengo’s Baldus (which, however, leaves its heroes stranded in Hell). The Fourth Book narrates peasant encounters with devils (45–47) and ends when Panurge battles the cat Rodilardus, whom he mistakes for a devil (67). Like giants, demons were figures of grotesque corporeality. Whereas giants were characterized by exaggerated stature, devils’ bodies were systematically 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 crustacean 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

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Dindenault

normal physique exaggerated only one feature: ears, noses, penises, etc.) “Scientific” demonology between about 1400 and 1700 increasingly emphasized the corporeality of demons. Public officials actively investigated 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 spectacular and fantastic features of witchcraft—flying, sexual relations between women and demons, and attendance at the sabbat (a transfer of Satan’s court from Hell to earth)—were extracted 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 demons, which they feared was becoming widespread. When Pantagruel advises Panurge to consult the Sibyl of Panzoust, it cannot be accidental that Episte´mon, 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. Paradoxically, 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 implicates both his insight that exaggeration is fundamentally 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 disrespectful “Popefigs.” Conversely, Rabelais’s relative neglect of the theme of witchcraft may be a historical accident: between the 1520s and the 1570s, witchcraft persecutions and the production of witchcraft treatises declined as Western

Christians struggled through the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, but resumed ferociously from about 1580 to 1630, before gradually disappearing from scholarly attention. Rabelais’s early phrase “jusqu’au feu exclusivement” (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. (London: Longman, 1995); Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: 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 Panurge a cuckold, provoking a conflict that escalates until a peace is imposed between them. Panurge, true to form, neither forgives nor forgets and plots to undo the sheep merchant. He negotiates the purchase of a sheep from him, and Dindenault responds by outlandishly exaggerating 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 Coccaie (pseudonym of Teofilo Folengo), is superficially similar to that of the Haughty Parisian Lady: an offended Panurge exacts a disproportionate revenge on an unwitting victim and considers 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 to which Panurge is truly a fallen creature, highlighting his cowardice and vengeful nature. The incident is rich in meaning. The punishment the sheep merchant receives for his grotesque 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, Dindenault recalls the transformation Panurge underwent at the beginning of the Third Book and reminds us that the purpose of the voyage to consult the Divine Bottle is to settle the question of Panurge’s marriage. Of equal interest, by referring to Panurge as a “belle me´daille de coqu¨,” Dindenault allies himself with the Sibyl of Panzoust, Nazdecabre the mute, Triboullet the fool, and the other oracles of the Third Book who indicated 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 deliberate 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 destroying sheep and shepherds, Panurge symbolically commits violence against Christ and his followers. Defying the biblical injunction against revenge (“Vengeance is mine. It’s in the prayer book,” as Fre`re Jan says in the last line of chapter 8), Panurge brings upon himself and his fellow travelers the trials that will follow. Readings: Alice Fiola Berry, The Charm of Catastrophe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Elizabeth Zegura and Marcel Tetel, Rabelais 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 conventions. As a character in Rabelais, Diogenes makes five more or less satirical appearances. On visiting the underworld (P 30), Episte´mon finds Diogenes living in luxury and thrashing Alexander the Great, who has become a cobbler. His imaginary treatment of Alexander reflects the historical Diogenes’s contempt for wealth and

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rank. But insofar as he had been notoriously poor, this is a case of role reversal, akin to others that Episte´mon witnesses. Two references concern Diogenes’s pronouncements on appetites. He is reported to have called lust “an occupation for people with nothing else to do” (3BK 31). And in a discussion about the times of day when one should eat, Pantagruel 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 venerate 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 miraculous effects of these texts (4BK 51). Unimpressed 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 reminds 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 ineptitude 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 neighbors 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,

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when Philip of Macedonia threatened to attack the city (3BK prol.). The Corinthians made frantic 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 narrator underlines the inherent futility of this activity, likening it to Sisyphus with his rock. When asked, Diogenes explained that he was trying “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 between 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 equivalent—both are equally pointless. Whichever one’s interpretation, Diogenes’s activity and his ostensible explanation of it imply a scathing criticism of the Corinthians. Highlighted in the prologue, this episode foreshadows a theme of futility 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 Pantagruel 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 Rabelais’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. Saulnier identified them in his TLF edition as inhabitants 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, Thomas 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 The´le`me 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 litteraires franc¸ais (Geneva: Droz, 1965). Edward Benson

DISCIPLE OF PANTAGRUEL (LE DISCIPLE 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 material and characters from Pantagruel and was, in turn, used by Rabelais in the composition of the Fourth Book, and by the author(s) or compiler(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 vogue as a separate text until 1547, when it ceased to be published on its own and was thereafter included in various editions of Rabelais’s collected Oeuvres, thereby blurring the distinctions 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 Fessepinte.” 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 success 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 produced after 1545 include two chapters lifted verbatim from the 1542 edition of Pantagruel and material from Les croniques admirables (a late non-Rabelaisian Chronique gargantuine), without regard for textual cohesion. Taking advantage 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 example, the general structure of a voyage to various marvelous islands, the description of the “pays des Lanternes,” the account of the windmillswallowing giant Bringuenarilles, the description of the “Isle Farouche” and the “Isle des Andouilles” (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 compiler(s) of the Fifth Book (for example, the description of the “Isle des Ferrements” [Toolmaking Island]), and in particular the list of “basses dances” which, from its orthography and disposition on the page, can be seen to have been taken from Etienne Dolet’s 1542 edition of the Merveilleuses navigations du disciple de Pantagruel, dict Panurge, bound with his important pirated editions of Pantagruel and Gargantua. Readings: Geoffrey Atkinson, La litte´rature ge´ographique franc¸aise de la Renaissance: re´pertoire bib-

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liographique (Paris, 1927 rpt. New York: B. Franklin, 1968); Le Disciple de Pantagruel, ed. Guy Demerson and Christiane Lauvergnat-Gagnie`re (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’ Verha¨ltnis 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 emblematic 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 evangelical parallel with the humiliation of Christ by Roman soldiers, in the Book of Matthew (Rigolot 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 suggests that the book contains more meaning on the inside than appears on the outside—it is one of the more “reader-centered” discussions of interpretation in the book. The dog provides a powerful visual image that shows humans and animals 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-

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Dolet, Etienne

gantua’s dog, Kyne, entering the room and deduces that his master is not far away. Here scholars have seen a reference to the biblical Book of Tobit and an endorsement of the conception of marriage contained there (Ce´ard 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 herself 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 positive 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 (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998); Jean Ce´ard, La nature et les prodiges. L’insolite au XVII sie`cle en France (Geneva: Droz, 1977); Carla Freccero, “Damning Haughty Dames: Panurge and the Haulte Dame de Paris (Pantagruel, 14),” JMRS 15 (1985): 57–67; Marguerite de Navarre, Les Marguerites 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); Franc¸ois 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 Orle´ans, educated there until age twelve, studied in Paris with Nicholas Be´rauld 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 alienated 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, afterward moving to Lyon, working as proofreader for Sebastian Gryphius and Claude Nourry. He counted Guillaume and Maurice Sce`ve and Franc¸ois Rabelais among his friends. Dolet published his Orations in 1534, dialogues against Erasmus in 1535, and volume 1 of his monumental Commentaries on the Latin Language in 1536 (volume 2 in 1538). The Commentaries attacked both the Gallican Church and the Calvinists, 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 Franc¸ois Rabelais. Dolet married in 1538; his son Claude was born a year later. Now an independent printer, Dolet published the Genethliacum, advice to his son. He earned the enmity of many Lyonnese printers as their rival and as an advocate of workers’ rights. Perhaps at their instigation, he was imprisoned in 1542 for printing “heretical” books. He was tried in Lyon, transferred to Paris, and received another royal pardon in 1543, thanks to the intercession of Pierre Duchaˆtel, bishop of Tulle. Rearrested in 1544 on a trumped-up charge, he escaped briefly to Piedmont, 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 (Geneva: Slatkine, 1970); Richard C. Christie, Etienne Dolet: The Martyr of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1880); Etudes sur Etienne Dolet; le The´aˆtre au XVIe sie`cle, publie´es a` la me´moire de Claude Longeon (Geneva: Droz, 1993). Florence M. Weinberg

DORIBUS (D’ORIBUS, DORISIUS) The 1542 Pantagruel (22) appended a passage about “nostre maistre d’Oribus” who preached that the Bie`vre 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 Matthieu Ory, a Dominican friar born in about 1492 near Saint-Malo (Brittany), took the doctorate in theology in 1528. In 1536 King Francis I named him as an inquisitor and, in 1539, as inquisitor general in France. Ory actively supported 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 Ercole II d’Este of Ferrara, King Henry II sent Ory to Italy to convert the duke’s wife Rene´e de France away from the Reformation. John Calvin 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 Parisian doctor of theology (1532), was born in Orle´ans 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 reprinted 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,” Biographical 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, “Premie`res re´ponses catholiques aux e´crits de la Re´forme en France, 1525–c. 1540,” Le livre dans l’Europe de la Renaissance (N.p.: Promodis, 1988); John A. Langlois, A Catholic Response in Sixteenth-Century France to Reformation Theology: The Works of Pierre Dore´ (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003); Nathanae¨l Weiss, La chambre ardente: e´tude sur la liberte´ de conscience en France sous Franc¸ois 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 Franc¸ois Habert and printed by

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Adam Saulnier at Paris in 1542. No other editions 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 Rabelaisian characters to promote views that are never explicitly expressed in authentic Rabelaisian chronicles. In the Songe, published during Rabelais’s absence in Italy, Habert appears to support 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 admits 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 describe 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 Gargantua 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 shepherd after the manner of Tityre (Saint Peter) and by shunning the contemporary abusive practices of high ecclesiastics. In the second, more lighthearted, 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 chronicles—for example, the whole debate about the advantages and disadvantages of marriage and

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the qualities to be sought in a good wife, Panurge’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 sie`cle (1515–1589) (Paris: Droz 1938); Henry Lea, A History of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church, 2 vols. (London: Watts & Co. 1907); John Lewis, “Franc¸ois Habert, Le Songe de Pantagruel,” ER 18 (1985):103–62. John Lewis

DREAMS Rabelais’s writing shows little interest 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 fictional use of this theme owes something to one of his own imitators, Franc¸ois 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 Panurge 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, prophetic 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 treatises on the subject by Hippocrates, Aristotle, Artemidorus, the Neoplatonic work by Synesius, and especially the famous commentary of Macrobius 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 future of his marriage (3BK 13–14). Some critics have thought that Rabelais was mocking the interpretation of dreams in these chapters and that he was broadly skeptical of divination. Both views have little foundation. Pantagruel specifically 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 . . . , antique, et authenticque” [OC 388]). Biblical precedents added further prestige to this method, notably the examples of Daniel, who had interpreted the dreams of Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 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 associated with a medieval dreambook, which circulated in manuscript throughout Europe, and of which French editions exist: The Dreams of Daniel the Prophet, translated from Latin into French (Les Songes Daniel prophete, translatez de latin en Franc¸oys [c. 1510]). Although this manual provided interpretations for a popular readership, its material was reworked by contemporary 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 Phisionomie des songes et visions fantastiques des personnes), 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 prefigure Panurge’s concerns about marriage: thus “Marrying a woman means trouble” (“Espouser une femme signifie dommage”); “Engag-

Du Bellay, Guillaume ing in conjugal acts with one’s wife spells danger” (“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 instruments. Treatises and manuals on dreams appeared throughout the sixteenth century, and Rabelais had read studies by Ficino, Vive`s, Agrippa and Scaliger, who provide him with some of the erudition 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 impressions from this night journey of the soul, including 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 recommendations 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 Virgil of the two gates of ivory and horn. The Rabelaisian episode seeks to distinguish between natural 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 illustrated reading of the dream as inauspicious and as prophesying cuckoldry. The title of Habert’s poem, and no doubt the

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increasingly bizarre, nightmarish nature of episodes 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 woodcuts derived from Bosch and Breughel illustrating monstrous figures has become associated with Rabelais in many subsequent editions. Readings: Roland Antonioli, “Rabelais et les songes,” Cahiers de l’Association internationale des e´tudes franc¸aises 30 (1978): 7–21; Franc¸ois 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 Ce´ard, La nature et les prodiges (Geneva: Droz, 1977); Richard A. Cooper, “Deux me´decins royaux onirocrites: Jean Thibault et Auger Ferrier,” Le Songe a` la Renaissance, ed. Franc¸oise Charpentier (St. Etienne, 1990); Richard A. Cooper, “Bibliographie sommaire d’ouvrages sur le Songe publie´s 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 official record of a meeting between the two men dates from 1534, the year in which Rabelais accompanied 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 compromise and moderation in debates between Reformist and Catholic factions during the 1520s and 1530s. During his illustrious career Guillaume du Bellay, Sieur de Langey, was repeatedly 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-

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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 sobering effect on the Gallic physician, who incorporates 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: Socie´te´ nouvelle de librairie et d’e´dition, 1905); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London: Duckworth, 1979). Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

DU BELLAY, JEAN (1493–1560) French humanist, 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 suffering 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 Rabelais’s stay in Metz during 1546–47, long viewed as a period of exile following the publication 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. Despite 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 Protestants during the 1530s. In addition to being a diplomat and prelate, Jean du Bellay like many other humanists was a writer as well, whose literary output includes Latin verse, printed with Salmon Macrin’s Odes in 1546, and a collection of lively (but mostly unpublished) correspondence. Readings: Richard Cooper, “Les poe´sies de jeunesse de Jean du Bellay,” Me´langes offerts a` Guy Demerson, ed. Jacques-Philippe Saint-Ge´rand (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 cardinal Jean du Bellay. Tome II: 1535–1536 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1973); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London: Duckworth, 1979). Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

E ECOLIER LIMOUSIN (LIMOUSIN SCHOOLBOY) (P 6) A university student traveling from Paris to Limoges whom Pantagruel encounters outside the gates of Orle´ans. The Limousin student speaks what the chapter heading identifies as counterfeit French by inserting Latin words with French endings into vernacular syntax in order, as he claims, to enrich the French language, or “le locupleter de la redundance latinicome.” In fact, posterity has in part vindicated his efforts since many of his unusual 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 reinforced by an appeal to Julius Caesar’s condemnation of archaic diction recorded in Aulus Gellius’s Noctes Atticae. The encounter between Pantagruel and the Limousin scholar has provoked a great deal of commentary, some of it indignant and some interpretive. The first critic to respond to the episode was Etienne Pasquier in a letter addressed to Claude de Kerquefinen dated circa 1560, where Pasquier identifies the Ecolier as a parody of He´lisenne de Crenne, author of the novel Les angoysses douloureuses d’amour. Pasquier initiated 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 identified numerous other references to the skimmer or

skinner of Latin in middle French literature, suggesting 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 university jargon to his native dialect, Pantagruel, whose violence has induced this change, congratulates him for speaking naturally, though his speech is equally strange in both instances. By juxtaposing a regional dialect with a national language 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 understood in French. One way to deepen our understanding of the Ecolier Limousin is to examine his strange Latinate diction more closely and to attempt to identify 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. However, 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 Colonna, arranged in the most impossible combinations with other ostentatious Latinisms. Thus, when the Ecolier admires “ces meritricules amicabilissimes,” 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 distinctive features of Erasmus’s prose style, deriving most likely from the influence of Lorenzo Valla’s

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Elegantiae. In this way, when he imagines the extravagant speech of his Limousin scholar, Rabelais offers us not so much a moral satire as a verbal experiment, what Raymond Queneau called an exercise of style, following in the tradition of some of the most original prose writers of the European Renaissance. Readings: Jacques Chomarat, Grammaire et rhe´torique chez Erasme (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1980); Ge´rard Defaux, Pantagruel et les sophistes (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973); Georges Gougenheim, “La relatinisation du vocabulaire franc¸ais,” Annales de l’Universite´ de Paris 29 (1959): 5–18; Etienne Pasquier, Choix de lettres sur la litte´rature, 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 Dindenault, 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 resembled what we would in modern terms call “free trade.” The very notion of work was also redefined in the Renaissance. Indeed, the social and economic reality of the time placed labor and production 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 relationship 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 irremediably separated from the sacred, and work increasingly preoccupied the centralized state. Images and metaphors based on production, exchange, and accumulation abound during the Renaissance. 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 considerations, economic discourse shaped and redefined 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 diversity 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, Benedetto 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 introduced new accounting techniques in France. The iconography of the Renaissance provides numerous images of merchants and bankers involved in changing or weighing golden and silver coins. Once again, literature offers us a good understanding 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 excellence, providing the measure of success or failure in any number of human endeavors. If one cannot, per se, speak of political economy during the Renaissance (Montchrestien will coin the term in the early seventeenth century), we can nonetheless assert that economic considerations 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 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 episode of the Chats-fourre´z in the Fifth Book). Despite the rapid expansion of markets, one must also recognize that, for most sixteenthcentury people, the region remained the immediate 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 accelerated the circulation of foodstuffs. The period’s literature exploited images of local peasants en route to market. The city was rapidly becoming the center of all economic activities. The episode of the fouaciers or bakers in Gargantua provides a glimpse of this new reality, where even war is sparked by a breakdown in regional commerce. Readings: Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th century, 3 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1982–84); Philippe Desan, L’imaginaire e´conomique 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 WorldEconomy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic 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 fourteenth century and swept northward during the next two hundred years, brought with it a reassessment 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 Christian Prince (1516) by Erasmus, and On the Transmission of Knowledge (1531) by Juan Luis Vives. Inspired in part by humanistic pedagogical models of this type, which advocate timeefficient, stimulating methods of teaching and a

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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 education (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 Renaissance Man or uomo universale. Borrowing language that dates back to Petrarch, the Utopian 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 ambitious course of studies Gargantua lays out for his son modifies and expands the medieval Trivium (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 natural sciences, and medicine; advocates the study of biblical texts in the original Greek and Hebrew; 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 rollicking 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-

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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 Pantagruel an appetite for knowledge and preparing the prince to become an active agent in his own education. To be sure, Gargantua advocates extensive 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 humanistic tutor (Episte´mon) for his son to emulate and converse with; emphasizes the importance of observation, discussion, and judgment; and addresses the imperative for doing as well as learning. In his Gargantua, written two years later, Rabelais adds painting, sculpture, physical education, and even the study of industry and technology 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 timeefficient and interactive curriculum designed by Ponocrates, the humanistic tutor who replaces the theologians, actively seeks to engage the student’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 parodies of humanistic hubris than as either serious pedagogical models or tributes to the New Learn-

ing. Although not universally accepted, this cautionary reading finds partial support in the more overtly skeptical Third and Fourth Books, which explore alternate sources of information (interviews with learned men, forays into the occult, geographical exploration), the gap between learning 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 science’: On the Interpretation of Gargantua’s Letter to Pantagruel,” BHR 28 (1966): 615–32; Ge´rard Defaux, Pantagruel et les sophistes. Contribution a` l’histoire de l’humanisme chre´tien au XVIe sie`cle (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973); Edwin M. Duval, “The Medieval Curriculum, The Scholastic University, and Gargantua’s Program of Studies (Pantagruel, 8),” Rabelais’s Incomparable Book (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986); Elizabeth Zegura and Marcel Tetel, Rabelais Revisited (New York: Macmillan, 1993). Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

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 published in Augsburg in 1531 and in Paris in 1534 by Chre´tien Wechel, with each of the 113 Latin emblems accompanied by a complementary woodcut in Wechel’s edition. Several other Parisian 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 resembled 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 spiritual truth, and the reader must participate in deciphering the meaning suggested by each emblem. There were also books of personal or heraldic devices (imprese in Italian) with mottoes, 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 appeared in France. The popularity of emblem books may have contributed to the appeal of Rabelais’s works, and vice versa. Among contemporary emblematic publications were the Theatre of Virtuous Devices (Theatre des bons engines) by Guillaume de La Perrie`re and the Hecatomgraphie of Gilles Corrozet, both published in 1540 in Paris by Denis Janot. This same publisher had produced Les cronicques du roy Gargantua et qui fut son pere et sa mere (c. 1532), as well as The Disciple of Pantagruel (Le disciple de Pantagruel [c. 1538?]), each with a fullpage 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 Rabelais were published in Lyon, a hotbed of Alciato publishing by Bonhomme and Rouille between 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 published a textual edition of Horapollo’s Hieroglyphics (Hieroglyphica), which was followed by illustrated editions in Paris. Renaissance scholars thought that Horapollo’s symbols contained ancient, pristine wisdom; this “essence” of truth is a recurring theme in Rabelais’s opus. Although Gargantua includes satirical treatment of both heraldic devices and emblems, illustrated editions of this text present several pictures 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 The´le`me, with a poetic text below the woodcut explaining precisely what types of people are not permitted to enter the abbey (226). Another example 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 enigmatic prophecy (f. 151v). There are also many thematic connections between Rabelais’s books and subjects treated in contemporary emblem books. Corrozet’s Hecatomgraphie features several such topics, such as an emblem “Against As-

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trologers” (“Contre les astrologues”) with an astrologer 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 Hieroglyphics of Horapollo, with the idea of discovering arcane meanings and hidden symbolism. Moreover, Renaissance books without emblematic pictures sometimes contained emblematic structure, featuring descriptive visual imagery in juxtaposition with narrative or explanatory text. The combination of this imagery and text functioned emblematically, so that readers 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 (Chatsfourrez) and of the glorious Androgyne. The Divine Bottle was often illustrated in technopaegnia (the words reflecting the shape of the object), another emblematic approach to literature. As we have come to realize, the hidden meanings in Rabelais expressed his Evangelical sympathies and the tenets of Renaissance Neoplatonism. For Neoplatonism, the image was a vital link between external reality and the essence of truth; what we now call “applied emblematics” was one of Rabelais’s most fruitful literary tools. Readings: Franc¸ois Rigolot and Sandra Sider, “Fonctions de l’e´criture emble´matique 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 de´lits du corps (New York: Peter Lang, 1997); Jerome Schwartz, “Gargantua’s Device and the Abbey of The´le`me: 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),” Me´langes d’histoire du XVIe sie`cle: Offerts a` Henri Meylan (Geneva: Droz, 1970) 65–80; Sandra Sider, “Emblematic Imagery in Rabelais,” Diss. University of North Carolina, 1977; Florence Weinberg, “Layers of Emblem-

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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 “circle of learning.” Thaumaste, the “great scholar” from England, wishes to test Pantagruel’s learning 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 contemporary 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 Guillaume Bude´, the great humanist, meditated on the “circle of learning” that had been called enkyklios paideia by the ancient Greeks, orbis doctrinae 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 Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, 1.10.1). In the late fifteenth century, for Poliziano and others, this “circle” was even more substantial: the encyclopedia now consisted in detailed knowledge of the extant corpus of ancient texts; that knowledge qualified a person to practice philology. Erasmus put greater emphasis on study of the Bible as the most valuable outcome of this humanist “circle of learning.” Bude´’s notion of the encyclopedia 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 erudition, that so impresses Thaumaste, is the outcome 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 Thaumaste’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 “Encyclopedia” is revealed to Thaumaste only by Panurge’s obscene and scatological gestures. Rabelais represents the “Encyclopedia” as involving occultist knowledge in particular. Thaumaste thinks he has been discussing with Panurge not only philosophy but also magic, alchemy, the kabbala, geomancy, and astrology. 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 Calbasy, doctor in the most noble discipline of astrology and medicine of the entire Encyclopedia.” Soon after Rabelais’s time, some book compilations of learning began to be called encyclopedias. 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 significant order. Renaissance encyclopedism, in its different varieties, differed from its modern counterparts in that it did not claim exhaustiveness: only knowledge deemed necessary was included in the circle of learning. It was not until the Enlightenment Encyclope´die that the modern notion of the encyclopedia as a comprehensive, alphabetically arranged reference work began to become dominant. Readings: Guy Guedet, “Guillaume Bude´, parrain d’‘encyclope´die’ ou le vrai texte de l’Institution du prince,” Le ge´nie de la forme: Me´langes de langue et litte´rature offerts a` Jean Mourot (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1982); Neil Kenny, The Palace of Secrets: Be´roalde de Verville and Renaissance Conceptions of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Franco Simone, “La notion d’encyclope´die:

England e´le´ment caracte´ristique de la Renaissance franc¸aise,” 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 complicated by the presence of a now lost chapbook, probably called The History of Gargantua, translated from the Croniques admirables sometime around 1567, and by the Songes drolatiques Pantagruel (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 chapbook giant, even if as Rabelais became better known some must have equated them. Other pseudorabelaisian works had minimal impact, although in 1628 the satirist and explorer Robert Hayman translated two poems by Franc¸ois Habert which he thought were by Rabelais because they were published in some editions of Rabelais’s Oeuvres. The role of Rabelais’s own works in the English or Scottish imagination can be traced through borrowings (most extensively in John Eliot’s Ortho-epia Gallica, 1593) and the admiring 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 FrenchEnglish 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 translation of the Third Book, and this, together with a more subdued English version of the remaining two books was published by the Huguenot e´migre´ Peter Motteux in 1693–94. The list of those who quoted or alluded to Rabelais 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

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Burton; the satirist (and future bishop) John Hall; and King James I. Many relished and sometimes imitated his verbal inventiveness, others his fantasy, and yet others his scatology or similar gestures 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 theater, and the legal world of London’s Inns of Court. To quote or name him was, in these circles, 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 associating them with his supposed drunkenness, atheism, and ridiculous fictions. Sometimes the villain is Gargantua, who may or may not be the Rabelaisian giant, but often he is Rabelais himself, the writer’s Bacchic imagery and exhortations 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 Harvey, to cite the clearest example, praises Rabelais in the manuscript marginalia he scribbled in various books but denigrates him in printed attacks on his enemy Thomas Nashe. Did Rabelais have much influence in the British Isles? One can find traces of him in the writings 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 narrative intrusions by the author. Donne, and perhaps others, imitated his fantasy library (P 7) or Episte´mon’s vision of Carnival reversal in Hades (P 30), although it can be difficult to distinguish his influence from that of Lucian. Largely miss-

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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 (Gulliver’s Travels), and, less expectedly, the Victorian 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 Franc¸ois Girault c. 1534 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932); Marcel de Gre`ve, “La legende de Gargantua en Angleterre au XVIe sie`cle,” 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 (E´NIGME EN PROPHE´TIE) (G 58) Abruptly situated at the end of Gargantua (58), this poem is immediately followed by contradictory interpretations offered by Gargantua and Fre`re Jean. With the exception of the first two and last ten verses, the poem was formerly attributed to Mellin de SaintGelais, 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 discovered, little critical interest remained. Fre`re 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 SaintGelais version of the poem, Pantagruel’s interpretation 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 reformist text by offering the anodyne interpretation of Fre`re Jean. However, neither interpretation is exclusive, and both offer only a partial understanding of the text. Although both interpretations are correct, both are incomplete. Meaning is reached only through a combination of these opposing views. Along with the Franfreluches antidote´es chapter (G 2), this poem helps to frame the larger work and illustrates the complicated hermeneutics put forward in the prologue. 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 ALLIANCES (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 scrutiny the institutions and attitudes of sixteenthcentury France. On Ennasin, or the Island of Alliances, 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 connected, inviting the reader to find what they have in common. The topic common to all is lan-

Episte´mon 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 figures deal with aberrations of the relationship between 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 triangle of petrified quarrelling scholars. In the Physetere episode (see Papimanes and Papefigues), the monster is silenced by three javelins through mouth and tongue, forming a triangle 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 marriage marks a rupture between idea and word. Marriage in the Rabelaisian allegory is the consecrated 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 midsixteenth-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. Saulnier, Rabelais II: Rabelais dans son enqueˆte: Etude sur le “Quart” et le “Cinquie`me” livre (Paris: SEDES, 1982); Emile V. Telle, “L’ile des Alliances ou l’Anti-The´le`me,” BHR 14 (1952): 159–75; Marcel Tetel, “The`me et structure du Quart livre,” BAARD 2 (1968): 217–19. Fred W. Marshall

EPISTE´MON When Pantagruel first meets Panurge in the ninth chapter of Pantagruel, Panurge speaks several real and imaginary languages. At first, Episte´mon does not even rec-

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ognize the specific languages that Panurge is speaking, but when Panurge speaks Hebrew, Episte´mon understands and even compliments Panurge on his correct Hebrew pronunciation. In chapter 24, Episte´mon once again demonstrates his command of Hebrew by translating the Hebrew words “Lamah hazabthani,” which Christ says to his Father on the cross, as “Why have you abandoned me?” This is, of course, a quotation from the Gospel according to Saint Matthew 27.46. Episte´mon’s knowledge of Hebrew enables him to read the Old Testament in the original version, and for this reason his understanding of the Old Testament has not been distorted by inaccurate translations. Gargantua had, in fact, developed a very similar argument in P 8 when he told his son that the two most important languages for a learned Christian were Hebrew and Greek because the Old Testament was written in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek. Episte´mon 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 companions, with the noticeable exception of the hypocrite Panurge, in working very hard to save the lives of all the crew and passengers. In Pantagruel, 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, Episte´mon 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. Episte´mon indicates that those who sold indulgences suffer for eternity in Hell because they had shown contempt for Christianity by claiming that people could buy their way out of Purgatory. Protestant reformers 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 Rabelais greatly admired, agreed with Luther that selling indulgences was incompatible with Christianity. It should be noted that Rabelais places in Hell

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Erasmus, Desiderius

those who sell indulgences, and this is the same mortal sin committed by Panurge. Through his fictional character Episte´mon, 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 Episte´mon with the amoral Panurge, and this serves to discredit Panurge in the minds of Rabelais’s readers. Readings: Donald M. Frame, Franc¸ois 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) Rabelais, like many contemporary writers, profited from the classical scholarship, reforming theology, 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. Erasmus’s reply (if any) has not survived, but the influence of his writings on Rabelais is obvious. His great compilation of ancient wisdom, the Adagia, regularly augmented after its first appearance 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. Although Rabelais here strips the adage of Erasmus’s syncretic reading (Christ is another Silenus) 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 obfuscation practiced by the Sorbonne theologians echoes Erasmus’s own acrimonious disputes with the University of Paris, not least with Noe¨l Be´da, syndic of the Sorbonne and perhaps the model

for Janotus de Bragmardo (G 17–20). The contempt for monasticism embodied in Fre`re Jean and voiced by Gargantua (G 40) similarly echoes 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 educational programs of Rabelais’s first two books, while Erasmus’s innovative pedagogical methods, based on freedom and pleasure in learning, are more distantly echoed in Ponocrates’s program for Gargantua (G 23). Rabelais’s Christianity, with its rejection of scholastic formalism and its recourse to the revealed word of God in the scriptures, also reflects the evangelism formulated in France, following Erasmus’s lead, by Jacques Lefe`vre d’Etaples (possibly the inspiration for Hippothade´e in 3BK 30) and Guillaume Bric¸onnet. Erasmus’s ethical humanism, expounded in the Education of a Christian Prince (1516), influences Rabelais’s prescriptions for monarchy in Gargantua, where he quotes almost verbatim Erasmus’s condemnation of war, “which must never be undertaken 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 narrator embodied in Rabelais’s alter ego Alcofrybas Nasier, and highlighted the playful ambiguity 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 Erasmus’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 conclusions in the Praise of Folly, while the latter’s genre, mock-panegyric, is reproduced in Panurge’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 which began life, like the Adages, as a schoolboy manual but developed into a portrait of the vices (and occasionally the virtues) of sixteenthcentury society. The pilgrims in Gargantua (38) and the storm episode in the Fourth Book (24) owe much to, respectively, the colloquies Peregrinatio (Pilgrimage) and Naufragium (Shipwreck). Rabelais’s debt to Erasmus is thus immense, but in one passage he appears, unexpectedly, to mock his mentor, describing the etymologist 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, Rabelais, 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 University 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

EUDE´MON From the Greek endaiÓmvnÓ (“happy, prosperous, blissful”), Eude´mon first appears in Gargantua 15, after which he is only mentioned sporadically. In reaction to Grandgousier’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 preceptors, Thubal Holoferne and Jobelin Bride´, and modern pedagogy and learning, incarnated by his page Eude´mon 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 Eude´mon’s master’s, Des Marays. The influence 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. Eude´mon’s speech is

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part of the oratorical contest between him and Gargantua and ends up proving the vast superiority of the modern method. Gargantua’s infantile response to his twelve-year-old opponent underlines the giant’s embarrassing defeat: he cries, hides his face, and will not utter a word. Even though Eude´mon’s praise is artificial and exaggerated, it is not primarily meant to flatter a powerful prince. Rather, it is a practical application of the educational method promoted in Gargantua’s letter to Pantagruel (P 8), in which Gargantua praises the superiority of modern curricula and pedagogy. Moreover, the speech accurately 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 modern education, Eude´mon’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 Eude´mon’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 (E´LOGE PARADOXAL) Defined as the defense of “an unexpected, unworthy, or indefensible object,” satirical 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 Encomium moriae, Erasmus used folly to explore the concept of docta ignorantia (learned ignorance), 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 rhetorical and linguistic skills to work to create a series of satirical eulogies. V.-L. Saulnier has described three types of satirical eulogies: ve´rite´ originale or contre ve´rite´, curiosite´ remarquable, and ve´rite´ contre-apparence (Saulnier 1950: 91). Rabelais has examples of both the first and second

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types in his work. The ve´rite´ originale or contre ve´rite´ 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 codpiece 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 curiosity (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 material 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 paradoxes 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 argument, through the classical components of the eulogy: narration, confirmation, and conclusion, necessary in the case of contre-ve´rite´s since the argument runs counter to accepted opinion. The open form unattached to narrative plot allows the eulogist to amplify through such rhetorical devices as enumeration and gradation. Quite distinct from lyrical paradox is burlesque paradox, where the goal is to ridicule and where the paradox is linked to the narrative development and comic interaction (Losse 66; Tetel 30). Burlesque paradox has many of the elements of farce. In Rabelais’s Fourth Book, two burlesque praises come to mind. First, Dindenault’s praise of his sheep (4BK 7) extols both the practical 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 intent is removed by the ludic juxtaposition of scatology and epic comparison. However, the flow of his praise is interrupted by the baser vocabulary 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 parodying the elevated, inflated style of the Church and using the tools of epideictic rhetoric: enumeration, gradation, and alliteration. As in the earlier lyrical Praise of Debts or of the Pantagruelion, 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 enflamme´e la fournaise d’amour divin, de charite´ envers vostre prochain, pourveu qu’il ne soit Hereticque” [4BK 51]). Explicit within the satirical eulogy itself is the contradiction of Catholic orthodoxy—the violence awaiting those who arouse papal ire. Caritas is not based on unconditional love but on the strict observance of church law as interpreted by those who are supposed to be the guardians of the faithful (Losse 85). The second part of Homenaz’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 juxtaposition 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 Rhetoric at Play. Rabelais and Satirical Eulogy (Berne, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 1980); Verdun-L. Saulnier, “Proverbe et paradoxe du XVe au XVIe sie`cle,” Pense´e humaniste et tradition chre´tienne aux XVe et XVIe sie`cles (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1950); Marcel Tetel, E´tude sur le comique de Rabelais (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1964). Deborah Nichols Losse

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 indistinguishable 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, Lefe`vre d’Etaples, Marguerite de Navarre, and Cle´ment 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 Pantagruel, 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 endures forever” (P 8). Gargantua’s own initial tutor, Thubal Holoferne, evokes laughter as well as disgust with his mania for the mindless recitation of secondary devotional texts backwards and forwards. 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, Hippothade´e, who insists that God has made Himself and His desires known to

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humans by describing them clearly in the Gospels (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 Privile`ge du Roy, Rabelais expanded his caricatures of religious leaders of all stripes. Quaresmeprenant and the Andouilles are monstrous representations of adherents to Protestantism, while the Papefigues and Papimanes, inhabitants 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 interpreters 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, Rabelais 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 themselves that Gargantua plucks them with his lettuce and starts to chew them up with his salad (G 38). His father Grandgousier later admonishes pilgrims hoping to avoid the plague by making an offering to Saint Sebastian. His judgment is harsh, claiming that Church leaders who advocate pilgrimage as a means of forestalling calamity blaspheme the just and saintly by reducing them to mere devils who only make trouble 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

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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 humor. Gargantua explains that monks are the outcasts 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 understanding the meaning of what they say, which truly I call mocking of God” (G 40). His good friend Fre`re Jean is the exception for he is “neither bigot nor hypocrite” and is constantly active, helping others. The monk’s Abbey of The´le`me, best known for its motto “Do as you will,” is often cited as Rabelais’s take on the highly contentious issue of free will in his day (see Grace and Free Will). This free will is at the root of The´le`me’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. Fre`re Jean becomes one of Rabelais’s most memorable characters and serves as a counterpoint to another friend, the self-centered and spiritually 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 fervent 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 futility of human conduct. The eventual bitter rift between Protestants

and evangelicals is epitomized by the mutual antipathy between Rabelais and Calvin. Probable onetime acquaintances, Calvin accused Rabelais of “diabolical effrontery” in his Treatise on Scandals (Traite´ des scandales). Rabelais provided a scathing riposte in the Fourth Book, with the generally understated Pantagruel describing “les Calvins de´moniaques” as deformed monsters in direct opposition with nature (32). The theme of the inherent goodness of nature distinguishes Rabelais’s religious thought. Rabelais’s works champion the notion that ignorance 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 doctrine 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 ecclesiastical state, it is notable that Rabelais never broke from the Roman Church. Indeed, he remained 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 diminish as religious disputes between the state, Protestants, and Catholics hardened and became militant. Thirteen years passed between the publication of Rabelais’s Gargantua and his Third Book. After the official advent of the Religious Wars in 1559, evangelical traces in literary writings are couched in stark Protestant or Catholic terms. In Montaigne’s Essays (1590–98), evangelical themes disappear as he prefers to consider humans in and of themselves rather than as God’s creations (see Religion). Readings: Barbara C. Bowen, Enter Rabelais, Laughing (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998); Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). Margaret Harp

F FANFRELUCHES ANTIDOTE´ES This puzzling 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 destroyed 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, fopperies, fooleries, fond tricks.” As for “antidote´es,” 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 Gargantua, this chapter parallels the Enigmatic Prophecy at the end of the book, and both poems appear in a later collection of Mellin de SaintGelais’s poetry (1574). The Fanfreluches antidote´es and the Enigmatic Prophecy frame Gargantua 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 interpretations a` la fre`re Lubin. While traditional hermeneutics are called into question in this chapter, it has also been suggested that this enigma is an attempt to illustrate the graphic nature of language, 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 antidote´es,’ ” BAARD 8 (1999): 471–84 and 9 (2000) 569–88; Eva Tsuquiashi-Paddesio, “Le bruissement silencieux de la graphie dans ‘Les fanfreluches antidote´es,’ ” 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 being the Farce de Maistre Pathelin. The influence of this genre on Rabelais’s work is pronounced and takes on two principal forms: explicit references 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 between Panurge and Thaumaste (P 19–20), Panurge’s attempted seduction and humiliation of the Haughty Parisian Lady (P 21–22), his encounter 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 Panurge and Dindenault episode, the prose narrative is momentarily interrupted with a theatrical dialogue, a phenomenon found elsewhere in Rabelais’s work (e.g., Panurge’s conversation with Trouillogan [3BK 36] and Panurge and Pantagruel’s discussion of Triboullet [3BK 38]). Some of the episodes containing farcical elements are Pantagruel’s encounter with the Ecolier 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 period focused on marital jealousies and petty con-

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niving, Rabelais’s farcical episodes center on humanistic debates of the time. Instead of the anonymous characters found in traditional farce, the participants in Rabelais’s work represent opposing 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 humanist satire. Readings: Barbara C. Bowen, Enter Rabelais, Laughing (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998); Carol Clark, The Vulgar Rabelais (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1983); Gustave Cohen, “Rabelais et le the´aˆtre,” RER 9 (1911): 1–72; Emmanuel Philopot, “Notes sur quelques farces de la Renaissance,” RER 9 (1911): 365–422. E. Bruce Hayes

FEZANDAT, MICHEL (ff. 1538–77) Parisian 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 Neoplatonic theories throughout Europe during the Renaissance. Chosen by Cosimo de’ Medici to translate 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 Platonic and Christian love; and although he attacked astrology in a 1477 treatise entitled Disputation 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 mysticism. Whether Rabelais, who shared many of these interests, actually borrowed directly from Ficino is uncertain. Clearly, echoes of Platonism and Neoplatonism—including references to divine love, the quest for a transcendent Ideal, Bac-

chic furor, allegory, hidden meanings, and even the “Ideas of Plato”—abound in the Pantagrueline tales, but often the treatment of these Platonic 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 theories in such examples of satirical eulogy as the Praise of Debts and the Messer Gaster episodes. Whether one accepts or rejects this interpretation, many experts agree that Plato’s influence on Rabelais is far greater, and much more positive, than any specific echoes of Ficino that inform the Pantagrueline tales. Readings: G. Mallary Masters, Rabelaisian Dialectic and the Platonic-Hermetic Tradition (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1969); Christine Raffini, Marsilio Ficino, Pietro Bembo, Baldassare Castiglione: Philosophical, Aesthetic, and Political Approaches in Renaissance Platonism (New York: Peter Lang, 1998); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London: Duckworth, 1979). Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

FIFTH BOOK (CINQUIESME LIVRE) The posthumous Fifth Book has long fueled the interest 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 comprins, les grans Abus, et d’esordonne vie de, Plusieurs 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 Franc¸ois 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 Sayings of the Good Pantagruel appeared with no indication as to the place of publication or editor. However, a final quatrain was signed “Nature 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 Apedeftes or “ignorant ones,” adding a prologue and thirty-two additional chapters. This long version is found in an unsigned manuscript of the sixteenth century containing the fragment of a prologue, 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 Disciple 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 author, 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 (focusing 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 hypotheses assessing the degree to which the fragments are complete and their date of composition. An examination of the three known forms of the text yields three parallel readings of two groups of manuscripts, which are difficult to decipher. (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 reflect poorly classified papers and a desire to avoid disparities in the succession of chapters. For the end of the text, the copyist and editor

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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 contains an apocryphal sixteenth chapter on the Apedeftes (“the ignorant”) with its satire of the Court of Auditors (“Cour des Comptes”) and the financial 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 incompatible 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 QuinteEssence, the Isle of Odes, the Fre`res 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 symbolic steps which was scheduled to take the heroes from Saint-Malo, along the French coast (the kingdom of Quinte, Brest; the Isle of the Fredons, Ole´ron, with a stop at La Rochelle, and probably a river navigation, suggested by the Isle of Odes), through Poitou, the country of Lanterns, 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 geographical indications. Whereas the first series of sketches contains virulent religious and judicial satire, punctuated with monsters and echoes of contemporary voyages that recall the Fourth Book, the second series, despite its Fre`res Fredons and critique of monastic orders, Lent, and confession, is distinguished 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 follows the psychogony of Plato’s Timaeus. How-

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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 extract essence from matter, are prone to activities labeled inanis opera or “foolish works” by Erasmus in his Adages, and the port of Quinte essence is called Mateotechnie or “vain science.” In fact, Panurge’s poetic furor seems to be a fusion 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 (sublimation 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 number 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, reflections 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 Mayerne to publish a narrative featuring QuinteEssence. While the episode may not be Paracelsian 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 allusions 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 reading notes and texts from different drafts, in various stages of completion, as the Fifth Book, attempting to persuade us that Rabelais penned a sequel to the Fourth Book voyage which he concluded 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 proble`mes 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 pre´tendu Ve livre apocryphe de Rabelais de 1549,” Marginalite´ et litte´rature (Nice: ILF-CNS, 2000); Verdun L. Saulnier, Rabelais dans son enqueˆte II. Etude sur le Quart et le Cinquiesme livre (Paris: Nizet, 1975). Mireille Huchon

FOLENGO, TEOFILO (1491–1544) Benedictine monk and well-known macaronic poet, mentioned three times by Rabelais: in the giant genealogy of P 1, a` propos of his creation Fracassus; at the end of the list of books in the Library of Saint-Victor (P 7), as author of a patria 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, syntactically and metrically correct Latin verse interspersed 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 different versions of the Baldus, known respectively as the Paganini (1517), Toscolana (1521), Cipadense (early 1530s), and Vigaso Cocaio (1552). The French “translation,” or rather adaptation, of 1606, the Histoire Maccaronique de Merlin Coccaie prototype de Rabelais . . . is based on the Vigaso Cocaio version, which Rabelais could not have known, and is also much influenced by Rabelais 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 cauldrons perpetually cook pasta, the first canto recounts the love of Baldus’s parents in the context 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 invisibility, and a dragon who turns into a beautiful woman, and encounters with—among many others—a sorceress, a centaur, assorted devils and mythological beings, a personified Manto (founder of Mantua), and the helpful magician Merlinus Coccaius (Folengo’s pseudonym). The adventures 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 scatology, and more raucous laughter, but Rabelais found in it, besides the storm and sheepdrowning episodes, a number of congenial elements: the trickster Cingar (Panurge), the fleet-of-foot Falchettus (Carpalim), the boy-heroturned-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, unlike Rabelais, was probably a Lutheran sympathizer, but they agreed on many doctrinal matters. 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 enraged Charon as he bears down on the heroes is “Cra cra: tif trafnot: sgneflet: canatauta: riogna.” Readings: Barbara C. Bowen, “Rabelais and Folengo 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:

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Atti del convegno tenuto a Mantova il 15–17 ottobre 1977, ed. Ettore Bonora and Mario Chiesa (Milan: Feltrinelli, 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 Rabelais,” 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 marrowbone to the Holy Bottle, food and drink are employed with comic effect to subvert the normal order of the universe. Throughout the text, deportment 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. Although 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 impart, and by drawing his unwitting audience in with crude and often grotesque depictions of ingestion 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 uncontrolled 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

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have been immediately recognizable to a sixteenth-century audience as the food of peasants: 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, orgiastic, 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 humanist Ponocrates. Only then does he learn to eat sober and frugal meals according to the recommendations of Galenic medicine, with which Rabelais 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 Erasmus 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 Gastrolatres, or worshippers of the belly, it is not entirely 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 pleasures of the palate. For several pages he catalogues 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 almond 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 written off as a simple exhortation advocating moderation. At the very end of Book 5, Pantagruel and his companions reach the Temple of the Holy Bottle, wherein the oracle dispenses truth. Its miraculous 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 Panurge 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. Intoxication 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. Although the authorship of this last book has been disputed, this final idea is unmistakably Rabelaisian. 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!” Litte´raire 319 (1994): 36–39; Michel Jeanneret, A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance, trans. Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1991); Michel Jeanneret, “ ‘Ma patrie est une citrouille’: The`mes alimentaires dans Rabelais et Folengo,” Litte´rature et gastronomie: 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-Noe¨l McMahon, “Gargantua, Pantagruel and Renaissance Cooking Tracts: Texts for Consumption,” Neophilologus 76.2 (1992): 186–97; Anthony Phelan, “Rabelais’s Sister: Food, Writing, and Power,” Gu¨nter Grass’s Der Butt: Sexual Politics and the Male Myth of History, ed. Philip Brady, Timothy McFarland, and John J. White (Clarendon: Ox-

Forests 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. Panurge’s seemingly endless series of consultations is brought to a pseudoresolution with the “advice” 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 Rabelaisian 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 privileged and marginalized. Although fools were sometimes seen as diabolic, they also spoke the unspeakable, which provided them with a reputation as seers. This ambiguity of meaning concerning 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 macabre (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. Although the former category essentially repeated the negative connotations of universal human folly put forward in many medieval texts, the latter 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

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vacillates between wise and foolish folly. The morosophe is central to the debates that encompass the Third Book and Panurge’s perplexity. This multidimensionality of folly leads to ambiguity 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; Ge´rard Defaux, “Sagesse et folie d’Erasme a` Molie`re,” MLN 91.4 (1976): 655–71; Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie a` l’aˆge classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972); Walter Kaiser, 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, noblemen, 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 resources: 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 pagan 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 civilization and more as an attack on precious national resources. Several French forests are featured in Rabelais’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 Ferrements, or Toolmaking Island, where the trees grow weapons (5BK 9). Yet the episode gives rise to a weighty scientific discourse on why trees

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are animate. Panurge’s fable of the fox and lion (P 15) is set in the forest of Fontainebleau (called at that time Bie`re), transforming it into a mythical 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 significantly 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 Ve`de, near Rabelais’s ancestral home, becomes strategic territory in the Picrocholine wars (G 34). The´le`me, 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´le`mites (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 considerations in the prologue to the Fourth Book through the character of Couillatris, a woodcutter. The forest on the Ile des Macreons (compared to the Ardennes) may be full of ancient monuments, but it also resembles a utopian sylvan economy (4BK 25): it is sparsely populated, all old-growth trees, and the islanders are carpenters. 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 common 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 transformed the savage, dark forest into bright clearings. This is a very medieval view of clear cutting, set against a more pragmatic and arguably more modern view of profit and resource management. As this discourse shows, forests in Rabelais serve as sites of contention between multiple discourses. Readings: Michel Deve`ze, La vie de la foreˆt franc¸aise au 16e sie`cle (Paris: SEVPEN, 1961); Raphae¨l

Larre`re and Olivier Nougare`de, Des hommes et des foreˆts (Paris: Gallimard, 1993); V. L. Saulnier, Rabelais dans son enqueˆte, 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 mockheroic episodes, it recounts the voyage undertaken by Pantagruel to assist his ne’er-do-well friend Panurge in seeking the advice of the Divine Bottle. The intent and destination of the trip are rarely mentioned and are ultimately unfulfilled. By establishing a sea voyage to unknown lands as the narrative premise of the Fourth Book, Rabelais incorporated a topic that both excited and challenged his contemporaries. The multiple transformations occurring in European society due to the Italian Wars, the nascent Reform 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 indeed welcomes, change but remains faithful to traditional Christian doctrine. Pantagruel and his fellow travelers on the ship the Thalame`ge represent this latter group. From the outset of the Fourth Book, Rabelais takes great care to establish 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 others. The Fourth Book is unique among Rabelais’s writings in that a prototype for it exists. This work, containing only eleven chapters, was published 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 authorized the publication of the 1548 version. Abundant typographical variations and changes exist between the two editions. Even where episodes 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 Christians at prayer. For Rabelais, as for all evangelical humanists of his time, the first Christians constituted the definitive ideal community. His evocation of these people establishes an evangelical tone in the text and underscores the rapport between these few faithful and the Pantagruelists. 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 distinguish it from Pantagruel, Gargantua, and the Third Book. Not only does it have the expected prologue, but it is introduced with a letter of dedication from Rabelais to his benefactor, the cardinal of Chastillon, Odet de Coligny. Following the 1552 text, there is a glossary entitled the Briefve De´claration, which elucidates terms and names used in the chronicle. Although it is doubtful that Rabelais wrote the De´claration, its clarifications are of interest because for nonreaders of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin it provides a French translation of the names Rabelais often fabricated from combinations of terms from classical languages. The fact that Rabelais did not himself include such a glossary suggests his assumption 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

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the 1564 publication is little more than an awkward attempt to copy Rabelais’s style, they nonetheless consider its first sixteen chapters to have been composed by Rabelais. Relating additional encounters between newfound islands and the Thalame`ge, the chapters serve as an epilogue to the Fourth Book. Hence, the Fourth Book is extremely rich: not only does it have two versions, each with its own prologue, but its definitive version’s introductory letter, glossary, and supplement render it encyclopedic. The Fourth Book’s theme and complex but finely crafted narrative make it arguably Rabelais’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 limitations and ambiguities of language, the anxiety and promise of characterizing contemporary society, and the import and controversial nature of evangelical concerns. In contrast with the earlier books, the Fourth Book reveals a more thoughtful and reflective author who nonetheless maintains his comic tone. Care is taken in revealing the complexity of relationships between Gargantua, Pantagruel, Fre`re Jean, Panurge, and Alcofrybas. Some of Rabelais’s more memorable characters as well as lyrical passages appear in the Fourth Book. There is Monsieur Gaster, “premier master of the arts of the world,” who is the personification of hunger (4BK 57). His influence is pervasive and accounts for all of humankind’s creations, both good and bad. Pantagruel witnesses and abhors the elaborate culinary offerings of adoration made by Gaster’s subjects. The Gaster episode provides a strange mix of humor 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 passage’s comic elements become more evident. However, Pantagruel’s anger against the adoration of Gaster belies a purely farcical episode. The Thalame`ge’s encounter with the parolles gele´es (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

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Francis I

explains that they are crossing the Glass Sea, near where a fierce battle took place a year before. 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, throwing them on deck. The narrator Alcofrybas wishes to conserve the frozen words in jars of oil, but Pantagruel refuses him, saying it is foolish to save words; they come in abundance, particularly for jovial Pantagruelists such as themselves. 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 joyful 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 presented as comical, grotesque, satirical, sad, chimeric, or wise. Rabelais’s final work is unique in that it demonstrates the optimistic and evangelical traits of early French Renaissance writings, while still revealing the concern and disillusionment that led to the Religious Wars. Readings: Elizabeth A. Chesney, The Countervoyage of Rabelais and Ariosto: A Comparative Reading of Two Renaissance Mock Epics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1982); Edwin Duval, “La messe, la ce`ne, 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: Peter Lang, 1997); Paul J. Smith, Voyage et Ecriture: Etude sur le Quart Livre de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1987). Margaret Harp

FRANCIS (FRANC ¸ OIS) I (1494–1547) Son of Charles, comte d’Angouleˆme, 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 cultural programs from time to time. At home, he attempted to reform the country’s financial system and the Parlement and to tame the evergrowing power of the Sorbonne. Not only a soldier, Francis was deeply committed to making his reputation as a patron of learning and the arts. He appointed poets, painters, and scholars as “gentlemen of the chamber,” his confidants and private staff. He brought Leonardo 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, including the Mona Lisa, which remained in Francis’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 interest in architecture and built several chateaux, most notably Chambord and Fontainebleau. At Fontainebleau, he surrounded himself with paintings, tapestries, enamel works, classical and contemporary sculpture, and a library of over three thousand books and manuscripts. An ardent admirer of Petrarch and Erasmus, Francis encouraged French humanists, providing pensions and protection to writers like Cle´ment Marot, Saint-Gelais, and Rabelais and scholars such as Lefe`vre 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 Colle`ge de France. He patronized and protected printers, especially the scholar Robert Estienne, who published humanist texts and translations of the Bible. The king’s position on the Reform often appears contradictory. A traditional Catholic, he denounced Lutheranism but disagreed with the Sorbonne as to what constituted heresy. His personal attitude seems to have been one of sympathy with the moderate reformers whom he protected while at home but who were at risk from the Sorbonne as soon as Francis left Paris. Although many cite the Affair of the Placards as having turned the king against the evangelicals, his policy was mostly influenced by a desire to

Fre`re Jean keep the peace at home and by political expedience abroad, which required Protestant sympathies 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 gentleman,” inserting his jester Triboullet as a character (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 satirize war and the dying cult of chivalry (G 8), both dear to Francis’s heart. Readings: Gilbert Gadoffre, La re´volution culturelle dans la France des humanistes: Guillaume Bude´ et Franc¸ois Ier (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Robert J. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Desmond Seward, Prince of the Renaissance (New York: Macmillan, 1973). Megan Conway

FRE`RE JEAN (FRE`RE JAN, FRIAR JOHN, BROTHER JOHN) Fre`re Jean is a monk who recognizes the importance of connecting the religious 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 Fre`re 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. Fre`re Jean will not permit evil to triumph over good, and his first appearance in the four books definitely written

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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 liberating force that brings people joy. After his defeat of Picrochole’s soldiers, Gargantua builds Fre`re Jean a new type of monastery called The´le`me. This word means “will” in Greek, and Rabelais shows us that in this monastery “free will” and not arbitrary rules govern the daily actions of the male and female residents. Only welleducated men and women may live there. Fre`re 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, Fre`re Jean has become a good judge of human character. Like many other characters in Rabelais’s four fully authenticated books, Fre`re Jean sees through Panurge’s bad faith. He knows that neither he nor any priest could persuade Panurge to accept the simple truth that Christian marriage should be based on religious commitment and on mutual love and respect. When Fre`re Jean realizes that Panurge is resorting 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 conversion. In chapter 28 of the Third Book, Fre`re 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 Fre`re Jean’s tongue-in-cheek argument, Panurge will become a cuckold only if his wife is beautiful. If his wife is beautiful, she will treat him well, he will have many friends, and therefore he will be “saved.” Fre`re Jean understands that Panurge will not respond positively to logical arguments, and for that reason he tries to force him into facing his own bad faith. Fre`re 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 religious truths that Fre`re Jean tries to teach him.

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Friendship

In the Fourth Book, Panurge once again pretends to seek religious help from Fre`re 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 Apostles. In chapter 19, Panurge pretends that he has just had a religious conversion. He wants Fre`re Jean to stop helping the sailors and to hear his confession. Fre`re Jean realizes that God will forgive Panurge’s sins if Panurge’s repentance is sincere even without confession to a priest. At that moment it is more important for Fre`re Jean to save lives. He certainly offers to hear Panurge’s confession after the storm, but, as he suspected, Panurge’s religious faith disappears as soon as the danger ends. Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. He´le`ne Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968); Thomas M. Greene, Rabelais: A Study in Comic Courage (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 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 Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero’s Laelius (De Amicitia). These texts provided the starting point for Renaissance thinkers who wrote their own treatises, dialogues, and letters on the subject of friendship. In particular, the dissemination of Cicero’s De Amicitia cultivated an ideal of intimate affection between men of equal standing which became instrumental to Renaissance theorizations of friendship. The pairing of Panurge and Pantagruel stands as one of the most famous of all Renaissance friendships. Pantagruel conceives a spontaneous 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 accompanies 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 classical 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 considered to outshine his friend and master, Panurge fills this more capacious role with ease. He takes the place of Pantagruel in the compromising debate with Thaumaste and is never far from the center of the action (P 18–20). The later books do not deny the famous chapter title—“How Pantagruel found Panurge, whom he loved all his life” (P 9)—but the nature of their friendship changes. The question of Panurge’s marriage, which dominates the Third Book, threatens entirely to supplant the older claims of friendship. Panurge as prospective husband and future cuckold becomes a less redeemable 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 Ciceronian ideal of equitable friendship becomes compromised. Although this possibility is never explicitly stated, the voyage of the Fourth Book with its all-male crew may be understood as a reaffirmation of masculine friendship. It takes place under the shadow of Pantagruel’s promise to accept a wife of Gargantua’s choosing when he returns: the quest defers the moment when love between men and women must supersede friendship (3BK 48). Panurge and Pantagruel, accompanied by Episte´mon, Gymnaste, and Gargantua’s old friend Fre`re Jean, embark upon a glorious, if troubled, bachelor party. The convivial relationship between narrator and reader in Rabelais’s sympotic prologues offers 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 community of friends the moment he opens the book. Readings: Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’ Pantagruel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Ullrich Langer, The Perfect Friendship (Geneva: Droz, 1994). Andrea Walkden

Frozen Words FROZEN WORDS (PAROLES GELE´ES) (4BK 55–56) A curious event during the voyage 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 terrified, 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 “flying.” 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 preceding winter at that very place—the edge of the Frozen Sea. All the sounds of the battle had frozen, 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. Unfortunately, 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 Panurge wishing wistfully that he had found the

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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, Pantagruel 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 suspended in a poetic moment. Pantagruel’s explanations underscore his philanthropic nature, for he is determined to interpret the Frozen Words in terms of essential philosophical truths, Platonic 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 especially 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 radically over the past century since Arthur Tilley (1907) dismissed the whole scene in a single sentence: “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 Rabelais’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 human 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 Rabelais’s strategy to push the Utopians inexorably away from their idealistic certainty, at the beginning of the voyage, that they will find the Truth at the end of Panurge’s quest. Berry’s analysis inter-

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Frozen Words

prets this episode as a key to our understanding of the Decretals and Gaster by defining two opposing 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: University of North Carolina, 2000); Edwin Duval, The

Design of Rabelais’s Quart livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Alfred Glauser, Rabelais cre´ateur (Paris: Nizet, 1964); M. A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979); Marcel Tetel, Rabelais (New York: Twayne, 1967); Arthur Tilley, Franc¸ois Rabelais (London: Kennikat, 1907). Megan Conway

G GALEN (A.D. 129–c. 199) Greek physician whose work, often stemming from and expanding on Hippocratic texts, largely informed Rabelais’s writing and medical practice. Taking further the Hippocratic theory of humors, Galen developed a classification of temperaments Rabelais employed in the formation and transformation of characters such as the anxious Panurge 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 (Hygiene). Also originating from Galenic theory is the frequent Rabelaisian encouragement to readers to find balance through simplicity and humility; avoiding extremes and correcting excesses are deemed essential to staying in good health—health being the most important possession and indeed the primary source of happiness, 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 doctor that mortality rates dipped 2 to 3 percent during his tenure at the Hoˆtel-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 Renaissance doctor in his work and writing. Readings: Roland Antonioli, Rabelais et la me´decine, ER 12 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1976); Gilles Henry, Rabelais (Paris: Librairie Acade´mique 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 encyclopedic list includes card games, games of chance, and sports. The list not only contains games, but also terms used in games (e.g., “defendo,” no. 187) or ways of playing a game (e.g., “coquinbert, qui gaigne perd,” no. 30). Also contained in the list are swear words associated with gaming (e.g., “reniguebieu,” no. 52) as well as suggestive words with sexual connotations (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, beginning in the late thirteenth century, the Church, municipal governments, and the crown issued decrees banning certain types of games, especially 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 compensated. 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

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Ganabin

GANABIN (4BK 66–67) The episode of Ganabin (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 Fre`re Jean are as diametrically opposed as they are in other episodes of the Fourth Book: Panurge wants to flee, while Fre`re 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 instigation of Fre`re 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 hidden 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 excrement. The narrator explains that Panurge’s defecation is a natural effect of fear and illustrates this with two lengthy exempla, one of which is the apocryphal ancedote of Franc¸ois 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 Die´guez, Alfred 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 repression, the two-peaked Mount Antiparnassus symbolizing the Chaˆtelet and the Conciergerie; for Ge´rard 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 Panurge (descent into the dark underground, struggle with the devil, rebirth symbolized by white clothing). 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 (Gaster), sanctimonious hypocrisy (Chaneph), and predatory force against the defenseless (Ganabin)”: “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 enigmatic 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: University of North Carolina, 2000); Ge´rard Defaux, Rabelais agonistes: du rieur au prophe`te (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1998); Myriam Marrache-Gouraud, ‘Hors toute intimidation’. Panurge ou la parole singulie`re (Geneva: Droz, 2003); V.-L. Saulnier, Rabelais II. Rabelais dans son enqueˆte. Etude sur le Quart et le Cinquie`me Livre (Paris: SEDES, 1982); Paul J. Smith, Voyage et e´criture. 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 Provenc¸al, means “throat.” Gargamelle fea-

Gargantua tures briefly at two moments of Gargantua. Her first and longest appearance is during the chapters (3–4, 6) detailing Gargantua’s conception and birth, which develops Rabelais’s preoccupation with the interiority and exteriority of bodies, but enables the author to speculate on the particular nature of the female body. Gargamelle’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 deciphered by the male child. M. A. Screech interprets this unusual birth as a means of challenging the reader’s belief in the Christian Nativity story. Although greeted with laughter from Grandgousier, Gargamelle’s remark that she regrets not cutting off his penis to avoid the pain of childbirth demonstrates the perceived threat to masculinity posed by the pregnant woman. In this light, Gargamelle’s marginalization from Gargantua’s education can be read as a restoration of patriarchy. When Gargamelle’s death is announced to Grandgousier later in the work, he responds by expressing his lack of interest in her and all other women. Readings: Franc¸oise 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 (London: Duckworth, 1979). Pollie Bromilow

GARGANTUA The story of the father of Pantagruel, covering the earliest period in the fictional 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 characters borrowed from the anonymous Grandes et inestimables cronicques, rather undistinguished comic tales about giants.

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Gargantua falls roughly into five parts: preliminaries (“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 The´le`me (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 essentially of aesthetic interest or primarily an interpretational 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 Alcofrybas Nasier, a pseudonym of Franc¸ois Rabelais. 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 himself. The first issue is precisely whether to take the book seriously. Alcofrybas raises the question insistently 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 pagan but in which devout sixteenth-century readers 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 something profound to say. On the other hand, Alcofrybas casts doubt on his own third analogy by declaring that, though credulous readers may detect hidden meanings in Gargantua, he did not

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knowingly include any! Although scholars debate 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 straightforwardly (e.g., justifications for war [1, 46]). Second, 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 meaning of the enigma [58]). Gargantua is born during a feast, which continues the merry tone of the prologue. More remarkably, his mother’s pregnancy lasts eleven months, and he is born through her ear. Alcofrybas 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 dismissively: “If you don’t believe it, I don’t care.” The account of Gargantua’s early childhood partly stresses his alleged intelligence. Thus, experimentation 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 theologians who, in fifty years, make Gargantua utterly stupid and idle. Grandgousier then places him with humanist teachers, under whose guidance he swiftly masters classical literature, modern 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 Gargantua’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 includes 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 difficult ideal to realize. Some scholars prefer a more specific interpretation, identifying Picrochole 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 Fre`re Jean, a monk and bloodthirsty fighter. Although the massacres which he perpetrates 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 pugnacious servants. Fre`re Jean is also a vehicle for religious satire, for he is presented as both a typical and an atypical monk: typically, he is drunken, greedy, and lecherous; atypically, he is active and useful. After the war, Grandgousier rewards his followers. The Abbey of The´le`me is founded ostensibly for Fre`re Jean, but Gargantua plans this institution. Only nominally an abbey, it is a utopia where rich, cultivated men and women live in harmony. The harmony comes not from rules imposed on the inmates, as in a monastic house, but from the The´le´mites’ internal sense of “honneur,” which is partly innate, partly due to education and social influence. “Honneur” is also sustained by Christianity, for the inhabitants have individual chapels, and preachers are welcome in The´le`me. Harmony is not, however, the last word. Under the abbey is discovered an obscure poem, whose meaning Fre`re Jean and Gargantua debate (58) (see Enigmatic Prophecy). The monk thinks it a comically mysterious description of tennis. For Gargantua, it evokes the persecutions that Christians must endure on earth. His interpretation recalls that The´le`me is an ideal and that reality can be brutally different. Fre`re Jean’s reading, however, recalls the Alcofrybas

Gargantua of the prologue: as he dismissed the Christianizing 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 Franc¸ois Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Age et sous la Renaissance, trans. Andre´ Robel (Paris: Gallimard, 1970); Guy Demerson, “Rabelais et la violence,” Europe 757 (1992): 67–79; Jerome Schwartz, Irony and Ideology in Rabelais (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London: Duckworth, 1979); Olivier Zegna-Rata, “L’acheminement vers la parole, ou l’e´ducation de Gargantua,” ER 30 (1995): 7–29. Ian R. Morrison

GARGANTUA Giant featured in the Gargantuan Chronicles, and believed by many to have folkloric origins, who appears as the title character’s father and the voice of patriarchy in Rabelais’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 genealogy (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 tension between old and new, legitimacy and illegitimacy, 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, unabashed 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 Panurge in chapter 9. Upon closer inspection, how-

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ever, the Utopian patriarch who once strapped Pantagruel to his cradle seems less bent on fostering independence in his child than on ensuring the continuation of his own values. Despite Gargantua’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 instructs him to return home and defend the patrimony whenever it is threatened. True, Gargantua as a youth was scatologically inclined and played his own share of pranks, including stealing the bells of Notre Dame and urinating on the people of Paris, both of which might suggest a kinship with Panurge and an effort 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 keeping with the advice he gives his son in Pantagruel 8, young Gargantua returns home after sowing his wild oats, defends the patrimony, and emulates Grandgousier’s temperate style of governance (“unwilling . . . to degenerate from the hereditary mildness and clemency of my parents” [G 50]) in his speech to the vanquished, effectively mirroring the words and will of his wise and generous father. Indeed, one might even argue that the Abbey of The´le`me, Gargantua’s gift to Fre`re Jean, replicates Utopia in its institutionalization 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 fascination with alterity or otherness, thrives on conflict rather than consensus, and—in his role as a surrogate fils re´volte´ or rebellious son—is re-

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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 resurrected in the Third Book as an authority figure to whom the companions bow (35) and as a cautionary voice warning against unorthodox practices. 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 century. 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. Rabelais still draws a subtle distinction between father and son, however, in the choice of gifts he attributes to each character. Although Gargantua selects books, associated with learned culture and patriarchal authority, as presents for his son, Pantagruel 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, Genealogy and Narrative Structure in Rabelais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Walter Stephens, Giants in Those Days (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

GARGANTUAN CHRONICLES (CHRONIQUES GARGANTUINES) The term Chroniques gargantuines designates a series of popular tales published around 1530–40 featuring the character Gargantua. In the prologue to Pantagruel, narrator Alcofrybas Nasier mentions 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 Giant Gargantua (Grandes et inestimables Chronicques 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 commentators 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 characteristics that make it very similar to Rabelaisian tales. (3) Quite different in tone is the Great and Marvelous Life of the Most Powerful and Fearsome King Gargantua (Grande et merveilleuse vie du trespuissant et redoubte Roy de Gargantua [ . . . ]) 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 merveilleuse vie, and (5) the Admirable Chronicles of the Powerful King Gargantua (Croniques admirables du puissant Roy Gargantua [ . . . ]), very close to the Vroy Gargantua, which it repeats in addition to including whole chapters of Pantagruel. The Disciple de Pantagruel, published in 1538 or slightly later, is the terminus a quo of this series. In their borrowings, compilations, and successive rewritings of episodes, these counterfeit versions 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. However, with the title “chronicles,” these popular

Gaster, Messere 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 gargantuines. 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 passage in the Vroy Gargantua [ . . . ]. Moreover, in the sixteenth century, the tales of Rabelais were often printed together with the Chroniques gargantuines, 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. Christiane Lauvergnat-Gagnie`re and Guy Demerson (Paris: Nizet, 1988); Franc¸ois Cornilliat, “L’Autre ge´ant: Les chroniques gargantuines et leur intertexte,” Litte´rature 55 (1984): 85–97; Diane Desrosiers-Bonin, “Les chroniques gargantuines et la parodie du chevaleresque,” ER 32.1 (1996): 85–95; John Lewis, “Towards a Chronology of the Chroniques gargantuines,” ER 18 (1985): 83–101; Franc¸ois Rabelais Œuvres comple`tes, ed. Mireille Huchon, coll. “Bibliothe`que de la Ple´iade” (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). Diane Desrosiers-Bonin

GASTER, MESSERE (4BK 57–62) The Gaster episode occupies chapters 57–62 of the Fourth Book. Pantagruel and the crew of the Thalame`ge descend upon an island whose summit 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 description 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

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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 industry, 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 discussion 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 (Adages, 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 immigration and discovery and many of the technological advances of the day. Despite his many accomplishments, Gaster is unworthy of undue glorification and himself admits to being not a god but a vile creature, sending his worshipers to his chamber pot to see the evidence of his base humanity. At his court, Gaster is served by two categories of followers: the Engastrimythes, or ventriloquists, and the Gastrolatres, or Bellyworshipers. 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 arrange 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 formalistic routine and a transformation of the Eucharist into an idolatrous feast (Duval, 1988: 132–34). The vituperation of Gaster and his followers

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continues as the stomach is presented as the cause of the recent diabolical creation of gunpowder. Since the seeming Manor of Virtue or Garden of Eden proves to be a false paradise accessible 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 voyages 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 contradictions within the text itself, which is essentially the development of a stomach-god character based on a very literal reading of a biblical injunction against literal interpretation and fetishism. Readings: Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1998); Edwin M. Duval, “La messe, la ce`ne et le voyage sans fin du Quart Livre,” ER 21 (1988): 131–41; Michel Jeanneret, “Les Paroles de´gele´es (Rabelais, Quart Livre, 48–65), Litte´rature 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 Engastrimythes (4BK 58); a summary of their religious rituals (4BK 59–60); and finally an account of Gaster’s many “inventions” (4BK 61–62). Because of the central role played by allegory, the Gastrolatres episode has served as a centerpiece in scholarly debate on interpretation itself hinging on questions of allegory, ambivalence, and instability. As “Belly-worshipers,” (Briefve De´claration) the Gastrolatres cultivate an elaborate gastronomy 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 Rabelais’s time was the site of one of the Renaissance’s public works projects with accompanying rhetoric condemning “idle” paupers. Beyond this satire, critics have identified a religious 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, worshiping 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 materiality has Pauline resonances: it recalls the condemnation 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 function of a kind of master-source for an evangelical humanist like Rabelais. The episode also resonates 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 consecrated topos from Hesiod found in contemporary texts such as Jean Lemaire de Belges’s Concorde des deux langages (1511) and Franc¸ois 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 allegorically in light of (1) the Neoplatonic conception of love or (2) the human (postlapsarian) condition. 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 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 subjects work (4BK 57) echoes the Old Testament injunction “in the sweat of your face you will eat your bread.” This episode combines the Old Testament 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 Neoplatonic conception of love, but also to the “arts and trades” that characterize humanity’s postlapsarian 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: Variations on the Rock of Virtue,” Literary Theory/Renaissance 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 de´gele´es,” Litte´rature 27 (1975): 163–80; Virginia Krause, “Idle Works in Rabelais’ Quart Livre: The Case of the Gastrolatres,” SCJ 30.1 (1999): 47–60; Robert Marichal, “Commentaires du Quart Livre,” ER 1 (1956): 183–202; Franc¸ois Rigolot, Les langages de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1996 [1972]), 152–60. Virginia Krause

GENEALOGIES Evoking both biblical lineages (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 ancestors, Rabelais’s own genealogy of the Utopian princely family (P 1) lends itself to multiple interpretations. Given the plethora of inventors who figure in the giants’ lineage, the family tree represents at one level a tribute to humanistic ingenuity, enriched by a syncretic but improbable mixture of biblical (Jewish), classical (Roman and Greek), medieval Christian, and completely

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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 gently undermined by the narrator’s own suggestion that he believes nothing of what he has transcribed (“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 invisible 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 elevenmonth 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 Rabelais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Walter Stephens, Giants in Those Days (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

GEOGRAPHY An important element, to differing degrees, in Rabelais’s five books. Rabelaisian 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 medieval cartographers. But it is more than “reflection”: Rabelais exploits the many narrative possibilities of this diversity, navigating the reader through landscapes that invite interpretation, even while refusing to yield a fixed meaning. Sixteenth-century geography was largely determined 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 Strasbourg 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

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and beasts (rather like Rabelais’s text), or T.O. maps, so called because the three known continents formed a T within the circle of God’s creation. The myth of the terrestrial paradise continued during the sixteenth century and is one of the comparisons evoked by Rabelais for the island of Gaster (4BK 57). The most influential cartographer, however, was Ptolemy (second century a.d.), whose Geography was widely translated and printed in Europe 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 system, and his canonical distinction between local cartography (chorography) and national or international (geography). Ptolemy’s influence was added to medieval influences, rather than replacing them immediately, and the Geography’s limits were also being shown by explorers in the Americas: Da Gama, Vespucci, Columbus, Verrazano, Cartier, or Corte´s. 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 include contemporary discoveries. The result was Martin Waldseemu¨ller’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 intended to improve upon Ptolemy, was widely used by cartographers all over Europe and was known by Rabelais, who uses Olaus as the inspiration 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 Mu¨nster’s epoque-making Cosmography (1544), Mercator’s world map (1554), and the publication of new and more upto-date atlases, in particular Ortelius’s Theater of

the World (1570), considered the first modern atlas. Travel accounts also proliferate at this time. Jacques Cartier’s accounts of his first two voyages to Canada (1534, 1535-36), published in 1545, were certainly known by Rabelais. The itinerary of the travelers in the Fourth Book recalls 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, recent criticism has challenged too direct a calquing of the voyages of the Fourth Book onto Cartier’s Brief Account. Although Cartier’s text is rather sober in its descriptions, other travel accounts 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 observation 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, confirming 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 criticism has also shown the importance of the “insular,” 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 diversity. Nor was there any lack of maps or accounts of travel within Europe or France. Sebastien Mu¨nster’s new maps for his edition of Ptolemy (1540) marked a revolution in the mapping of Europe. In France, the Church often took the initiative 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 contributed to France’s sense of itself as a territory distinct from others and to increased mobility within the country. In Rabelais, the image of France is that of a nation both expanding outward and opening up within. Recent criticism has shown the importance of non-French “others” in Rabelais’s exploration of the psychic and geographical limits of French identity. And changes within France, the formation of new communication 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 nomenclature 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 possibilities 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 universities 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 alternately recognizable and strange. The voyage to Utopia in Pantagruel (P 24) starts on an itinerary that exactly matches that taken by the Portuguese toward the Indies, but then progresses to places such as Me`den (“Nothing”). The Island of

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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 constructed out of linguistic puzzles, games, and debates. 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 pronunciation of “Ente´le´chie,” 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 “Ende´le´chie,” as other uneducated travelers have done. This refers to a contemporary humanist 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 Fre`re 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 narrative 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, Pantagruel, 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 references to small villages, woods, territories, fords, and so on, near his family’s land at La Devinie`re near Chinon. In fact, La Devinie`re seems to be the general quarters of the Picrocholine War. This war, based on a historical local quarrel between the seigneur of Lerne´ and the users of the Loire River, a dispute in which Rabelais’s own

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father was involved, reads like a chorography of the Touraine: the local landscape is ravaged by the enemy troops, the castle of La Roche Clermaud is taken, the Abbey of Seuilly is attacked, and the Gue´ de Ve`de becomes pivotal strategic territory (G 26–28, 34). The´le`me 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 etymology (Caynon) linking the name with Cain’s originary 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 produces the ne`fles or medlars, at the origin of Rabelais’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 ge´ographie a` la Renaissance (1420–1620) (Paris: Bibliothe`que Nationale, 1980); Franc¸ois de Dainville, La ge´ographie des humanistes (Paris: Beauchesne, 1940); Timothy Hampton, Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Abel Lefranc, Les navigations de Pantagruel, e´tude sur la ge´ographie rabelaisienne (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967, 1905); Frank Lestringant, “Ele´ments pour une lecture topographique du Cinquiesme Livre,” ER 40 (2001): 81–102; Frank Lestringant, Le livre des ˆıles. Atlas et re´cits insulaires de la Gene`se a` Jules Verne (Geneva: Droz, 2002); Frank Lestringant, Ecrire le monde a` la Renaissance (Caen: Paradigme, 1993); Robert Marichal, “Commentaires du Quart livre,” ER 1 (1956): 153–58, 181–88; V.-L. Saulnier, Rabelais: Rabelais dans son enqueˆte, vol. 1 (Paris: SEDES, 1983); Gabriel Spillebout, “Le re´alisme chinonais,” ER 21 (1988): 69–75. Louisa Mackenzie

GIANTS “Giant,” “Rabelaisian,” and “Gargantuan” 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. Before 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, Alcofrybas 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 references to Gargantua in the oral culture of French peasants and speculated that the giant had originated in prehistoric Celtic mythology, perhaps as a god. Anthropologists investigated “town giants,” 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 exploited 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 Rabelais would not have known, told of giants. In Rabelais’s time, comparable evidence of truly oral French folklore about giants was not recorded; only the Chroniques gargantuines, surviving in few copies, are clearly datable to Rabelais’s era, and, aside from their written format, they show literate influences (e.g., Arthurian romances). Giants were massively present in official or scholarly culture of Rabelais’s time, however. 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 mythology recounted how giants and titans had rebelled against the gods of Olympus. Since antiquity, Jewish and Christian authors had defended the historical existence of Giants, iden-

Giants tifying pagan myths about them as deformed echoes of biblical truth. The giants of scholarly culture differed radically from those of Rabelais, from the hero of the Chroniques gargantuines, and from the “popular” 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 angels, giving Giants a semidemonic genealogy; several Christian writers disputed this idea, interpreting the “sons of God” as descendants of Adam’s son Seth and the “daughters of men” as Cain’s posterity. After Augustine, the Sethian explanation prevailed, despite Augustine’s denial that giants were a discrete race. Augustine’s idea that giants were simply deviations from the genetic 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 reappeared in the time of Moses and David. Aside from a few giants who converted to Christianity, like Saint Christopher and some giants in medieval French and Renaissance Italian heroic poems, there were no good giants in official culture until 1498, when Annius of Viterbo (Giovanni Nanni, 1432–1502) published a collection of forged chronicles attributed to ancient Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, and Latin authors. Skillfully coordinating his bogus texts and commentaries with histories written by authoritative 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 anomalous good giants before the Flood and that Noah had founded an Etruscan empire in postdiluvian Italy, becoming the first pontifex maximus, prefiguring the Papacy, and establishing an administrative center at Rome. Thus the Pope had in-

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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 Lemaire 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 singularite´s 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 Trojan refugees founded France and other kingdoms. He depicted an eternal French hegemony, claiming 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 aˆge” (from Noah’s Ark down to our own times). They are anomalous giants, staggeringly good and pious, superhumanly erudite. Pantagruel’s herb Pantagruelion 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 human 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. Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. He´le`ne Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968); Abel Lefranc, Rabelais: Etudes sur Gargantua, Pantagruel, Le Tiers livre, Introd. by Robert Marichal (Paris: Albin Michel, 1951); Walter Stephens, Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient History, and Nationalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). Walter Stephens

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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 reestablishment of peace following Anarche’s defeat, the image is developed at greater length in chapter 4 of the Third Book when a world characterized by mutual debt and the unfettered circulation 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 Duval’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 sexuality and problems of interpretation. When Panurge asserts that Nature created man with unprotected 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 exegetical language. Although Rabelais’s most direct source is Erasmus’s “Dulce bellum inexpertis” (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). Readings: Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel’(Geneva: Droz, 1997); Jennifer Monahan, “Reading the Rose in the Early Renaissance,” (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 unmerited salvation, while free will (liberum arbitrium, libre arbitre) denotes an individual’s unconstrained ability to accept or reject the saving

message of the Gospel. Controversies opposing freedom of the will to doctrines such as the bondage 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 history and still continue to divide Protestant, Roman 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 emphasizes 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 Epistle of Saint James, however, seems to offer another 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 Reformation. In addition, Erasmus and Luther engaged in a bitter polemical exchange opposing the freedom of the will to the bondage of the will. As usual, one should not expect from Rabelais a coherent, systematic defense of one position or the other, given the extremely subtle theological concepts involved and the vernacular genre that he had chosen as the vehicle for expressing himself. Indeed, his attitudes seem to oscillate between optimistic and pessimistic visions of human nature. Grandgousier, Gargantua, and Pantagruel all express their confidence in the value of religious and secular educational reform as a means of restraining individual aggression and reforming European society. The way of life adopted by the The´le´mites (G 51–57) is generally cited as proof that Rabelais had taken the side of the “optimistic” Erasmus against Luther, “the pessimist”: “Their lives were not ordered and gov-

Gross Medlars erned by laws and statutes and rules, but according to their own free will” (“Toute leur vie estoit employe´e 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 Pantagruelisme (3BK 2) offer a means of intelligently cultivating human happiness. Rabelais often evokes the catastrophic potential of humanity’s franc arbitre. When describing Picrochole’s “oultraiges” and “cholere tyrannique,” 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, nothing 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 certainly 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 reasons to hate and, ideally, destroy their neighbors, thereby confirming for some readers the universal depravity of human beings (and Andouilles). Readings: Roland H. Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1969); Edmund J. Campion, Montaigne, Rabelais, and Marot as Readers 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.

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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 Gargamelle and proud father of the great Gargantua, so named by Grandgousier himself when uttering his first words to the newborn in astonishment over the impressive size of his mouth and the volume of his voice when demanding 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, Grandgousier stands out as a model of pacifism and diplomacy. Before entering war, he attempts to soften Picrochole’s ire by sending an ambassador and responding to accusations of theft by offering a shipment of bread (fouaces) as restitution (G 31–32). When war can no longer be avoided, Grandgousier reluctantly participates, treating prisoners such as Tocquedillon with justice 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 Gargantua 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: Genealogy and Narrative Structure in Rabelais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). Lesa Randall

GROSS MEDLARS (P 1) Literally and figuratively, 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, pagan, way of measuring time—had rendered the soil so fertile as to create an abundance of fruit, particularly said medlars. That year was henceforth known as the “year of the gross medlars.” Anyone eating that invigorating fruit experienced curious swelling of body parts, and some even

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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 ne`fle as well as in the utter temporal and cosmological confusion that marks the “year of the gross medlars,” 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 factors, 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 humankind once again. In this context, we must not forget that they are the product of the exact opposite 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 Lemaire 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 effect of fertility but also seems to connote the type of raw, farcical mixture that this first chronicle will offer. The medlars therefore become the defining 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 obscenity or vulgarity will henceforth be expressed in a more subtle fashion. The gross medlars have finally given way to a more refined concoction. Readings: Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’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 rencontres. Me´langes de langue, d’histoire et de litte´rature franc¸aises offerts a` Enea Balmas, vol. 1, ed. Paolo Carile et al. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1993); Marcel Tetel, “Gene`se d’une œuvre: Le premier chapitre du Pantagruel,” Stanford French Review 3 (1979): 41– 52. Bernd Renner

GROTESQUE REALISM In Mikhail Bakhtin the grotesque realism of medieval and Renaissance popular culture is intimately linked to the representation of the body. According to this aesthetic, the body, through a topographical displacement 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, digestion, defecation, micturition, childbirth, decomposition, 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 entries into and exits from this grotesque anatomical 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 reflecting the author’s implicit support for a certain kind of materialism. Thus the emblem of the androgyne 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 Codpieces (3BK 8) is really a tribute to the material immortality of the grotesque body, the celebration 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 meaning—in the Renaissance. The word even appears in Rabelais’s work (3BK 26 and 5BK 40). In

Grotesque Realism fact, the adjective first appeared in Italian to designate the rich and fanciful wall decoration of the Domus Aurea of Nero, rediscovered during the archaeological excavations of the fifteenth century. The term derives from the substantive grotto, because the famous House of Gold, before being completely unearthed, was first taken for a kind of cave. According to the Tresor de la langue franc¸aise, the first appearance of the term dates from 1532, which constitutes an extraordinary coincidence: for the first famous work of Rabelais, the Pantagruel, dates from exactly the same year. Nonetheless, this grotesque realism rests upon a postulate that is at the base of Bakhtin’s interpretation. According to Bakhtin, Rabelais is both an atheist and the partisan of a materialist conception 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 spermatozoids 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 rehabilitation of the body in the Renaissance, which, even as its dignity was restored, remains subor-

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dinate to the mind and soul. Furthermore, grotesque elements in the Gallic physician’s text doubtless relate to the fact that Rabelais, according 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 riparographe 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 aesthetic of riparography does not represent a negative 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 hominis 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, defecates, 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 Franc¸ois Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Aˆge et sous la Renaissance, trans. Andre´e Robel (1970; Paris: Gallimard, coll. “Tel,” 1994); Jean Ce´ard, “Le fantastique d’en dec¸a,” Magazine litte´raire 319 (1994): 49–51; Claude La Charite´, “Panurge est-il ‘thalamite’ ou the´le´mite? Le style de petit ‘riparographe’: l’apologue sans morale de l’aˆne 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 modern debate over the question of Rabelais’s attitudes toward women: was the writer a misogynist, 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 Panurge, 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 narrator in this dialogic, polyvocal text. Panurge, a lover of practical jokes, finds himself locally famous in Paris for having defeated an Englishman 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, Panurge finds a bitch in heat, kills her, takes an unspecified 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 enjoyment. As Wayne Booth famously observed (“Freedom 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 between 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, although the third-person narrator of the scene insinuates from time to time that her stated resolve is not as firm as it may seem. Thus, in a combination parody of two genres, courtly love and the medieval pastourelle (a debate cum sexual assault often taking place between a knight and a humble shepherdess), Rabelais both critiques and restages the double bind of early modern sexual politics. On the one hand, if the lady refuses—which she must also absolutely 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 Panurge 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 violence beneath the rhetoric of courtliness. The substitution of dogs for his person further suggests a failure at the heart of Panurge’s mascu-

Hebrew Language and Culture, References to linity, a failure that must, inevitably, result in visiting 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 invoking 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 homosocial bonding produced at the expense of women, no, it is not. But the marvel in this instance 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 Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 9 (1982): 45–76; Carla Freccero, “Damning Haughty Dames: Panurge and the ‘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 interest for the study of Hebrew prevalent among humanists 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 Lefe`vre d’Etaples. Christian Hebraists 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 commissioned Jean Thenaud’s Traite´ de Cabale and established the Colle`ge de Lecteurs Royaux,

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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 creation. 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 kabbalist texts. This eloquent admonishment is eventually concretized in the Hebraic Library of The´le`me. 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 Massoretic 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, bemeherah thithen li kikar lehem, cham cathub: laah al Adonai chonen ral” (P 9). This word-forword translation informs the reader of Rabelais’s proficiency in Hebrew. Other examples of Rabelais’s playfulness with Hebrew are interspersed here and there. Among other things, eight islands have a name that is either Hebrew or Hebraicized: Ennasin, Cheli, Tohu, Bohu, Farouche, Ruach, Chaneph, and Ganabin. The name offers 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 formulations: such are Chalbroth, Sarabroth, Faribroth, the litany of giants in Gargantua’s genealogy. This ending in-oth imitates the Hebrew mark of feminine plural. On that pattern, Rabelais created many words that have a Hebraic fla-

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vor: falbroth, enthoth, broth, dechoth, endoth, moth, voldemoth, diavoloth, doth. Yet others have a masculine resonance: barildim, elmim, ensouim, 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 obscenities: 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’he´breu de Rabelais: La rencontre avec Panurge (Pantagruel, chap. 9),” ER 25 (1991): 95–105; Marie Holban, “Autour de Jean Thenaud et de Fre`re Jean des Entonneurs,” ER 9 (1971): 49–65; David Morris, “The Place of Jewish Law and Tradition in the Work of Franc¸ois Rabelais,” ER 15 (1963); Franc¸ois Secret, Les Kabbalistes chre´tiens 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 performs alchemy-cum-surgery after finding Episte´mon lying with his bloody head in his arms. Thus resurrected, Episte´mon describes his stay “en enfer” and in the “Champs Elise´es” (OC 322). Below the ground, Episte´mon encounters a mix of historical and legendary figures from classical, 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 underworld vary considerably in different editions of Pantagruel. Although most of these modifications involve additions of figures from GrecoRoman 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). Episte´mon’s descent is not represented as part of some larger epic design, as are Odysseus’s and Aeneas’s trips to the underworld. Episte´mon 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, Episte´mon’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 Episte´mon’s vision ultimately bears little resemblance to medieval Christian depictions 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 Episte´mon encounters appears to be remarkable primarily for its entertainment value: Episte´mon 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 passetemps a` les veoir” [322]). In his groundbreaking work on religious belief in sixteenth-century France, Lucien Febvre insisted 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 bergers. More recently, Edwin Duval has developed a sustained, systematic analysis of Rabelais’s work that attributes a thoroughly Christian framework to the Pantagruel series. Thus, Episte´mon’s focus on the sheer pleasure to be had from observing specific figures from history and mythology in ridiculous situations exists alongside Pantagruel’s concern with the more abstract question of the wages of mortal sin. “Keep these fine stories for another time,” Pantagruel interrupts his companion’s report; “Just tell us how the usurers are treated” (326). It would, of course, be a mistake to separate completely Episte´mon’s and Pantagruel’s respective approaches to a hermeneutics of Hell; chez Rabelais, moral reflection and good storytelling are inextricably intertwined. Readings: Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century. The Religion of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Mireille Huchan, Oeuvres comple`tes (Paris: Gallimard, 1994, Bibliotheque de la Ple´iade series). 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 monarch’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 Orle´ans; and in the dedication to Odet de Coligny, cardinal of Chaˆtillon, 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 cardinal a ten-year royal privilege for their publication. Whether Henry, better known for his athletic prowess than his scholarly pursuits, had read the

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chronicles is uncertain. Clearly, however, Rabelais 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 intellectual freedom, at least in his own country. Building 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 Lutheran 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 nonCatholics 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 Machiavelli’s prince. On the other hand, his exceptionally hard-line attitude toward French Reformers, 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 conservative 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 domestic 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

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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). Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

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 artium). It is Episte´mon who suggests this consultation, 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 frightened 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 unmasks Her Trippa, first insulting him rather violently and then drawing on a number of proverbs from Erasmus’s Adages, reproaching him for his lack of self-knowledge. The criticism culminates in what Panurge calls the “first characteristic of philosophy,” the phrase “KNOW THYSELF,” forming, in capital letters, the center

of the chapter and repeating, essentially, the advice that could be considered the leitmotif of all fourteen consultations beginning with Pantagruel’s “Ricochet song” (3BK 9). The trickster— combining biblical and classical sources (the parable 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 qualifications of the prognosticator, who, blissfully ignorant of his own wife’s adulterous actions, is nonetheless convinced to be able to predict another man’s marital future, the irony consists in the fact that the trickster implicitly unmasks himself in his ranting, as he and Her Trippa turn out to be mirror images as models of philautia, unable 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 adherence to univocal models of thought expressed through Panurge’s subtle unconscious selfsatirization, a technique that illustrates the Third Book’s new brand of elaborate satire. Readings: Jean Ce´ard, 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, damaging to the central teachings of the Catholic Church—and condemned by the religious authorities 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 authorities—the Sorbonne and the Parlement. In Catholic theology, no crime was more serious

Heresy 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 attacking 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 Pantagruel, 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 redherrings, [and went away] saying ‘God forbid I should die such a death.’ ” The professor in question, 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, Rabelais, always on the lookout for safe havens and protective patrons, was constantly prepared to flee and did so (Poitou, Chambe´ry, 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 Maubert. Over the next three years, from 1547 to 1550, the Paris Parlement issued more than five hundred 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

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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 reform? In 1543 Francis I issued a royal ordinance enjoining “inquisitors of the faith to pursue Lutherans and heretics as seditious, disruptors of the public peace, and conspirators against the security 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 theology 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 doctors 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 addendum (“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 pronouncements 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 “heresy 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.

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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 actions. 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 visible 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 convoked in due and legitimate fashion and representing the universal Church, cannot err in

Hero 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 fasting, 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 accepted, divine grace and salvation, flowed a series of bitterly contested issues: free will and predestination, 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 eschatological and ecclesiological controversy by “constitutions,” 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 councils (including the power of the Pope to dispense indulgences, added seemingly almost as an afterthought in no. 23). All these issues were interrelated, complex, fiercely disputed, and in varying degrees mocked or occasionally defended by Rabelais. The list covers most of the litigious points contested by Reformers of the various confessional leanings hinted at behind the scenes of Rabelais’s comedy and satire—e´vange´lisme, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and others—confronting the corrupt traditionalism and militant ignorance that dominated the Church and resisted all attempts 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); Franc¸ois Isambert, Recueil ge´-

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ne´ral des anciennes lois franc¸aises, vol. 12 (Paris: Plon, 1822–33) in Jonathan Beck, The´aˆtre et propagande aux de´buts de la Re´forme. Six pie`ces pole´miques du recueil La Vallie`re (Paris/Geneva: Slatkine, 1986). Jonathan Beck

HERO Rabelais’s first two books are clearly structured as parodies of the epic poems and legends 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), condemned to a degrading common fate aux Enfers (P 30), or relegated to the Island of the Macraeons (4BK 25–28). Very few contemporary readers would question the use of the term mockheroic epic as an accurate description of Pantagruel and Gargantua, since nearly all of the major 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 companions 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 political 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 epicheroic 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 reasoning of the increasingly tyrannical antihero, Panurge. Both the consultations of the Third Book and the “odyssey” of the Fourth Book recall the extraordinary voyages and encounters of classical and medieval adventurers. Rabelais’s depiction of the hero, however, systematically calls into question the definition and value of the concept, as many references are irreverent and disrespectful. Panurge tells Panta-

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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); virtually all classical and medieval heroes are humiliated 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 arsewipe 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 picture. 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, Alexander, 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 utopian 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, Rabelais et l’humanisme civil, ER 27 (Geneva: Droz, 1992); Walter Stephens, Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient History, and Nationalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); Marcel Tetel, “Mock Epic in Rabelais,” Neophilologus, 59 (1975): 157–64. William H. Huseman

HE´ROE¨T, ANTOINE (1492?–1568?) Poet and Neoplatonist, also known as La Maison Neuve. Little is known of He´roe¨t’s life before 1524 when he became a pensioner of Marguerite 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. He´roe¨t 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 He´roe¨t took any part in the religious or political questions of the day. When He´roe¨t 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 Rabelais the next year in Gargantua’s letter to Pantagruel. Five years later, He´roe¨t presented Francis with the Androgyne de Platon, a French interpretation of Marsilis Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Symposium. He´roe¨t is primarily remembered, however, for his immensely popular, poetic exposition of the Platonic doctrine of love in La parfaicte amye published in 1542. Although He´roe¨t’s renown as a poet is underscored by praise from Cle´ment Marot, Gaucher de Sainte-Marthe, Thomas Sebillet, Pierre de Ronsard, 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 misogynistic 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 He´roe¨t) among the model authors cited in the prologue to the Fifth Book. Readings: Jules Arnoux, Un pre´curseur de Ronsard: Antoine He´roe¨t, ne´o-platonicien et poe`te (Digne: Chaspoul, 1912); Antoine He´roe¨t, La parfaicte amye, ed. crit. Christine Hill ( Exeter: University of Exeter, 1981); Michael A. Screech, The Rabelaisian Marriage (London: Arnold, 1958); Raphae¨l Vale´ry, “Qui e´tait Antoine He´roe¨t?” Bulletin d’art et d’histoire de la valle´e du Loing, 5 (2002): 147–58. Megan Conway

HIEROGLYPHS Shortly after Gargamelle gives birth to her son, Grandgousier, her portly

Hieroglyphs 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 between the “arbitrary” or “motivated” nature of language that recalls Plato’s Cratylus and anticipates 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, delights, 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 desiring 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 imposing silly allegations that turn them into rebuses. Unlike the “vainglorious” blazoners of his own era, says Alcofrybas, the wise Egyptians of Antiquity “wrote letters that they called hieroglyphs.” Informed readers could discern “the virtue, 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 extensively about the properties of hieroglyphs, the narrator adds, as did “Poliphile, in his Dream of Love” (Francesco Colonna’s Dream of Polyphilus). Recently published in Italy (1499) and celebrated 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 ideogram, a piece of writing understood through both its referent (via the indexical function of itself as sign) and its own form (via its own figural design). It would aim at an abstraction, a reflection of higher essence than its own material substance. It would be of divine language because it gives way to greater secrets concerning

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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) signify 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 delights in calling the devices “so inept, so tasteless, so rustic and barbaric” that a “foxtail ought to be tied to the collar and a mask of cow manure” 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 abstraction and reason, the rebus (or device) pulls language 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 Rabelais’s work can be treated in its multivalent and

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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 Ce´ard and Jean-Claude Margolin, Rebus de la Renaissance: Des images qui parlent, 2 vols. (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1984); Franc¸ois 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 re´gime des maladies aigue¨s. As a medical student and subsequently a practicing doctor in Lyon, Rabelais relied heavily on Hippocratic inventions, such as the theory of humors and the notion that maintenance of balance within the human 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 citations in the first four books, but the Greek doctor’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 degree 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 ve´role´z 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. Readings: Roland Antonioli, Rabelais et la me´decine, ER 12 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1976); Gilles

Henry, Rabelais (Paris: Librairie Acade´mique Perrin, 1988). Lesa Randall

HIPPOTHADE´E (3BK 30) A theologian consulted 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 resolve his perplexity. After several failed attempts to divine what Panurge’s matrimonial fate will in fact be, Pantagruel arranges for him to take advice from experts, the theologian Hippothade´e, a doctor, and a philosopher. Hippothade´e’s dialogue with Panurge is interesting partly for his views on marriage and partly for Panurge’s reactions. The Third Book is sometimes very hostile to theologians. The prologue reviles them generally as evil, hair-splitting pedants. However, Pantagruel calls Hippothade´e a good theologian, seeking to uphold the true faith by his actions and teachings (29), and thus accords considerable authority to his advice. The outlook he reveals may be called broadly “e´vange´lique,” that is, it implies a form of Christianity centered on the Bible and the individual’s conscience. Although the e´vange´liques or evangelicals tended therefore to attach reduced importance to the priesthood and the traditions of the Church, they remained Roman Catholics. Unlike the Protestants, they sought simply to reform the Church moderately from within. The personal portrait of Hippothade´e 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 figures, most plausibly the liberal Lutheran, Philipp Melanchthon (Schwarzerd). If correct, this identification suggests a considerable degree of personal respect for Melanchthon. (It appears that Melanchthon, though a follower of the schismatic Martin Luther, was generally esteemed by French e´vange´liques.) Panurge puts his doubts to Hippothade´e in two stages (30). First he asks, “Should I marry?” Initially, Hippothade´e advises him to seek the an-

Homenaz swer within himself, as it is a matter of selfknowledge; Panurge has received and discounted such advice several times already. Hippothade´e’s second answer is to advocate marriage in preference to unmarried lust, “for it is far better to marry than to burn in the fire of lust.” The expression “far better” implies quite a positive view of marriage, compared with the grudging approval current among contemporary theologians, Protestant as well as Catholic. (Hippothade´e does, however, warn against uxoriousness. He cites approvingly the advice of Saint Paul: “Let those who are married be as though not married.”) Happy with the advice to marry, Panurge puts his other question to the theologian: “Shall I be cuckolded?” Hippothade´e 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 human undertaking depends on God’s will: “All that we propose [depends] on the dispositions of His holy will.” For Panurge, this response condemns 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, scrutinize the unfathomable secrets of Providence, could he be reassured. But Hippothade´e maintains that God, through Scripture, does reveal his will in these matters, and proceeds to offer Panurge the benefit of biblical precept. His wife will be virtuous if she is, among other things, a Godfearing woman who will not readily infringe God’s commandment against adultery. Similarly, Hippothade´e tells Panurge that he must encourage her by living as chastely himself as he expects her to do. These are obviously general precepts, and whether or not they work in the particular case of Panurge and his hypothetical spouse remains subject to the proviso, “God willing.” Panurge rejects this advice, ostensibly on the grounds that female virtue, as envisaged by Hippothade´e, no longer exists. The reader may suspect also that Panurge is not attracted by the emphasis on his own responsibility to behave virtuously and set a good example. Panurge’s rejection of his advice presumably counts as a failure for Hippothade´e. The failure

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is not, of course, very remarkable in that Panurge rejects almost all advice in the Third Book. More importantly, Hippothade´e’s failure and his gracious acceptance of it may also be taken to reflect his own guiding principle, “God willing.” Readings: Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Michael A. Screech, The Rabelaisian Marriage (London: Arnold, 1958). Ian R. Morrison

HOMENAZ (4BK 49–54) When Pantagruel and his friends stop off at the Island of the Papimaniacs (L’Isle des Papimanes), they are met first by the Papimaniacs themselves, whose definition 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 Decretals, Panurge responds with an obscene pun: “De cons fesser, respondit Panurge, tre`s 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 identify 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 expense of the faithful flock. Homenaz and the Pap-

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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 Christians through fear and force, symbolized in the articles of canon law detailed in the Decretals rather than through acts of faith, hope, and charity (Duval 73–74) (see Decretals; Eulogy, Satirical). Reading: Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Livre de Pantagruel, ER 36 (Geneva: Droz, 1998). Deborah Nichols Losse

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 narrative scope: Rabelais’s prolixity, the triumph, in his work, rhetorically speaking, of amplificatio, digressio, and copia, make him a truly epic author 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 plaidoyers, 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 Homeric of early modern artifacts in France—compared to, say, Pierre de Ronsard’s ill-conceived and ill-fated Franc¸iade. (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 represent 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 GrecoRoman epic: above all to Homer and Virgil. It should be stated at the outset that other classical authors are more influential: Plato, Cicero, Plutarch, 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 literature advocated in this letter represents, in itself, a significant departure, it has been pointed out, from the medieval orbis doctrinarum that Rabelais 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 Rabelais knows as what he does not know; indices of cultural distance as of proximity. Are these references allusions, echoes, arguments? The question is one that Rabelais himself anticipates, and it goes to the very question of Rabelais’s semantic and semiotic instability—the difficulty readers have had, over the centuries, in pinning him down. Thus, the most significant reference to Homer in the Chroniques is precisely the one that explicitly alerts us to the dangers of ascribing to that reference any particular significance. The Homeric allusion occurs in the preface to Gargantua, the “Prologe de l’Auteur,” where Rabelais 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 connection 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 critics who read outlandish and extraneous messages 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 compares 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 author 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 Rabelais must take into account cautionary passages such as the one found in chapter 24 of the Third Book. Episte´mon has lost patience with Panurge who, we know, has vowed not to marry until his doubts regarding fidelity are resolved. Episte´mon compares Panurge’s vow to one made by a Spanish knight and recorded in a fifteenthcentury chronicle on the Hundred Years’ War by one Enguerrard de Monstrelet. The reference allows 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 extension Episte´mon’s reading of Panurge’s vow) relies on a line from Horace, taken from Erasmus, parturiunt montes (“mountains giving birth” . . . ultimately to mere mice), on epic ambitions giving rise to less than epic results. The scene is significant for our purposes here because the Horatian passage to which Rabelais alludes here explicitly 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 Horace tells us not to write—and that he knows this. One must remember then that what might be important in a discussion of Rabelais as Homericist

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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 Iliadic war scenes, Paris as Homeric polis, the focus 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 Chroniques, which constitute a maritime epic, like Homer’s Odyssey. Elsewhere, of course, Rabelais’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. Consider the fact, for example, that the Third Book ends—rather than begins—with Panurge’s maritime 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 antiOdyssey 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 traveler, a pragmatist and a polyglot. This is shown in our very first encounter with him in Pantagruel 9, where Panurge’s linguistic tour de force, his request for food in several different languages, in fact defers the completion of that request. As this last scene suggests, Panurge, like Odysseus, is a very human proponent of the primacy of hunger, of the appetitive force. Note that in chapter 13 of the Third Book, Panurge’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 (Odyssey 19.563; see also Aeneid 6.893, although Rabelais’s reference, we are not surprised, is taken from Macrobius). The passage, like its Homeric 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 journey, we know, is motivated by a desire to find that truth, to arrive at a stable and fixed propo-

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sition. But surely it is the ultimate aim of Rabelais’s entire epic project to undermine the possibility 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 answer; 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 episode 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” (“maintient les parolles de Homere estre voligeantes, volantes, moventes, et par consequent anime´es”). 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 Aspley, David Bellos, Peter Sharratt (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1982) 47–50; Ge´rard Defaux, “Le curieux, le glorieux et la sagesse du monde dans la premie`re moitie´ du XVIe sie`cle,” French Forum Monographs 34 (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1982); Ge´rard Defaux, “Une recontre home´rique: Panurge noble, pe´re´grin et curieux,” FF 6.2 (1981): 109–122. Matthew Gumpert

ˆ TEL-DIEU DE LYON Public hospital HO known formally as the “grand hostel Dieu de Notre Dame de Pitie´ du Pont-du-Rhoˆne” where Rabelais served as main physician from 1532 to 1534. Evolving from its status as a hospice whose primary function was to provide sustenance and lodging for the sick and destitute, the Hoˆtel-Dieu had in years prior to Rabelais’s arrival obtained municipal funds, thus expanding its services to include medical treatment, pharmaceutical services, and resources for cases of famine. The main hospital operated under conditions hardly imaginable today: one vast room was divided 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 responsibilities that carried serious risks to his own health. Among his duties, the most rigorous included daily visits to each of the hospital’s 150 to 220 patients, accompanied by a barbersurgeon to whom he prescribed procedures to be performed under his supervision. A meager salary 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 Hoˆtel-Dieu provided ample fodder for the development of the allegories, not to mention an audience; here was the population of gouty syphilitics the dear Alcofrybas wished to heal. Readings: Roland Antonioli, Rabelais et la me´decine, ER 12 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1976); Gilles Henry, Rabelais (Paris: Librairie Academique Perrin, 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 medieval disciplines of logic and theology. Whereas medieval learning tended to focus on abstract and atemporal truths in a divinely ordered world, humanism 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 antiquity marked the high point of Western civilization, 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 following 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 gradually corrupted beyond recognition. The “gothic” culture of the “Middle Ages” was thus to be re-

Humanism 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 (paleography, textual criticism, archaeology, numismatics, 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 ultimately 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 practiced 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 disciplines—most notably the “three languages”: classical Latin, Greek, and Hebrew—without interference 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 Erasmus 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 ancient Roman will. Rabelais’s fictional works in the vernacular are no less informed by the ideology of humanism, despite their obvious popular aspects. Gargantua’s famous letter to Pantagruel (P 8) expresses the typical humanist

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view of the Middle Ages as a thousand-year period 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, medicine, and theology) completely reformed. More revealing is the fact that the humanist education spelled out in this letter allows Pantagruel to perform miracles of justice, to restore the Church to its original evangelical purity, and to establish a new Golden Age of peace and harmony in Utopia. The sequels to Pantagruel are increasingly humanistic in their allusions to history, literature, and legal, medical, and biblical scholarship, but at the same time they express a growing skepticism about the regenerative value of pure learning. In Gargantua, the hero’s education is essentially irrelevant to his later exploits and plays no role in the defeat of Picrochole or in the abolition of monasticism in the utopian Abbey of The´le`me. 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 ostentatious humanistic medical and legal learning. The Third Book, by far the most densely erudite of all Rabelais’s books, goes even further to suggest that no necessary connection exists between learning and understanding, between knowledge and wisdom. The examples of Panurge, Episte´mon, 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” [“science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’ame”] P 8), leads ultimately to the conclusion that Rabelais, 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 re´volution culturelle dans la France des humanistes: Guillaume Bude´ et Franc¸ois Ier, Titre courant 8 (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Margaret Mann Phillips, Erasmus and the Northern Renaissance, rev. ed. (Wood-

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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 analysis of humor. His erudite satire, often prosecuted under Erasmus’s aegis, promotes the advancement 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 intellectual improvement than with the turning of the seasons, the defeat of oldtime, and the enjoyment of material abundance. Both strategies are possible, nor are they mutually opposed, and behind the one narratee who delights in the learned festivitas 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 response, and given the central importance Rabelais 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 representatives, the Sorbonne, for instance. He mocks ritual prayer, the traffic in indulgences, monasticism, pilgrimage, Roman rather than universal

Catholicism, and its converse, dogmatic Protestantism. He lampoons the emperor Charles V, implying that his policies are tyrannical, and simultaneously he warns his own monarchs against the crimes that often accompany territorial expansion. 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 impenetrable and their humor dormant. The incongruity fundamental to this value-based satire involves 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 Rabelaisian satire is too radical to be seriously intended to convert opponents), or to stress its importance to those initially indifferent to his campaigns but attracted by the comical way in which they are prosecuted. Were Rabelaisian humor reducible to this single mechanism, then it would be very staid and predictable, certainly an unfair criticism even of his satire. That value-based satire is in fact doubled by a second, equally aggressive pattern, but it depends on shared loyalties rather than on shared standards. This mode may be termed clanbased satire, and it operates first in simple oppositions like the rivalry between villagers (as at the start of the Picrocholine War), Rabelais’s narratorial 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 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 permanent 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 company that scapegoats him, say, at the closing of the Fourth Book with its practical joke of the cannonade plus unfortunate aftermath. Conversely, 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 selfobsession (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 Rabelais, nay even Panurge as his most significant character, and that is the naı¨f. Rather than defying the value systems of

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honor, respectability, and so on, the naı¨ve 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 investigating, 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 effrontery but on simplicity. Our response, say, to scenes of peasants’ festivals (e.g., G 5) or of children’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 determined—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 Fre`re 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 savage, and perceptible in the clown, the drunk, the idiot, or the inge´nu. 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 madman’s pathological laughter or the ecstatic’s rapturous joy), combine and interpenetrate to a degree of complexity, defying reliable predictions and conclusions. Not to mention their later adventures, 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 (naı¨ve parody once more), yet he is well capable of enforcing a value-based satire such as that visited on the Ecolier Limousin. Meanwhile, Panurge combines the comic allure of the naı¨ve outsider 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

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sly mockery of his appearance and manner?) to look beyond his weird and eccentric words. Here, as ever in the best comic scenes and scenarios, considerable initiative is handed over to the reader, who will choose which pattern to emphasize at a particular juncture and how to enhance it: “le rire est le propre de l’homme” in this sense also. The huge disagreements that Rabelais scholarship has endured merely bear testament to the comic resourcefulness he enjoyed. Meanwhile, the reader’s joy in exploiting those resources springs from the execution of a prerogative the author respects in full degree.

Readings: Barbara C. Bowen, Enter Rabelais Laughing (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998); Floyd Gray, Rabelais et le comique du discontinu (Paris: Champion, 1994); Daniel Me´nager, La Renaissance et le rire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995); Colette Quesnel, Mourir de rire d’apre`s et avec Rabelais (Paris: Vrin, 1991); Michael A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (London: Allen Lane, 1997); Marcel Tetel, Etude sur le comique de Rabelais (Florence: Olschki, 1964); Florence M. Weinberg, Rabelais et les lec¸ons du rire (Orle´ans: 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 promises to increase the reader’s “pastimes” by providing 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 constitute a common backdrop in Gargantua. The prologue 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 proximity of leisure to the sacred insofar as the Sabbath, feasts, and holidays all offer a means for humanity to participate in the sacred through leisure. In contrast, if Fre`re Jean’s contempt for otia monastica (otia-idleness) is any indication, Rabelais seems to put little stock in monastic contemplation—the highest order of leisure throughout the Middle Ages but in clear decline during the Renaissance. Idle monks (“ces ocieux moynes”) suffer in comparison to hard-working peasants, warriors, evangelical preachers, doctors, and even merchants (G 38). A perpetually busy, hard-working Benedictine who is also a “bon compagnon,” Fre`re 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 The´le`me with which Gargantua concludes. Rabelais has provided for every aristocratic pastime imaginable from the jardin de plaisance and tennis courts to three-level baths. Most of all, however, the The´le`mites appear to be devoted to the hunt, long the quintessential aristocratic pastime (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 borrowed 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 preparations 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 intellectual’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 described as “ceste insigne fable et tragicque comedie.”) In either case, the choice between the active life and the speculative life is recast as

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the choice between being an actor in a tragic farce rather than a spectator—a properly Diogenic decentering of a familiar debate in keeping with the ethos of the Greek cynic. Readings: Diane Desrosiers-Bonin, Rabelais et l’humanisme civil (Geneva: Droz, 1992); Marc Fumaroli, “Otium, convivium, sermo: La Conversation comme ‘lieu commun’ des lettre´s,” Le loisir lettre´ a` l’aˆge classique, ed. Marc Fumaroli, Philippe-Joseph Salazar, and Emmanuel Bury (Geneva: Droz, 1996); Virginia Krause, Idle Pursuits: Literature and ‘Oisivete´’ in the French Renaissance (Newark: Delaware University Press, 2003); Les loisirs et l’he´ritage 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. Generic 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 chaˆteaux, Philibert de Lorme, sketched the famous Abbey of The´le`me described by Rabelais at the end of Gargantua. The 1565 Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel, a collection of 120 engravings depicting monstrous, yet whimsical, figures, is attributed to Rabelais himself. Although Rabelais almost certainly knew nothing of this work published thirteen years after his death, its appearance 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 illustration. Illustrators of Rabelais have by and large relied on the same episodes for their illustrations, 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 seemingly inconsistent: in the same edition he has created 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 quality—cheap paper and small type—it was nonetheless 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 effective 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 De´rain have produced lithographs and wood engravings for limited editions of Pantagruel and Gargantua. Readings: Gustave Dore´, illus., Les oeuvres de Franc¸ois Rabelais (Paris: J. Bry aıˆne´, 1854); Gustave Dore´, illus., Les oeuvres de Franc¸ois Rabelais, 2 vols. (Paris: Fre`res Garnier, 1873); W. J. Strachan, The Artist 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 contemporary textual models. When attempted for comic purposes, the imitation is known as “parody.” Imitation was an essential process in all writings of the Renaissance, itself an imitative phenomenon as it attempted to reproduce the aesthetic and ethical values of antiquity. It was thought to be the chief means through which as-

Interpretations piring writers could achieve the greatness attained 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 Petrarch. Several Renaissance scholars (including Erasmus, Bembo, and Joachim du Bellay) debated the preferred methods of imitation, and in so doing they imitated classical theorists such as Cicero and Quintilian. Whereas some Renaissance scholars focused on the imitation of particular stylistic features, others urged the cultivation of classical genres as a whole. The most pervasive 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 between the sublimity of the model and the baseness 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 individual episodes. These include P 7 (where the titles of books found in the Library of SaintVictor lampoon those of genuine scholarship on law, medicine, and religion); P 10–13, P 18, and G 19 (where the language of scholastic disputation is spoofed); P 3 (which caricatures the genre of the de´ploration fune`bre); 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

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“nativity” of Pantagruel), P 30 (on the “resurrection” of Episte´mon), 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 imitation and parody, as the “torchecul” or arsewipe episode (G 12) has been seen as a parody of Michelangelo’s Leda and the Swan. Readings: Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Raymond Lebe`gue, “Rabelais et la parodie,” BHR 14 (1952): 193–204; Franc¸ois Rigolot, “Leda and the Swan: Rabelais’s Parody of Michelangelo,” RQ 38 (1985): 688–700; Franc¸ois Rigolot, “Rabelais, Misogyny, and Christian Charity: Biblical Intertextuality and the Renaissance Crisis of Exemplarity,” PMLA 109 (1994): 225–37; Marcel Tetel, Etude sur le comique de Rabelais (Florence: Olschki, 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 variations on this same thematic pattern. But it is of course the celebrated prologue to Gargantua that raises the issue of interpretation as it applies specifically to the ensuing narrative, and by extension 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 irreverent assimilation of the reader with a dog gnawing on a bone in frenzied search of its sustantificque 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.

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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 Rabelais’s fictional text. Not all of Rabelais’s contemporaries were equally quick to rise to the challenge of the reading strategy outlined in the prologue. The success of Rabelais’s books upon their publication suggests that the general public was content to take them at face value and enjoy them first and foremost 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 authors 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 respective 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 authority and the parody of biblical texts admittedly pervading the novels, both the upholders of orthodoxy and those who call for reforms unexpectedly join forces in their vehement denunciation of Rabelais’s religious leanings as dangerously heretical or downright atheistic. In the seventeenth century, the religious debates subside in favor of a more literary approach. When La Bruye`re declares much of Rabelais’s humor as fit only for the amusement of the rabble (“la canaille”), he clearly has in mind the recently defined norms of acceptable behavior and good taste known to his contemporaries as les biense´ances. Above all, when he deplores the “monstrous assemblage (“monstrueux assemblage”) of high seriousness and vulgarity within the confines of one and the same work and denounces such a juxtaposition of opposites as unacceptable 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 persistence of an essentially aesthetic reaction to Rabelais 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 revolutionaries 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 scintillating 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 analytical, the Romantic reaction to Rabelais was followed, 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 Picrocholine War at the heart of Gargantua could be followed, their mock-heroic treatment notwithstanding, on any sixteenth-century map of the region 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 devoted to education or to life at The´le`me, direct access to the author’s thought. Throughout the first half of the century, Rabelais’s work continued to be studied from this

Interpretations 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 historical determinism encouraged a similar emphasis 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 philologist 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 interpretation 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 Rabelais’s e´criture, 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 Gargantua’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 exaggeration. This new awareness of the essential ambiguity of Rabelais’s text did not prevent more traditional scholars from pursuing their quest of what V.-L. Saulnier was to call “the design of Rabelais” (“le dessein de Rabelais”). Saulnier himself did much to impose the symbolic interpretation of Rabelais’s first two books as a fictional representation of the humanist ideal, and of the Third and Fourth Books as an allegorical account of the obstacles in the path of its realization. In a series of studies remarkable for the breadth of their erudition, Michael Screech sees Rabelais’s adherence to the evangelical movement as a key to various aspects of his thought.

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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 Rabelais’s secret thought and various forms of esoteric initiation. The publication in 1968 of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World in English translation marks another significant turning point in Rabelais criticism and sets it on a new course in two somewhat incompatible directions. By insisting on what Rabelais’s fiction owes to popular culture 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 opposition to the rise of capitalistic individualism. On the other hand, Bakhtin’s effort to minimize the importance of Rabelais’s humanistic message, together with his view of Rabelais’s novel as a polyphonic text resonating with a concert of voices from which the author’s own voice was conspicuously absent, led such disciples as Michel Beaujour to bring out in Le jeu de Rabelais the consequences of Bakhtin’s approach and to question the legitimacy of seeing in Rabelais’s references to the political, religious, and other cultural concerns 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 reinforced by poststructuralist notions of textuality and of the self-referential nature of literature, did not prevent such staunch traditionalists as Michael Screech and his followers from persisting in their conviction that a historical and scholarly approach was the one and only path to valid interpretation. More moderate scholars, such as Ge´rard Defaux, continued (and continue) to defend the rights of historical criticism, were it only as an indispensable precaution against anachronistic misreadings and adventurous claims. Combining thematic and stylistic concerns, language took center stage in the two following decades, in the wake of Franc¸ois Rigolot’s seminal work,

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Les langages de Rabelais. Studies of such aspects of the proble´matique du langage as the relationship between words and things, the relative status of linguistic signs in the act of communication, and their alleged inability to signify without ambivalence and ambiguity have stressed Rabelais’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 reexamined these traditional themes from new, often interdisciplinary perspectives. A number of intertextual 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 characterize 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 continues to be read in historical context by traditional scholars, and from an increasingly interdisciplinary perspective by critics favoring a more modern approach informed by new critical methodologies. But the near-hostility that had marked previous polemical confrontations between traditionalists and innovators seems to have given way to a new spirit of synthesis and conciliation, a welcome willingness to moderate the reductionist 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 polyvalence of meaning are no longer seen as necessarily justifying the rejection of all attempts at interpretation. Even the possibility of a sustantificque mouelle or marrow at the core of Rabelais’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 tolerance, 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. Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. He´le`ne Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968); Michel Beaujour, Le jeu de Rabelais: Essai sur Rabelais (Paris: Editions de l’Herne, 1969); Franc¸ois 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 ‘rabelaisants,’ ” SF 4.12 (September–December): 401–23. Bruno Braunrot

IRONY Mikhail Bakhtin’s study of the Rabelaisian carnivalesque, though limited by its Marxist perspective, offered a theoretical framework for the study of ironic structures in Rabelais’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 indispensable, 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 structure is Rabelais’s use of a fictive narrating persona in the first three books—Alcofrybas Nasier—who declares the presence of a new kind of literary voice addressing a fictive reader. This

Irony voice is dialogic and inaugurates a new role for the empirical reader of Rabelais’s books. Reading 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 charlatan, 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 ambivalent relations between the text and its readers, 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 inappropriate 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 indefinably 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 intertexts 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 reciprocally 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,

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Defaux, Rigolot) have attempted to read it ironically 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 undercut one another. Although the letter inscribes extratextual associations (e.g., humanist learning, Latinate diction) and ideological traces (hierarchy, legitimate marriage and paternity, established religious values, and the obedience of sons to fathers), the meeting with Panurge is a fictional challenge to the official ideology represented by the letter. Panurge’s essential role in Pantagruel is to be the trickster, the carnivalesque reverser of hierarchies, and, in sum, the instrument of Rabelais’s challenge to dominant ideologies, established hierarchies and authorities, 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 consultations with the diviners, and the legal, medical, and religious authorities, are polyvalent texts susceptible of being plurally read. For example, the Praise of Debts must be obliquely read as a satirical 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 noblemen 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 Panurge’s vision of the cosmic harmony of a world of borrowing and lending. This duplicitous text contains what Bakhtin has termed “doublevoiced discourse,” which serves the character who is speaking and the refracted intention of the author.

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Italy

Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, L’oeuvre de Franc¸ois Rabelais et la culture populaire au moyen aˆge et sous la Renaissance, trans. Andre´e Robel (Paris: Gallimard, 1970); M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Jerome Schwartz, Irony and Ideology: Structures of Subversion in Rabelais (Cambridge: 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 publications (1532), the editions of Manardi and Cuspidius, draw on this erudition: the Roman legal texts reproduce earlier Italian editions; the medical 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 macaronic epic but also of novellisti like Masuccio and probably Boccaccio. His language in Pantagruel 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 medieval 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 witnessed 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 excavating 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 abandoned his own project and instead published an edition of Marliani’s new Topographia, with corrections based on his own notes and with a nationalistic 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 Brasavola) and by sea to Pesaro. Rabelais and his patron renewed contact with academic circles in Rome, notably Paolo Giovio and a group of neoLatin 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 allegiance to du Bellay. Although his patron left Rome secretly in late February, Rabelais probably 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 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 Langey’s attempts to make the new province secure and to relieve famine. This example probably influenced the account of the fortification of Corinth 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 contact with the neo-Latin poet and magistrate in Chambe´ry, Jean de Boyssonne´, who wrote poems on the early death of Rabelais’s natural infant son, The´odule, and on the death in Turin of Langey’s wife (and Rabelais’s patient) Anne de Cre´qui. 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 assisted 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 Sciomachie, was published in Lyon, drawing on the recent royal entry to Lyon and on a contemporary Florentine newsletter. This important piece of writing highlights du Bellay’s successful promotion 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

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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 evidence of Rabelais’s role as royal propagandist. Rabelais’s five books and minor works reveal the breadth of his reading of Italian fiction (especially Francesco Colonna, whom he translates in the Fifth Book), short stories, mock epics and humanist polygraphs, and Platonists. The increasing 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 acquire benefices, and to be absolved from apostasy, besides requests from his own natural children 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 Renaissance art (see the comic views of Bernard Lardon in 4BK 11). Readings: Victor Louis Bourrilly, Guillaume Du Bellay, Seigneur de Langey, 1491–1543 (Paris, 1905); V.-L. Bourrilly ed., Rabelais, Lettres e´crites d’Italie (Paris, 1910); R. A. Cooper, Rabelais et l’Italie (Geneva: 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 sie`cle, special number, ER 33 (1998): 299– 325; R. A. Cooper, “Les lectures italiennes de Rabelais: une mise au point,” ER 37 (1999): 25–49; Robert Marichal, “Le dernier se´jour de Rabelais a` Rome,” Congre`s de Tours et Poitiers de l’Association Guillaume 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 theologian, 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 theologians in general. Rabelais ensures that Janotus’s speech in chapter 19 will be pointless by having Gargantua return the bells beforehand (18). Janotus is lazy, interested only in his material comforts, 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., theologians are no smarter than Gargantua’s mare). Janotus’s speech violates every rule of Ciceronian 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 habet 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 reference, or an in-joke that would have been quite clear to Rabelais’s intended readers. Ge´rard Defaux has tried to identify Janotus with the Sorbonne syndic Noe¨l Be´da, already lampooned in P 7, but the more important emphasis is on comedy. Janotus is not just despicable and inept—he is hilariously funny, and at the beginning of chapter 20 the heartiest laughter anywhere in Rabelais is the reaction of Ponocrates and Eude´mon to his speech. Like many a Molie`re 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 consummate 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 Bragmardo in the Limelight (Gargantua, ch. 19),” FR 72 (1998): 229–37; Ge´rard Defaux, “Rabelais et les cloches de Notre-Dame,” ER 9 (1971): 1–28. Barbara C. Bowen

JEWS Rabelais’s novels display definite familiarity 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 characters often mention Jewish law and kabbalists, Massoretes, and Marranes. Gargantua’s humanist program admonishes the study of Hebrew, also advising visits of Talmudists’ and kabbalists’ works (P 8). The allusions to the Jewish 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 circumcision (3BK 18), jokes about the rules of kosher 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 Jewish groups named most often are the kabbalists and the Massoretes. The kabbala, an ancient oral tradition claiming 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. However, in the fourteenth century, the kabbala took the Jewish communities by storm, and interest in this new discipline spread throughout the Christian world in the sixteenth. When introducing hermetic terms that belong to the speculative kabbala, such as Belima, Ruach, and Cheli, Rabelais’s text echoes the respect found for this mystical discipline in Reuchlin’s De arte Cabalistica, or Pico de la Mirandola’s Heptaplus. The tone, however, is mocking for the practical kabbala, which dallied in magic and astrology, and took advantage of credulous people. This dynamic 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 revealed text, both the vocalic and consonantal structure (diacritic signs, divisions into sections, etc.). The grammarians who took care of codifying this structure, particularly infralinear vo-

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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 immense 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 Hebrew language. His allusions to Rabbi Kimhi de Narbonne and Rabbi Ibn Ezra show that Rabelais was familiar with the work, or role, of these erudite commentators. Readings: Michel Bastiaensen, “L’he´breu chez Rabelais,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire (1968); David Morris, “The Place of Jewish Law and Tradition in the Work of Franc¸ois Rabelais,” ER 15 (1963); Gershom Scholem, Les grands courants de la mystique juive (Paris: Payot, 1983); Ilana Zinguer, ed., L’he´breu au temps de la Renaissance (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992). Katia Campbell

JUDICIARY Rabelais launched a caustic critique 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 repeatedly refer to legal occupations such as judges, lawyers, or other judiciary occupations. From Judge Bridoye (3BK 39–43), who rendered 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, economic 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 offices to the new “robin” class in order to replenish his coffers. For this reason, the judiciary bureaucracy grew rapidly during the first half of the sixteenth century. For example, in 1546, a Venetian ambassador in Paris wrote that “judicial offices are unlimited and augment everyday: law-

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yers of the court in even the smallest village, tax receivers, treasurers, counselors, presidents of courts of justice, ‘maıˆtres des requeˆtes’ . . . of which half of them would suffice.” Corruption among the diverse professions of justice became so prevalent in the sixteenth century that Rabelais found in them an easy target. From the Pantagruel (1532) to the Fifth Book (1564), we see a progressive increase in the portrayal of the justice system and its administrators. The best known example is undoubtedly the episode 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 expression (“the dice of judgments”) was a wellknown pun at the time Rabelais wrote his Third Book. As usual, Rabelais incorporates the sociolinguistic practices of his time into his novel. Yet there is more than a simple wordplay in this incident, for Rabelais extends his critique to attack 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 required 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 “Grippeminaudie`re” 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 Rabelais’s mockery of the judicial system sheds light on his observations. The venality of lawyers had reached new heights, and complaints of corruption were louder than ever. To give an example of such a contentious issue, the royal administration created a new judiciary profession in order to expedite judgments of common law. These presidial judges instated by Henry II represented 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 extraordinary power given to the presidial judges— convicted individuals had no recourse for appeal—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 Fre`re Jean and Panurge find themselves in front of Grippe-Minaud. The absence of Pantagruel in this episode enables the presidial judge to consider our two companions as vagabonds and therefore subject to common law. They are indicted 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 reserved 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 judicial references directly from compilations of judiciary loci communes, especially the Communes juris sententiae by Bellonus, the Lexicon by Albericus, the Speculum judiciale by Durand, and the De nobilitate by Tiraqueau. Judicial expressions 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 dissimulated behind adages, glosses, and other legal aphorisms. 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 mocking references to the judicial process and the legal 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, Pantagruelism, and the Unity of Rabelais’ Tiers Livre,” ER

Juste, Franc¸ois 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, FRANC ¸ OIS (fl. 1524–47) Printer/ bookseller in Lyon who appears to have been Rabelais’s printer of choice for Pantagruel and

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Gargantua, 1535–42. Juste worked from 1543 with his son-in-law Pierre de Tours, who also printed Rabelais. Reading: Y. de la Perrie`re, Supple´ment provisoire a` la bibliographie lyonnaise du Pre´sident Baudrier, pt. 1, fols. 85–116 (Paris: Bibliothe`que 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 Splendor), are both medieval. Kabbala is also a highly literary form of mysticism, focusing on letters and language. For example, the kabbalist practice 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 specifically Christian kabbala sparked an interest that became increasingly widespread among the humanists. Like other forms of mysticism, kabbala’s ultimate 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 followed Pico’s lead in focusing on kabbala. He included its study as a necessary part of the humanist 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 Rabelais 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 importantly the celebration held before they set out includes 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, perceived as the fundamental event of Jewish history, was the ultimate symbol of their mystical experience of the divine. On the voyage Pantagruel 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 maintained that there were three levels of soul—nefesh, 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 human and humanist knowledge to prepare himself for the oracle. Readings: G. Mallary Masters, Rabelaisian Dialectic and the Platonic-Hermetic Tradition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1969); Sheila J. Rabin, “The Qabbalistic Spirit in Gargantua and Pantagruel,” Voices in Translation, ed. Deborah SinnreichLevi 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. Rabelais has no single term for “knowledge.” Rather, he uses various terms that refer to different dimensions of cognition. His most general

Knowledge term for knowledge and learning is le savoir. By la science (Latin scientia) he and his contemporaries usually mean knowledge of a theoretical, abstract kind, such as law or mathematics, as opposed to l’art (Latin ars), which is knowledge of a more practical, applied kind, such as medicine, military skills, agriculture, architecture, painting, or divination. La philosophie tends to be an umbrella category for investigations of all human and natural phenomena, while la doctrine is usually the teaching of a particular philosophical school or sect, especially an ancient one. Certain junctures in Rabelais’s diegesis address the question of knowledge with particular force: Gargantua’s letter urging his son Pantagruel 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 recourse to divination and other methods in order to discover if he should marry (3BK); the encounters with unknown peoples on the voyage to the oracle of the Bottle Goddess (4BK). But even outside these episodes, the question of knowledge 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 subjects.) No single concept or theory of knowledge emerges unchallenged, though some are represented as particularly prestigious, such as the assumption that “science” leads to wisdom and scientia to sapientia: both Pantagruel and Gargantua 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 increasingly questioned later in the century by the likes of Michel de Montaigne and Pierre Charron, had been given its most celebrated formulation 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 Gargantua quotes to Pantagruel: “knowledge [science]

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without conscience is but ruin to the soul” (P 8). In other words, it is dangerous to separate knowledge 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 acquiring knowledge are explored, in both comic and serious registers, often in both simultaneously. 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 contain. 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 contact in our everyday lives. This Platonic and Neoplatonic route to knowledge is often described in a way that lends it prestige and credibility, especially 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 Rabelais’s day: knowledge in the intellect arises from experience, from data supplied by the senses—how else can the infant Gargantua discover the best objects with which to wipe his bottom (G 12)? Rather more unsettling is the unresolved skepticism, the doubt about the possibility 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 always knowing and always learning, whether from a clot or a pot?” (3BK 16). Readings: Terence Cave, Pre´-Histoires: Textes trouble´s au seuil de la modernite´ (Geneva: Droz, 1999); Alban J. Krailsheimer, Rabelais and the Franciscans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963); Jean Plattard, 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 puzzles and fascinates: it evokes “the sphinx or the chimera, a monster with a hundred heads, a hundred 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, including Jean de Meung, Jean Lemaire de Belges, Franc¸ois Villon, and Cle´ment Marot. He was also greatly influenced by many classical authors (especially Lucian, Plutarch, and Pliny the Elder) 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, music, military science, navigation, and zoology, and all kinds of cultural and social practices (Saine´an). His insatiable thirst for words has contributed to the romantic myth of the intoxicated genius. Although the poet’s “debauchery” took place in his imagination, readers are still dazzled today by the power of a language that seizes and confounds you, intoxicates and disgusts you (SainteBeuve 1876). As a writer, Rabelais paid a great deal of attention to the formal aspects of his books. He corrected the text of the various editions published 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 etymological 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 rediscovery of Plato’s Cratylus (4BK 37). This does not mean that the Church Fathers’ exegetic tradition 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 humanist and a poet, Rabelais tackled some of the issues that Isidore of Seville had discussed in his Etymologies. He translated and parodied this etymological obsession in his exuberant linguistic creations. Some key passages of Rabelais’s polyglotist 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 Ciceronian propaganda. He gropes for a “cultural mediation” between high and low cultures, and he exhibits a fascinating mixture of rival, polyphonic voices (Bakhtin 1968; Cave 2001). Rabelais’s stunning mastery of linguistic functions 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 communication between themselves); metalinguistic (they point up the “logic” of their arguments). Above all, through all sorts of echoes of rhythms and sounds, they demonstrate their ability 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 social order. The most antisocial, thoroughly “other” pattern of life, based on death and degradation, 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 threatening aspects of political and religious repression. Rabelais knew the virtue of what Latin rhetoricians called festivitas—a mirthful linguistic humor that was powerfully used by Thomas More and Erasmus, two humanists whom Rabelais greatly admired. In a similar spirit, Rabelais creates his narrative persona, Master Alcofrybas, 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 humanist 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 “drinkingtogether” 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 communion of minds engaged in linguistic conviviality. “The convivium alone rebuilds limbs, revives 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” (Ficino 51). In one of the last episodes of the Fourth Book

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(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 Rabelais’s deep-seated interest in language theory throughout his four books. After staging a linguistic comedy in praise of “natural language” (P 6–13), critiquing unwarranted symbolic interpretations (G 9–10), and exposing the arbitrariness 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 compelling transmutation. Alcofrybas, alias Rabelais, leads us festively, through his cornucopian meditation on language, to the problematic Word of the Divine Bottle (5BK). Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968); Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Terence Cave, Pre´histoires II. Langues e´trange`res et troubles e´conomiques au XVIe sie`cle (Geneva: Droz, 2001); Marie-Luce Demonet, Les voix du signe. Nature et origine 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’e´criture (Paris: Nizet, 1974); Mireille Huchon, Rabelais grammairien. De l’histoire du texte aux proble`mes d’authenticite´, ER 16 (Geneva: Droz, 1981); Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” Selected Writings III: Poetry of Grammar 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; Franc¸ois Moreau, Les images dans l’œuvre de Rabelais, 3 vols. (Paris: SEDES, 1982); Franc¸ois Rigolot, Les langages de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1972, 1996); Franc¸ois Rigolot, “Cratylisme et Pantagruelisme: Rabelais et le statut du signe,” ER 13 (1976): 115–32; Franc¸ois Rigolot, “Se´miotique de la sentence et du proverbe,” ER 14 (1978): 277–86; “Enigme et prophe´tie: les langages de l’herme´tisme chez Rabelais,” Œuvres et critiques 11.1

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(1986): 37–47; Franc¸ois Rigolot, “The Highs and Lows of Structuralist Readings: Rabelais, Pantagruel, chapters 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 Saine´an, La langue de Rabelais, 2 vols. (Paris, 1922–23; Geneva: Slatkine, 1976); Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, “Rabelais,” Causeries du lundi. Œuvres, e´d. Maxime Leroy, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1956); Charles-Augustin SainteBeuve, Tableau historique et critique de la poe´sie franc¸aise et the´aˆtre franc¸ais au XVIe sie`cle, 2 vols. (Paris: A. Lemerre, 1876); Paul J. Smith, Voyage et e´criture: Etude sur le Quart livre de Rabelais, ER 19 (Geneva: Droz, 1987); Leo Spitzer, “Le pre´tendu re´alisme de Rabelais,” Modern Philology 37 (1940): 139– 50; Jean Starobinski, “Note sur Rabelais et le langage,” Tel Quel 15 (1963): 79–81; Tonino Tornitore, Interpretazioni novecentesche dell’episodio delle parolles gele´es,” ER 18 (1985): 170–204; Florence Weinberg, The Wine and the Will (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975); Ve´ronique Zaercher, Le dialogue rabelaisien. Le Tiers livre exemplaire, ER 38 (Geneva: Droz, 2000). Franc¸ois Rigolot

LANTERNOIS Inhabitants of an island frequently referred to but ultimately not visited by Pantagruel in the Fourth Book. The fictional Lanternland did not originate with Rabelais. Inspired by the aerial city of Lamptown in Lucian’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 Thalame`ge encounters during its voyage a ship of fellow Frenchmen. They are returning to Saintonge from a general 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 individuals who were choosing to interpret the Bible for themselves without benefit of Church doctrine. Linking lanterne to Lateran and hence to a

contemporary religious conflict is but one example of Rabelais’s wordplay with the term. By not actually depicting Lanternland Rabelais highlights the etymological significance of the name. The word lanterne carried at least five different, indeed opposing, connotations during the sixteenth century. Lanterne might signify a type of toy lantern that corresponds well to the Rabelaisian sense of play and distortion. A vain or unimportant 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 connotation, 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 common expressions of the sixteenth century, including radouber la lanterne, meaning to gossip. The verb lanterner means to make foolish or silly remarks 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 acknowledging Erasmus: the Adages discuss the expression “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 addition to the Rabelaisian vocabulary. Such a reference in the narrative to intriguing yet ultimately unseen lands emphasizes the vast quantity of unfamiliar areas and peoples awaiting discovery. On the textual level, these allusions underscore the Fourth Book’s open-endedness and lack of closure. Readings: Mireille Huchon, “Arche´ologie du Ve`me Livre,” ER 21 (1988): 19–28; Georges Matore´, Le vocabulaire et la socie´te´ du XVIe`me sie`cle (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 selfenclosed body of knowledge open only to a professional e´lite which it has since become. Rabelais would have been able to assume that his readership would understand and appreciate the

Law legal learning (and the dependent comedy) deployed 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 philosophical, 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 understanding 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 Orle´ans (in P 5, the giant visits the legal faculties of several French universities, but it is from Orle´ans that he graduates with the title of Maıˆtre). 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 studiosissimus; Andre´ Tiraqueau and Amaury Bouchard, both great legal humanists to whom Rabelais was to dedicate learned works, were part of his early intellectual circle in the Franciscan house of Puy-Saint-Martin at Fontenay-leComte. 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 explicitly used for Guillaume le Rouille’s On Justice 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 accretions and to restore the texts of Roman law to their original purity. The comic legal trial between Baisecul and Humevesne (9, bis) is a multifaceted episode that mocks the Italian juridical tradition of Bartolus of Sassofarrato (1314– 57) and Franciscus Accursius (1182–1260), and

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the sterility of pro et contra debate seems to explore contemporary legal issues over the autonomy of the university versus ecclesiastical authority. But above all the concern is with the ways in which God-given language is able to obfuscate as much as to communicate, to complicate a problem as much as to clarify it. Rhetorical twisting of meaning (particularly by lawyers) 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 unmerited acquittals. Both Baisecul and Humevesne almost say something sensible, and the giant comically out-argues both. Three times logical discourse is employed to say absolutely nothing, and the giant is credited with the wisdom of Solomon. 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 resolve Panurge’s marriage dilemma. Bridoye is unable to come to the banquet; he has been summoned to account for his judgment in a recent case. Given that Bridoye first appears immediately 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 commonplaces, whose comic and literal misapplication would have been appreciated by most cultivated 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 permitted 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 humble 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 humanism.

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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 Bridoye in the Tiers Livre de Pantagruel,” ER 5 (1964): 175–95; Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London: Duckworth 1979). John Lewis

LEFE`VRE 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 acknowledged 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, Lefe`vre was exploring the mystical side of theology. He increasingly devoted himself to the study of the Bible, and in 1509, inspired by Erasmus, he wrote a commentary on five different Latin versions of the Psalms. In 1512, he published a groundbreaking commentary on Saint Paul’s Epistles that prefigured the theology of the Reform. Lefe`vre moved to Meaux in 1521 at the invitation of his friend Guillaume Bric¸onnet, the bishop. There Lefe`vre led the Circle of Meaux, a group devoted to the evangelical study and preaching of biblical texts. In 1523, he published a French translation of the New Testament which drew the fire of the Sorbonne until Francis I intervened. Unfortunately, the king’s imprisonment in Spain gave the Sorbonne the opportunity to demand the dispersion of the Meaux Circle in 1525 on grounds of heresy. Threatened with arrest, Lefe`vre fled to Strasbourg. When Francis returned, Lefe`vre was appointed keeper of the royal library at Blois and tutor to the king’s youngest son, which allowed Lefe`vre to continue his work on a French translation of the Old Testament which appeared in 1530. That same year, Lefe`vre went to live at the little court of Marguerite at Ne´rac where he remained until his death. Rabelais was strongly influenced by Lefe`vre’s (and others’) emphasis on studying biblical sources and his rejection of medieval scholarship. Pantagruel’s education includes Greek

and Hebrew in order that he might daily read and study the Old and New Testaments in the original. Both M. A. Screech and Donald Frame argue convincingly for Rabelais as an evangelical. The character of Hippothade´e in the Third Book is thought to refer to Lefe`vre. Readings: Guy Bedouelle, Lefe`vre d’Etaples (Geneva: Droz, 1976); Donald Frame, Franc¸ois Rabelais (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977); Philip Edgcumbe Hughes, Lefe`vre (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984); Augustin Renaudet, Humanisme et Renaissance: Dante, Pe´trarque, Standonck, Erasme, Lefe`vre d’Etaples, Marguerite de Navarre, Rabelais, Guichardin, Giordano Bruno (Geneva: Droz, 1958); Michael A. Screech, L’e´vange´lisme de Rabelais: aspects de la satire religieuse au XVIe sie`cle (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 documents, are presumably lost. Among the extant works are two letters in Latin sent to the humanistic luminaries Guillaume Bude´ and Erasmus, a letter in French addressed to Rabelais’s friend Antoine Hullot, a verse epistle intended for the rhe´toriqueur Jean Bouchet, four dedicatory epistles 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 primarily 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 me´dicales to Andre´ Tiraqueau, to support both serious and parodic readings of Gargantua’s famous programmatic letter to Pantagruel, where the son is exhorted to take advantage of the dawn of humanism and become a veritable “abyss of knowledge” (“abysme de

Lists science”). This letter on education has long been the target of critical attention, eliciting speculation as to whether it indirectly attacks the naı¨vete´ 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 emulation 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 resorting to language adornments.” The decade between 1530 and 1540, during which most of Rabelais’s letters were written, witnesses a dispute pertaining to the epistolary style between the followers of Nosopon, an Erasmian caricature who advocates word-for-word borrowing from Cicero, and the Erasmians who seek to adapt classical rhetoric to the specific needs of their times. Situated at the very crossroads of this debate, Rabelais exhibits a kind of linguistic schizophrenia, since his epistolary practices vary according to whether he is writing in Latin or French. His neoLatin correspondence, strongly epideictic, features 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 considered to be typically Ciceronian by his contemporaries, such as the conjunction “cum” at the beginning of the letter, the locution “etiam atque etiam,” or the measured “tum . . . tum.” The dedicatory epistles are also dominated by the demonstrative genre, involving praise of either the work to follow or the dedicatee. If Rabelais willingly adopts the Ciceronian style in his Latin letters, 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-

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toria) or the “letter from Rome” according to Fritz Neubert (Romsbrief), seem to be more strictly factual and stylistically austere, emphasizing the eyewitness or earwitness testimony of the writer. It is thanks to this economy of means, however, that we discover the rhetorical implications of these missives: they are destined to maintain the illusion of Rabelais’s importance in Rome in the eyes of his patron, whom he repeatedly plies with requests for money since, as Richard Cooper has shown, he often retranscribes 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 (epistola jocosa), a typically French genre according to Erasmus. The epistle shares numerous affinities 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 superlative in the address “baillif du baillif des baillifz,” and the disparagement of the letter-writer in the signature: “your humble festivities organizer, servant, and friend” (“[v]ostre humble architriclin, serviteur et amy”). Readings: Charles Be´ne´, “Rabelais et l’art e´pistolaire dans le Pantagruel,” Recherches et travaux 26 (1984): 101–14; Richard Cooper, Rabelais et l’Italie, ER 24 (Geneva: Droz, 1991); Richard Cooper, “Rabelais’s Neo-Latin Writings,” Neo-Latin and the Vernacular in Renaissance France, ed. Grahame Castor and Terence Cave (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); Claude La Charite´, La rhe´torique e´pistolaire de Rabelais (Quebec: E´ditions Nota bene, coll. “Litte´rature(s),” 2003); Fritz Neubert, “Franc¸ois Rabelais’ Briefe,” Zeitschrift fu¨r franzo¨sische Sprache und Literatur 71 (1961): 154–85. Claude La Charite´

LIMOUSIN SCHOOLBOY See Ecolier Limousin LISTS One of the most gratuitous and provocative comic devices in Rabelais’s repertoire. His pages are crowded with obstinate enumerations of the most varied and improbable items including food, games, books, boats, hot springs, snakes, ancestors, and epithets. Sometimes these lists have a satiric function, as when the pain-

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staking inventory of 217 children’s games (G 22) mimes the tedium of Gargantua’s first, prehumanist 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 lexical proliferation. For some readers, Rabelais’s verbal cascades recall the vertiginous variation exercises in Erasmus’s rhetorical manual De copia. From this perspective, the pointless luxuriance of lists enacts the Renaissance consciousness of the hollow abundance of language. The itemizing, anatomizing style of the list also offers a powerful critique of narrative coherence. This tendency can be seen in the description of Quaresmeprenant from the Fourth Book. Xenomanes anatomizes the monster in a series of lists enumerating his internal and external features as well as his “contenences” or mannerisms. The consequence of such enumeration is to dislocate the syntax or coordination of the text, leaving only isolated, interchangeable images. 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 immobilizes the voyage in a prolonged calm at sea. Having satisfied his hunger and having thus neutralized, according to Aristotle, the danger of his saliva for venomous animals, Eusthenes lists ninety-eight such animals in imperfect alphabetical order in two parallel columns whose disposition varies from edition to edition according to the size of print and page. Despite Fre`re 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 Rabelais 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 describes 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 reading 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,” Re´pertoire II (Paris: Minuit, 1964); Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Alfred Glauser, Rabelais cre´ateur (Paris: Nizet, 1966). Eric MacPhail

LOUP GAROU “Werewolf,” a cruel and arrogant giant, leader of three hundred giants in the army of King Anarche, defeated by Pantagruel 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 (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 famous prayer in which he vows to spread the Gospel 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 brotherly love in Utopie. Readings: Jean Ce´ard, “L’histoire e´coute´e aux portes de la le´gende: Rabelais, les fables de Turpin et les exemples de Saint Nicolas,” Etudes seizie´mistes offertes a` Monsieur le Professeur V.-L. Saulnier par plusieurs de ses anciens doctorants, THR 177 (Geneva: Droz, 1980); Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven, CT: Yale University 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 influence on Erasmus’s Praise of Folly and More’s Utopia. Lucian’s presence in Rabelais is documented as early as in chapter 1 of Pantagruel, where the narrator refers to the Cynic’s Icaromenippus to explain how the race of the giants had survived the deluge. In general, Lucian’s influence seems rather

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weak in the first two books, the most remarkable episodes being Episte´mon’s descent into the underworld, 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 monastery 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 erudite, 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 fundamental 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 Timon and Icaromenippus (4BK)—seems to illustrate 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 De´fense et illustration de la langue franc¸aise) and subsequently outdoing his model. Whereas the message 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 information (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 accepted blindly. Lucian can therefore be considered a milestone in the development of Rabela-

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isian hermeneutics and his idea of “how to write history.” Readings: Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1998); Christiane Lauvergnat-Gagnie`re, Lucien de Samosate et le lucianisme en France au XVIe sie`cle (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 franc¸aise (Paris: Champion, 1984); Marcel Tetel, “Rabelais et Lucien: de deux rhe´toriques,” Rabelais’s Incomparable Book (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986). Bernd Renner

LUTHER, MARTIN (1483–1546) A German Church reformer whose ideas were much disputed 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 pending. The Sorbonne previewed its intentions in a determinatio in 1521, before condemning Luther’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 surprising 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 forbade 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 tradition, 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 “luthe´riennes,” particularly before the Council of Trent. Luther’s schismatic stance quickly became apparent, 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 theological titles they censored appeared a couple of literary works considered suspect. They were authored 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 between Luther and Erasmus,” CLS 14.4 (December): 306–20; Will G. Moore, La re´forme allemande et la litte´rature franc¸aise. Recherches sur la notorie´te´ de Luther en France (Strasbourg: Faculte´ de Lettres de Strasbourg, 1930). Amy C. Graves

LYON Located on two navigable rivers, the Rhoˆne and the Saoˆne, near the cultural centers of northern Italy, southern Germany, and Geneva, 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, assured Lyon’s ties with the rest of Europe. Nonetheless, 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’Aumoˆne ge´ne´ral, was founded in 1534 to prevent these volatile situations. Lyon arguably surpassed Paris in the importance of its printing industry, as censorship was less to be feared here. In this period, Lyon had neither a university nor a Parlement, but rather groups of relatively independent humanist scholars and authors who were extraordinarily productive. Among them were Cle´ment

Lyon Marot, Maurice Sce`ve, Louise Labe´, and Etienne Dolet. Because of the numerous industries, silk and printing being the foremost, artisans gathered to create carnivalesque organizations such as mock courts and abbeys of misrule. Rabelais entered this lively atmosphere when he became a doctor at the city’s Hoˆtel-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

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works in the relatively repressive environments of other French cities. Readings: Franc¸oise Bayard, Vivre a` Lyon sous l’Ancien Re´gime (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 University Press, 1993), especially Richard Cooper, “Humanism 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 ` (1469–1527) A MACHIAVELLI, NICCOLO 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 service, and his more substantial Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy (Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio), circulated widely in manuscript, 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 Rabelais might have conceived the walls of Paris chapter of Pantagruel (TLF 11; P 15) on reading these lines, Verdun-L. Saulnier identified Plutarch as the likely source and pointed out that the exchange made it into the innumerable chapbooks 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 “antiMachiavellian” 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, Antimachiavelli, ed. Gian Franco Berardi (Rome: Edition Riuniti, 1984); Jonathan Haslam, No Virtue like Necessity: Re-

alist Thought in International Relations since Machiavelli (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Machiavelli, Il principe, ed. Federico Chabod and Luigi Firpo (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, (Turin: 1961); Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, ed. Gennaro Sasso and Giorgio 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 De´claration. 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 dominated by a vast forest filled with temples, obelisques, 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 Macreons 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 Macrobe”), reveals that this land of ancient wisdom is also the island of death. The heroes and demons 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 produced in nature at the deaths of great men, including that of Guillaume du Bellay in 1543 (4BK 27). During this same discussion, Pantagruel relates the tale of the Egyptian pilot Thamous 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 Macreons highlights the value of classical wisdom.

Major, John 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 between writing and reading and the interpretation of signs. Readings: Alice Fiola Berry, The Charm of Catastrophe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979). Douglas L. Boudreau

MACROBE A fictional character in the Fourth Book, old Macrobe welcomes Pantagruel and his companions to the island of the Macreons after the storm at sea. The Brief Declaration offers the following definition: “Macrobe, the long-lived man,” and the narrator of the Rabelaisian tale presents him as the “burgomaster” 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 explanation is that natural disasters occur at the moment that demons and heroes die. In French, Macrobe’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 transmission 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 influence 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 published in the sixteenth century testify to the broad circulation of his works. Even in the fifteenth century, Franc¸ois 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 contemporaries, Rabelais was quite familiar with Macrobius,

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whose Saturnalia he mentions at the end of chapter 3 of Gargantua. The name Macrobius also appears in chapter 42b (OC 1678) of the Fifth Book. Readings: Diane Desrosiers-Bonin, “Macrobe et les aˆmes he´roı¨ques (Rabelais, Quart Livre, chapters 25 to 28),” RAR 11.3 (1987): 211–21; Diane DesrosiersBonin, “Le Songe de Scipion et le commentaire de Macrobe a` la Renaissance,” Le songe a` la Renaissance (Saint-E´tienne; France: Institut d’e´tudes de la Renaisˆ ge classique, 1990); C. R. Ligota, sance et de l’A “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, Commentary 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 (Mu¨nster: Aschendorff, 1916). Diane Desrosiers-Bonin

MAJOR (MAIORIS, MAIR), JOHN (1467– 1550) Scholastic logician and theologian. Major 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 Nominalistterminist logic at the Colle`ge de Montaigu in Paris (1496–1517 and 1526–31), spending the intervening 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 Reportationes of Johannes Duns Scotus (1518). Rabelais and other humanists were critical of his scholastic methodology and style (P 7, where Major is said to have authored De modo faciendi boudinos [How to Make Sausages]). But his works manifest creative, independent thinking on questions of authority, economics, and morality. Although a staunch critic of humanist-based curriculum, in 1529 he wrote to Noe¨l Be´da and Pierre Tem-

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peˆte that scholastic theologians had too long ignored 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 Sua´rez 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 Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); John Durkan and James Kirk, University of Glasgow (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 1977); James K. Farge, Biographical Register of Paris Doctors of Theology, 1500–1536, n. 329 (Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980); Louis Vereecke, “Mariage et sexualite´ au de´clin du moyen-aˆge,” Vie spirituelle, Supple´ment, 56.14 (1961): 199–225; F. Vosman, Giovanni Maior (1467–1550) et la sua morale economica intorno al contratto di societa` (Rome: Pontificia Universitas Lateranensis, 1985). James K. Farge

MARDIGRAS Protector and idol of the Chitterlings or Andouilles in their eternal war against Quaresmeprenant; one in a long line of monsters that people the Fourth Book. In the incarnation of a grotesquely described winged pig, attributed to the fact that all sausages are made of pork, Mardigras flies over the battlefield at the height of the mock battle between Fre`re 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 Chitterlings, the sausages’ idolatry being thus directed toward an image of the self. In contrast to its ambivalent offspring, the monster seems to represent 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 papimanes and papefigues would serve as an example 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 reformers; 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 contemporary ecclesiastical rites, in which the flesh—in true Shrovetide fashion, as Carnival was known as “Charnage” (“flesh”) in medieval French literature—triumphs over the spirit of the ceremony. The elevation of “mustard” to the position of the Savior’s “real” and “royal blood” clearly shows the contemptible reification of sacred ceremonies. Rabelais had already presented a model for the Cena (4BK 1), in which the preparations for the fleet’s departure are completed by a ceremony dominated by the Holy Scriptures, reminiscent 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 Rabelais’s, goes far beyond the relatively timid reformation 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 suggest, it had contributed to the division of Christianity. Rabelais exploits this play on words at the beginning of the episode (4BK 35) and announces its biting religious satire, directed at Catholics and Protestants alike and capped by Mardigras’s timely appearance. Readings: Edwin M. Duval, “La messe, la ce`ne, et le voyage sans fin du Quart Livre,” Rabelais en son demi-mille´naire, ed. J. Ce´ard, and J.-Cl. Margolin, ER 21 (Geneva: Droz, 1983); Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s

Marot, Cle´ment Carnival (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais, chapter 9 (London: Duckworth, 1979). Bernd Renner

MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE (1492–1549) Scholars of the French Renaissance have wondered 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 Rabelais dedicated the Third Book to Marguerite, inviting her to come down from her “manoir divin,” 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 (Salminen 111). But did the relationship go beyond patronage? Traditionally, many scholars have been surprised by the dedication of the Third Book to Marguerite, since they see major differences and disagreements between the spiritual, feminist Marguerite 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 include their sympathy with the Reform, and particularly 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 (Heptame´ron 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

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spiritual thinker and Rabelais as much more oriented 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 Rabelais 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 Narrative Structure in Rabelais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Abel Lefranc, “Etude sur Rubelais,” Oeuvres, vol. 3 (Paris: Champion, 1922); Renja Salminen, ed. Heptame´ron,TFL 516 (Geneva: Droz, 1999): Marcel Tetel, Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptame´ron: Themes, Language and Structure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1973); Elizabeth Chesney Zegura and Marcel Tetel, Rabelais Revisited (New York: Twayne/Macmillan, 1993). Cathleen M. Bauschatz

MAROT, CLE´MENT (1496?–1544) French poet of the early Renaissance whose embattled relationship with the Sorbonne, evangelical leanings, taste for Erasmus, and satiric verve invite comparisons with his friend and fellow humanist Rabelais. Praised by Boileau for his “e´le´gant badinage” (Art poe´tique 1.96), the poet seems on one hand to build upon the legacy of his father Jean Marot, a rhe´toriqueur renowned for his exaggerated wordplay. On the other hand, the sharp-edged social, political, and religious commentary 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, despite the royal protection he enjoyed early in his career as the king’s valet de chambre, Marot almost certainly crossed paths with Rabelais on a number of occasions: at the court of Rene´e de France in Ferrara, for example, a haven for Reformers where Marot sought exile during Rabelais’s southward journey to Rome with Jean du Bellay in 1535, and at a banquet of humanists

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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 Adolescence Clementine, suggesting a “close collaboration” between the two authors (Defaux 1997: 404) (see also Evangelism). Readings: Ge´rard Defaux, Rabelais agonistes: Du rieur au prophe`te (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Ge´rard Defaux, Rabelais, Marot, Montaigne: l’e´criture comme presence (Paris: Champion-Slatkine, 1987); Donald Frame, Rabelais. A Study (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977); Claude A. Mayer, Cle´ment 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). Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

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 female authors over the nature and status of women. The necessity of marriage for men was also a standard topic for rhetorical pro/contra argumentation practice. As a result, it is difficult to determine to what extent writers’ positions on marriage were influenced by rhetorical conventions. In this cultural context, a number of French and Latin tracts treating marriage were published, including Erasmus’s In Praise of Marriage (1518), Vives’s The Instruction of a Christian 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 subject.

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 marriage” is mentioned within the lengthier discussion of the immortality acquired by having children. 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. Gargantua’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´le`me (G 57). Though living in an abbey, the The´le`mites can “be regularly married” if they so desire, 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 The´le`me marry and live “in devotion 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 personal, the issue is also framed as a larger question 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 rhetorical for/against fashion. Panurge’s desire for companionship, in particular, is contrasted with his fear of being cuckolded by a cruel wife, reflecting an anxiety about the masculine ability to control female sexuality. Rabelais accepts the widespread view that marriage exists for procreation, but like Erasmus, he extends this limited definition to include the possibility of companionship. As a result, marriage need not be considered an impediment to purity and a hindrance to spirituality. If marriage can be for companionship, 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 mon assumption in marriage tracts, marriage can moderate the excesses of male sexuality, although Panurge appears to be incapable of moderating his excesses. Despite these implicit critiques of the institution 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 relation to men in the various discussions of marriage. At the same time, Panurge’s comic excesses, bordering on hysteria, imply a mockery of masculine attitudes toward marriage. Readings: Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: 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 Marriage: 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 discussion 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 frivolouslooking Silenus box, is accessible only to those who through “curiosity” and “frequent meditation break the bone and suck out the marrow”

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(G prol.). Although this metaphor serves as the cornerstone for allegorical readings of Rabelais’s text, it is also undermined by the narrator’s subsequent 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 Rabelais’s Marrow Bone,” MLS 13.2 (1983): 97–104; Fred W. Marshall, “Worrying the Bone Again: The Structure and Significance of the Prologue to Gargantua,” AJFS 24.1 (1987): 3–22; Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, “The Myth of the Sustanficque Mouelle: A Lacanian Perspective on Rabelais’s Use of Language,” Literature and Psychology 34.3 (1988): 1–21. Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

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, Medamothi means “no place” in Greek. Although some scholars have attempted to identify the geographic location of Medamothi, others insist that its name and nature function to discourage any literal or realistic reading of the voyage. Arriving 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 animals which raise fascinating questions about literary and artistic mimesis. The inventory of Pantagruel’s art acquisitions has prompted conflicting interpretations, suggesting either a sudden penchant for “Alexandrian” symbolism on Rabelais’s part or a preclassical taste for idealizing imitation or a demonstration of the autoreferentiality of fiction. In particular, the painting of Platonic ideas purchased by Episte´mon may be understood to parody the Neoplatonic ambition to render the intelligible visible by means of hieroglyphs and other occult symbols. This parody of the utopian impulse to materialize the immaterial 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-

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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 popular 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 ge´ographie 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 e´criture (Geneva: Droz, 1987). Eric MacPhail

MEDICINE Renaissance field of study and profession intimately intertwined with religion and philosophy, selected as an interest by Rabelais 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 destitute likely formed in the future doctor a foundation 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 interpretation of Galenic theory, the medical profession 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 profession in Christian life. The respect for life necessary in the medical field could only be manifested 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 maintenance 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, Rabelais 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 considerable 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 treatise 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 HotelDieu 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 encountered 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 barbersurgeon, 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 sion to take up the pen in a singularly caring act of genius. Presenting his books from the outset as medicine for the very public he could do little to help tangibly as a physician, Rabelais concocts a potion of words with a promise of beneficial healing for all who partake. The allegories are thoroughly 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 intermingled 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 sciences, 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 humanist past, is the whole person—body and soul. Rabelais’s primary medico-philosophical “message” of health calls for moderation, simplicity, and humility 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 profession 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 me´decine, 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 imitations 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

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to combine comedy and dialogue, which marks the menippea’s typical mixture of genres, allowing for a formal framework incorporating philosophical profundity and levity in the same text and thus achieving the Horatian utile dulci mixtum. This syncretism of quasi-incompatible genres is mirrored on the content level by the device of the Menippean paradox: in Rabelais’s case, multiple, often seemingly mutually exclusive, interpretative possibilities that surface especially in the Third and Fourth Books, whose prologues display perhaps the most explicit Lucianic influence. Gargantua displays the timid beginnings of this phenomenon, particularly in the prologue with its emphasis on the paradoxical Silenus figure 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, especially 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 interpretation. Drawing on common sense and sound erudition, he shows how the philosopher Trouillogan’s contradictory answers to the question of Panurge’s marriage (“both” and “neither”) mutually enhance each other, thereby illustrating the menippea’s characteristic concordia oppositorum or union of opposites. The Fourth Book abounds in paradoxical episodes that are henceforth most often combined with another essential Menippean element: the grotesque. Prime examples would be the controversial farces of Dindenault (4BK 6–7) and Basche´ (4BK 12–16), questioning, in our perspective, 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

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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 Menippean 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 authorities, 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 fundamental skepticism provides an epistemological grounding to the plurality of meanings and interpretations, 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. Coleman, 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-Gagnie`re, Lucien de Samosate et le lucianisme en France au XVIe sie`cle: athe´isme et pole´mique (Geneva: Droz, 1988); Bernd Renner, “Du coq-a`-l’aˆne a` la me´nippe´enne: la satire comme forme d’expression litte´raire chez Rabelais” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2000); Andre´ Tournon, “Le paradoxe me´nippe´en dans l’œuvre de Rabelais,” Rabelais en son demi-mille´naire, 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 appears 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 affairs, he was likely best acquainted with mercury as a chemical element used in the medicopharmaceutical community as a powerful ingredient in lotions and ointments destined to treat patients suffering from syphilis. When used extremely 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 empirics and charlatan doctors the element was overused, and mercury treatments acquired connotations 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, symbols of sexual health, Mercury is charged with presenting them the choice of their own axe blade along with one of gold and another of silver, the latter two symbolizing sexual excess and desire. Selecting one’s own blade thus represents moderation in sexual activity and carries the reward of living richly. Opting for one of the other blades carries the penalty of instant death at Mercury’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. Readings: Roland Antonioli, Rabelais et la me´decine, ER 12 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1976); Gilles Henry, Rabelais (Paris: Librairie Acade´mique Perrin, 1988). Lesa Randall

MODERATION (MEDIOCRITAS) Principle of measure and balance promoted by Rabelais in his books as essential for health and contentment in life. Made popular by Galen, whose medical texts Rabelais knew well, this notion of equilibrium encompasses moral and spiritual living but involves the physical as well. Recognition 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 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 return 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 sensibilities 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 amusement. 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 Didactics of Moderation,” EC 32 (1963): 80–86; James S. Hans, The Golden Mean (Albany, NY: State University 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 throughout 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-

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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 foreign coins added further confusion to monetary exchanges. Vilar mentions that eighty types of coin were in circulation even in seventeenthcentury 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 imaginary 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 emergence of credit in the form of bills of exchange, which permitted payment through the balancing of debts and credits without the exchange of actual 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 deception and the creation of paradoxical relations. Zegura 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 economic 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 moneychanger, he managed to secret away five or six

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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 surreptitiously 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 “denier” or small change coin, he did so with such reverence as to make it seem a much more important denomination, actually taking twelve or more deniers as “change.” Although Pantagruel denounces the practice as heresy, Panurge defends himself using the pardoners’ own promise of a hundredfold return against them (P 17). Reversing similar inequalities from the real world which Rabelais inhabited, the underworld Episte´mon visits has popes selling paper and meat pies to earn a meager living and usurers collecting rusty pins and scrap metal just to earn a miserable penny (P 30). As with many enumerations in Rabelais, expressions of monetary value are often indications of the self-referential nature of Rabelais’s texts. For the construction of the Abbey of The´le`me which Gargantua offers in feudal fashion to Fre`re Jean in recognition of his service, Gargantua 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 cultivate a skeptical and informed reader through his constant references to conflicting and indeterminate expressions of value (54). In the prologue to the Third Book, the narrator initially fears that his readers will be offended by the arbitrary nature of his production. Later he realizes that the readership he has cultivated will accept his eccentric production in good faith as he has seen them take good-will, or credit as payment (prologue). In this way Rabelais links his production of fiction with its productive 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 portrayal 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 nature of the sixteenth-century economy in which gold and silver circulated as coins and in the more personalized form of rings. In this incompletely monetary economy, more financially advanced processes such as debt or credit are present 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 functional model of society in which exchanges are based not on the materiality of the signs produced 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 notoriously difficult dispute by determining that a porter 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 productivity in exchange. Dindenault, an insulting and dishonest sheep merchant whom Panurge and the crew of the Thalame`ge 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 livestock “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 for Panurge to throw the sheep purchased overboard, knowing that the nature of sheep is such that the others will follow, eventually taking Dindenault with them as he attempts to save his livestock. 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 equivalent 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 relationships to the point where they are objectified and become “purely instrumental relations,” as Ju¨rgen Habermas describes the effects of money on human interaction (qtd. in Lavatori 1996: p. 140). For the Chiquanous, all social relationships 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 action and piety. When a storm threatens to sink their ship, Panurge, gripped with fear, refuses to assist his comrades but sees money as his salvation. 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 misdirect their adoration to the portrait of a Pope (4BK 50) and whose bishop recommends the forsaking of all occupations for the studying of papal decrees called Decretals (4BK 51). When these Decretals are used as parchment for striking

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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 explains that the Decretals benefit the Papimaniacs with their “aurifluous energy,” which causes hundreds of thousands of “ducatz” to flow from France to Rome each year (4BK 53). Clearly, the exotic world of the Fourth Book with its mysterious 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 characteristic of the transitional nature of the Renaissance episteme. In this sense, Rabelais’s depictions 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 mone´taire de l’Europe (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1954); Jean-Christophe Deberre, “La ge´ne´alogie du pouvoir dans les trois premiers livres de Rabelais,” Litte´rature 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 Rabelais originated, produced a literature filled with monsters and monstrosities, incorporating beliefs evolved largely from Greek and Roman sources, including Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, Livy, Herodotus, 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-

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imal or human, physical or moral malformations, or large size. Aristotle, in the Generation of Animals, 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 geographies and histories, and by early sixteenthcentury thought in general. From Pliny’s Natural History, Rabelais espoused the belief that monstrous races lived in distant, exotic regions of the earth. Herodotus’s detail of the dog-headed cynocephali of Libya appears in the compilation of obscure terms in Rabelais’s Fourth Book, Briefve De´claration: “canibales: a monstrous people 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, Rabelais characterized monsters as members of exotic 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 cultural appetite for oddities within his own narrative. Undeniably, Rabelais exploits and commodifies monsters and monstrosities to fulfill various demonstrative functions, either to gain a readership, to reveal certain abuses, to expose religious or political zealots, or to criticize or oppose his detractors. The monsters and monstrous bodies scattered throughout the works of Rabelais appear in several traditional forms, the most common being the folkloric giants Grandgousier, Gargantua, and Pantagruel. While constituting a race apart from ordinary humanity, these gigantic protagonists, reputed for their heroic, moral, and intellectual 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 (werewolf) 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 proportions, while sharing similar extraordinary births. Borrowing from the most famous account of pygmies found in the Iliad (3.5), Rabelais incorporates their constant battle with the cranes into his account of Pantagruel engendering “fiftythree 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 described 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, Le´viathan,” the embodiment of Old Testament evil. Two episodes surrounding the physetere (4BK 33–34) are thematically linked: Quaresmeprenant (4BK 29–32), an ambiguous, Lent-like figure, and the Andouilles (4BK 35–42), who stand for Mardi Gras. Taken together, the three episodes form part of Rabelais’s anticlerical (Popish Rome or Calvinist Geneva) satire. On another level, the monstrous Quaresmeprenant, whose bizarre anatomy is described by Xenomanes, becomes Rabelais’s illustration of excessive selfindulgence, since he violated the rules of mediocritas or moderation. Readers of Rabelais encounter many more monsters in the Fourth Book, including “Amodunt and Discord,” the grotesque and ugly children of Antiphysis, “monsters deformed and misshapen 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 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 monstres et l’interpre´tation des signes (Quart Livre 18– 42),” Writing the Renaissance, ed. Raymond La Charite´ (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1992); Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Paul J. Smith, Voyage et e´criture, e´tude 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 entered Parliament in 1504, became master of requests and a privy councillor in 1517, and succeeded 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 render 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 description 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

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by Pantagruel’s royal father and “la ville des Amaurotes” is the largest city in the land; Badebec, 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, Pantagruel and his army defend the Amaurotes against invasion by the Dipsodes (15, 21). Such Morean echoes emphasize the fact that Rabelais was deliberately associating his book with learned circles linked to Erasmus himself. In the same perspective, 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: University of Michigan, 1958); Richard Marius, Thomas More: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1984; Andre´ Pre´vost, Thomas More (1477–1535) et la crise de la pense´e europe´enne (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 Alcofrybas 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 encounter with a French-speaking peasant who is busy planting cabbages in a Franco-Italianate countryside. After an early run-in with some brigands— hardly exotic creatures in sixteenth-century Europe—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 (Chroniques gargantuines), popular tales from which Rabelais explicitly borrowed. In addition, the

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fairly detailed mapping of Pantagruel’s interior incorporates Rabelais’s humanist medical training by drawing on Galen’s Hippocratic topography of the human body. The specifically medical resonance of the episode has echoes in the following chapter, in which a constipated Pantagruel 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 quintessentially 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 outside of it. In medieval versions of the voyage into the mouth of the giant Gargantua, the giant is always asleep. The narrators of the various Chroniques thus never abdicate their position as chronicler, since the giant has no adventures to speak of while they explore his innards. Similarly, 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 companions. The apparent mutual exclusivity of these two worlds effectively disrupts the totalizing pretensions 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. He´le`ne Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Andrea Frisch, “Quod vidimus testamur: Testimony, Narrative Agency and the World in Pantagruel’s Mouth,” FF 24 (September 1999): 261–83; Franc¸ois Rigolot, Les Langages de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1972). Andrea Frisch

MUSIC That Ponocrates, the humanistic tutor who replaces the stultifying sophists, should encourage 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 sixteenth century was considered an essential part of the cursus studiorum, anticipating today’s advocacy of early training in music. As one might expect from a Renaissance man, moreover, Rabelais 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 outlines for Gargantua is characteristically ambitious: 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 instruction, which immediately follows his geometry and astronomy lessons. In addition to playing a key role in the formation of his intellect, Gargantua’s music lessons also contribute to his social development: after dinner he and others 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 ability to list fifty-eight musicians of his own era, ranging from Josquin des Pre´s to Jannequin, in the Fourth Book prologue is a feat that few

Music modern-day novelists, physicians, naturalists, or clergymen could replicate. On the basis of this list and the musical similes, metaphors, and images that permeate his text from start to finish, Nan Cooke Carpenter surmises that Rabelais almost 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 “harmony 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 anatomical parts, also figure in comic, erotic, and scatological 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 efforts 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 striking; and his literary conflation of learned and

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popular culture is mirrored by sixteenth-century musical practices, which feature both the insertion of popular materials into courtly or “learned” compositions and the composition of popular songs by “serious” or liturgical composers like Jannequin. Finally, Rabelais’s text itself has served as the inspiration for a number of musical compositions, including the comic opera Pantagruel (1910) by Alfred Jarry and Euge`ne 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 Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954); Guy Demerson, Rabelais. Une vie, une oeuvre, une e´poque (Paris: Balland, 1986); Frank Dobbins, Music in Renaissance Lyons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Cle´ment Jannequin Ensemble, Les cris de Paris (Burbank, CA: Harmonia Mundi, 1996); Newberry Consort, Villon to Rabelais, Sixteenth Century Music of the Streets, Theatres, and Courts (Burbank, 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). Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

N NARRATOR, FIGURE OF The first two books of the Pantagruel series were published under Franc¸ois Rabelais’s anagrammatic pseudonym, Alcofrybas Nasier. In the “author’s prologue” to Pantagruel, Alcofrybas assumes both the narrative stance characteristic of a traditional medieval storyteller and that of a firsthand eyewitness, reminiscent of the narrator of Lucian’s True History. Like the narrators of the medieval Chronicques gargantuines, Alcofrybas frequently addresses his readers directly in this book, as if to replicate an oral storytelling situation in a circumscribed community. Unlike the narrators of medieval popular romance, however, Alcofrybas sometimes appears as a character inside the story he is telling. In chapter 17, we find him walking down the streets of Paris with Pantagruel’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 distance him from his audience. When he addresses this volume’s readers, he usually adopts a defensive posture, spewing invective at those who don’t believe his tale. In Gargantua, by contrast, Rabelais’s narrator softens his antagonistic stance toward the audience and appears to position himself firmly in their world. Having abandoned the Lucianic pretense to eyewitnessing—perhaps in part because Gargantua’s story precedes Pantagruel’s chronologically—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 Pantagruel, Panurge, and their companions. As in Gargantua, the narrator never appears to be among them. Although the Third Book was published under Rabelais’s name, the author’s pro-

logue to this volume maintains and develops the relationship with the audience that Alcofrybas establishes in the first two books. The narrative voice of Rabelais’s novel changes again with the Fourth Book. The prologue, signed by Rabelais, opens with greetings to a community of readers with which the narrator is by now on very familiar terms, thus reinforcing the atmosphere of medieval storytelling. 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 . . . discovered 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 consistent 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 narrator. In this volume, however, he has many more conversations with Pantagruel and company 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 readers 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 Cartier, than it does to Lucian. Like Rabelais’s traveler-narrator, eyewitness historians in the period openly struggled to articulate a perspective at once individual and unique (“I saw” [“je

Nature veidz”]), yet also sanctioned by a community of fellow travelers (“we discovered” [“nous descouvrismes”]) 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 storyteller in an age when the local communities that grounded narration in the medieval period were being redefined by the increasing centralization of the French state and by the technology of print. Readings: Andrea Frisch, The Invention of the Eyewitness (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 Alcofribas Nasier,” RR 64 (1973): 175–83. Andrea Frisch

NATURE There are 121 instances of the word “nature” in Rabelais’s corpus, not counting cognates. As in all Renaissance discourse, it is a highly polysemantic word in Rabelais’s writing, but some of the principal meanings are the following: 1. Nature as a creating or generative force (natura naturans), often written with a capital N, the antithesis of destructive Antiphysie (4BK 32). In most instances, the word has theological connotations, which are typical of the Renaissance notion of nature as a whole. Natura naturans was understood as a power or entity subject to God which performed the work of His creation in the sublunary world. The creation itself, natura naturata, was a physical manifestation of divine order, the understanding of which would lead to a greater understanding of a manifest God. Nature’s primary purpose is to ensure that the cycle of death and reproduction continues, both human and nonhuman, as Panurge indicates before his encomium to the codpiece (3BK 8). It is thus part of the sublunary corruptible world and “makes nothing immortal” (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

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in nature” (4BK 62), or (a sense very closely bound to the first) “strange births against the order of nature” (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, concomitant with “landscape” in the modern sense, except 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 structure? 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” (twentyseven instances), and recalls the shared etymology between “nature,” “naıˆtre,” (to be born) and “nation,” as does Panurge’s warning that “human nature”—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 The´le´mites are virtuous “by nature” (G 57).

The relationship between the human and the nonhuman worlds, the microcosm and the macrocosm, generated varying theories in the sixteenth century, many of which Rabelais explores. Particularly controversial is the question of portents, or whether events in the macrocosm can be interpreted as predictions of microcosmic (human) 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 human futures in every possible natural sign. The other side of the argument, however, is that God willingly reveals his intentions to the alert observer 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

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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 Pantagrueline 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 nonhuman 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 understand 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 difference between modern and premodern inquiry into nature lies, rather, in the place of theological teleology, with the premodern initiate a privileged witness into divine design, whereas modern study of nature coexists uncomfortably at best with religion. In Rabelais, nature does appear as an object of study—for example, in Gargantua’s letter to his son (P 8) in which he outlines an ideal educational program that includes zealous study of the “facts of nature.” Some critics 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 encomium makes increasingly extravagant claims for the plant, ending up with a vision of nations that have overcome the physical limits of distance, 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 finally 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 example, the study of nature is not yet designated by the word “science” (“natural history” is the term used): “science” in sixteenth-century French conserves the sense it has in the Latin scientia, that is, knowledge in general. When Gargantua famously 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 accompanied by ethical considerations. Gaster’s mastery of Nature is followed by a chapter that presents two very different types of human interaction with nature: the first is a rational “scientific” inquiry into the properties of magnets that allows Gaster to create a cannonball deflector; 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 Rabelais’s. Rational and mystical-occult views of nature frequently coexist in his text. For example, the magnetic door in the Fifth Book is explained with a similar bewildering blend of discourses (GP 5BK 37; OB 5BK 36). What does seem new in Rabelais’s text compared with earlier 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 ironical 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 multifaceted as they are today, but with different parameters. The semantics of the word “nature,” as well as ways in which the nonhuman world was perceived and studied, were shifting in the sixteenth century, and Rabelais engages consciously with such shifts. Over the whole hovers the fig-

Neoplatonism 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 Ce´ard, La nature et les prodiges (Geneva: Droz, 1996); Guy Demerson, Rabelais (Paris: Fayard, 1991); Stanley Eskin, Physis and Antiphysie: The Idea of Nature in Rabelais and Calcagnini (Berkeley: University of California, 1962); Michel Jeanneret, “Rabelais, les monstres et l’interpre´tation des signes (Quart Livre 18–42),” Writing the Renaissance. Essays on Sixteenth-Century French Literature in Honor of Floyd Gray, ed. Raymond C. La Charite´ (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1992); Robert Marichal, “Commentaires du Quart Livre,” ER 1 (1956): 188–202; Francis Me´tivier, ed., Actes des confe´rences du cycle “Rabelais et la nature,” ER 31 (1996); Andre´ Pellicier, Natura, e´tude se´mantique 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 dilemma 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 interpretation of words have so far failed, Pantagruel proposes an alternative method, relying on gesture 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 naı¨f—that is to say, effectively uncontaminated by verbal language. Nazdecabre’s name, which signifies “nose-of-goat,” has bawdy connotations and suggests connivance with the devil. The comic gestural exchange between Panurge and Nazdecabre recalls a similar debate by signs in the Thaumaste episode (P 18). But here the gestures, in turn erotic and violent, are more down to earth and transparent in

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their meaning, exciting Panurge’s anger. These chapters of the Third Book touch on some of the central preoccupations of the whole work: language and its origin, conventional and natural signs, Cratylist and Aristotelian linguistic theories, communication by signs and gestures, and problems of interpretation. Readings: Jean Ce´ard, La nature et les prodiges. L’insolite au XVIe sie`cle, 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). Agnieszka Steczowicz

NEOPLATONISM Idealistic philosophy stemming 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 Renaissance manifestations to astrology, divination, demonology, and hermeticism, Neoplatonism informs Rabelais’s work virtually from start to finish. The seminal prologue to Gargantua, with its allegory of the marrowbone and Sileni, evokes the Neoplatonist tradition from the outset by positing 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 image; his fascination with symbols and hieroglyphs, his own convivium that rivals the Platonic 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. Although some would argue that these Neoplatonic echoes are largely playful, intended to bamboozle the reader with the lure of hidden meanings that do not in fact exist, G. Mallary Masters suggests, on the contrary, that the author is inviting us to “play with him” (17) and extract the marrow from Rabelais’s hermetic text. Readings: G. Mallary Masters, Rabelaisian Dialectic and the Platonic-Hermetic Tradition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1969); Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, Bollingen Series 38 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972). Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

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Niphleseth

NIPHLESETH Queen of the female “Andouille Sausage Warriors,” who mistake Pantagruel for their archenemy Quaresmeprenant and attack the giant and his party in an episode of carnivalesque mock warfare (4BK 35–52). The Briefve De´claration defines her name as the Hebrew term for the “male member,” thus explicitly blurring gender distinctions that have already been called into question by the phallic shape of her subjects. She symbolizes the cornucopia of frequently mutually exclusive allusions and interpretations common to most episodes of the Fourth Book, in this particular case through inherent sexual, religious, and political ambiguities. The most obvious of these ambiguities is the phonetic proximity of “eels” (anguilles), a Lenten food, and chitterlings (andouilles), a carnival food, an ambivalence extended into the biblical realm (Genesis) by anguis, “snake.” Politically, the designation of infanta for Niphleseth’s daughter, the only procreative Chitterling and thus truly a counterpart to sterile Quaresmeprenant, 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 exploration of the New World being further reinforced by the tribute of 78,000 Chitterlings annually 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 another display of Pantagruel’s magnanimity in victory. The demand is based on the statement that chitterlings contain more excrement than malice. While certainly reflecting imperfect contemporary 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 refusal to consume the sausages (as in the corresponding episode from Le Disciple de Pantagruel, Rabelais’s model): Friar Jean’s army of cooks prefers to eliminate them, and dead Chitterlings in Paris are simply buried. Readings: Barbara Bowen, “L’episode des An-

douilles (Rabelais, Quart livre, chapitres XXXV– XLII): esquisse d’une me´thode de lecture,” Cahiers de Varsovie 8 (1981): 111–21; Barbara Bowen, “Lenten Eels and Carnival Sausages,” EC 21 (1981): 12–25; Franc¸oise Charpentier, “La guerre des Andouilles, Pantagruel, IV, 35–42,” E´tudes seizie´mistes offerts a` V. L. Saulnier (Geneva: Droz, 1980); Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival (Berkeley: University of California 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 lyonnaise: recherches sur les imprimeurs, libraires, relieurs et fondeurs de lettres de Lyon au XVIe sie`cle, ed. J. Baudrier, vol. 12 (Lyon: Librairie Ancienne d’Auguste Brun, 1895–1921). Stephen Rawles

NOVEL The question of the genre of Rabelais’s fictional narratives remains undecided. They have evident parallels with epic and chivalric 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 anachronistic. Although Rabelais’s fictions predate the official inception of the modern novel, they occupy a prominent place in what the Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin called the prehistory of the novel. For Bakhtin, the novel began as an encyclopedia of genres, incorporating dialogues, poems, letters, speeches, descriptions, and short stories, all forms present in Rabelais’s heterogeneous fictions, with their vast range of genres and styles. Above all, in Rabelais, language, from a medium of representation, becomes an object of representation. 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 characters and events of fiction on the same temporal level as the audience, thus abolishing epic distance. The most obvious method he employs to

Nursemaids 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 heroes and the real world of his audience is the deflation or humanization of heroism. To maintain their dignity, epic heroes recede into an inaccessible, legendary past, while the parodic genres 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 Episte´mon’s visit to the underworld (P 30), which brings together the inaccessible heroes of classical epic with more recent and more comic figures in a corrosive, contemporizing contact. In this way, Rabelais assures the breakthrough of a truly modern temporality necessary for development of the novel. Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Guy Demerson, “Paradigmes e´piques chez Rabelais,” Rabelais en son demi-mille´naire (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, references 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

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of milk to feed the gigantic toddlers. Their mammalian function put aside, they fulfill especially in Gargantua the more significant role of a sexual surrogate. The narrator refers to the nursemaids as objects of the boy’s libidinal desire. In chapter 11 Gargantua is said to be always groping and/or fondling his nursemaids. In so doing, the narrator adds, he was already exercising his “codpiece.” While sprucing up Gargantua’s codpiece with bouquets, ribbons, flowers, and silken tufts, as it seemed to be their duty, the nursemaids caused the boy to have an erection. As each one claims it for herself, one greedily menaces 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. Readings: Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1979); Hope Glidden, “Childhood and the Vernacular in Rabelais’s Gargantua,” 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 medieval Charlemagne cycle, including Roland, who is unlucky in love and goes mad. Although there is little evidence that Rabelais borrowed directly from his Italian predecessor, both authors combine Renaissance ebullience and an encomium 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. Readings: Elizabeth A. Chesney, The Countervoyage of Rabelais and Ariosto: A Comparative Reading of Two Renaissance Mock Epics (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 1982); Marcel Tetel, Rabelais et l’Italie (Florence: Olschki, 1969). Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

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 occurring 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 shepherds, 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 interpretation of the death of Pan demonstrates Renaissance Christianization of ancient thought. The death of Pan has also been read as allegory inspired by the religious troubles in sixteenthcentury France. Christ is again killed as his Body, in the form of the Church, is misused and dismembered. This chapter is followed immediately 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 Fre`re Jean’s request to “haulser le temps” (find a pastime) at the end of the Fourth Book. Readings: Alice Fiola Berry, The Charm of Catastrophe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Press, 2000); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979). Douglas L. Boudreau

PANTAGRUEL Pantagruel, the son of Gargantua and Badebec, is the principal character in the four books definitely written by Franc¸ois 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 Badebec died while giving birth to him, and for that reason Pantagruel was raised in an almost exclusively male environment. In the sixth chapter of Pantagruel, the title character reveals his contempt 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 obscene gestures in his debate with the learned but foolish Englishman Thaumaste. When a Parisian noblewoman (see Haughty Parisian Woman) refuses to grant Panurge a date, he has dogs urinate on her dress as she leaves the Cathedral 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

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his father Gargantua, Pantagruel hates war, but he does not shy away from his military obligations. Like his father, he also obtains victory through strategy and skill, and he does everything possible to limit the number of deaths in battle. He treats the defeated Dipsodes with magnanimity. In both his Third Book and Fourth Book, Rabelais frequently contrasts Panurge and Pantagruel. In the third and fourth chapters of the Third Book, Panurge develops clearly specious and self-serving arguments in a vain effort to justify 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 Pantagruel whether or not he should marry. Pantagruel, who has not forgotten how Panurge grotesquely treated the Parisian noblewoman, recognizes the insincerity of Panurge’s question. Pantagruel realizes that a successful marriage depends 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 Hippothade´e in the thirtieth chapter of the Third Book. This theologian tells Panurge that if he turns away from alcoholism, lives virtuously, obeys the Ten Commandments, and does not treat his wife as a sexual object, he will have a good marriage, if it pleases God. He encourages Panurge to trust in God’s absolute love. The selfish and misogynistic Panurge refuses to listen to such exemplary advice. The Fourth Book also stresses profound differences between Panurge and Pantagruel. Chapters 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 anything 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 Fre`re 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 Pantagruel the positive character traits that are the opposite of those negative qualities shown by Panurge in both his deeds and words. Readings: Richard Crescenzo, “Les controverses interpre´tatives de Pantagruel et Panurge dans le Tiers Livre: Etude des strate´gies rhe´toriques et argumentation,” Rabelais: A propos du Tiers livre, ed. James Dauphine´ and Paul Mironneau (Biarritz: J & D Editions, 1995); Dorothy Gabe Coleman, Rabelais: A Critical Study in Prose Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); Carla Freccero, Father Figures: Genealogy and Narrative Structure in Rabelais (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, Rabelais (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 anonymous and quite mediocre Arthurian mock epic published earlier the same year in Lyon, from which he borrowed certain salient characteristics—gothic format, popular style, low-brow humor, and the basic idea of a giant hero and his comic exploits—but combined these with great humanistic learning and a serious political, ethical, and religious purpose. The result is one of the greatest satirical works of the Renaissance. Its unique blend of high and low cultures, of exquisite learning and vulgar humor, of lofty ideals, vinous buffoonery, and mean pranks, was enormously successful in its time but has proven singularly disconcerting to post-Reformation, postclassical 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 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 humanists like Erasmus and Thomas More. Set in a Utopie inspired by More’s recent satire, Pantagruel narrates in episodic but linear fashion the birth, education, and heroic exploits of its eponymous hero, son of the giant Gargantua 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 prophecy by liberating his native Utopie from the invading 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 Dipsodes. Sent by his father to France to pursue his formal studies, Pantagruel finds only lazy students 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 pretentious, “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 SaintVictor 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 theology consisting of direct readings from the Bible in the original languages (P 8). Thanks to this progressive education, Pantagruel becomes a vir-

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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 intractable, 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 Pantagruel’s education constitute a scathing satire of medieval learning and an idealized picture of humanism as the solution to all the world’s ills. The most vivid and memorable character of Pantagruel is the hero’s epic companion Panurge, 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 crusade against the Turks, where he was nearly roasted alive (P 14). In his travels he has learned to speak all modern languages, as he demonstrates 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 superiors (16), who makes ends meet by stealing from alms boxes (17), and who takes ignoble revenge 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 between the two is played out throughout the book. Nearly every action by Pantagruel is mimicked in degraded form by Panurge. But the relationship 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 unanswerable questions about illegitimate arcane sciences like alchemy and astrology, the even wilier Panurge substitutes himself for the defenseless hero and easily defeats and humiliates

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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 established than news arrives that Gargantua has been transported to the land of the fairies and that Utopie 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 Episte´mon (learned). In an initial encounter with 660 enemy knights, Panurge devises a trick that allows the hero’s four companions to destroy all their adversaries, thus demonstrating the superiority of wit over force in military operations (25). Pantagruel 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). Episte´mon, decapitated during this final battle and resuscitated by Panurge, relates that in Hades the rich and the powerful of this world (epic heroes, kings, emperors, popes) all serve menial functions (30). On learning this, Panurge prepares 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.

Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. He´le`ne Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968); Ge´rard Defaux, Le curieux, le glorieux et la sagesse du monde dans la premie`re moitie´ du seizie`me sie`cle: L’exemple de Panurge (Ulysse, Demosthe`ne, Empe´docle), French Forum Monographs 34 (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1982); Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Raymond C. La Charite´, Recreation, Reflection and Re-creation: Perspectives on Rabelais’s Pantagruel, French Forum Monographs 19 (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1980); Walter Stephens, Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient History, and Nationalism (Lincoln: University 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 prepare 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 applications (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 together 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 belief in human industry and progress (Lefranc 1931; Plattard 1910). For supporters of Rabelais’s Erasmian evangelism, however, the enigmatic formulation of the episode was the key

Pantagruelion 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 reasons Rabelais had resorted to the ingenious device of enigmatic speech, covertly appealing to his contemporaries for a tacit attitude toward evangelical freedom (Saulnier’s “hesuchist” theory). In hermeneutical terms, Pantagruel’s eponymous plant could thus be an emblem of interpretive 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 movement of the encomium as a symbol of textual productivity (Bernard 1981; Dele`gue 1983; Rasson 1984; Rigolot 1972, 1996). Rabelais shares a fascination for paradox with many of his contemporaries. In the Pantagruelion chapters, however, lyricism becomes an end in itself, distinguishing the episode from other satirical eulogies of burlesque intent (Colie 1966; Losse 1980; Screech 1958). Other readings of the episode are based on the confrontation between Rabelais’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 predecessors might best be fulfilled by creating a mocklyric 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 ambivalent, 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 pharmacon: a wonderful remedy in which there always lurks the danger of poisoning, impotence, and death (Dele`gue 1983). Thus, as Edwin Duval (1997: 209–214) has compellingly remarked, “the enigma of Pantagruelion seems to resist any completely satisfactory interpretation and to re-

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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 sophistry as he lets himself be carried away by his own rhetoric. Although the eventual ascent to the heavenly seats of the gods, which Pantagruelion 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 reproduces and subverts the analogical system of emblematic representations. Readings: Claudie E. Bernard, “Le pantagrue´lion entre nature et culture,” Degre´ second, Studies in French Literature 5 (July 1981): 1–20; Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966); Yves Dele`gue, “Le pantagruelion, ou le discours de la ve´rite´,” 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 comple`tes (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. Enqueˆte sur le comique et le cosmique a` la Renaissance (Tokyo: France Tosho, 1989); Jean Plattard, L’œuvre de Rabelais (Paris: H. Champion, 1910); David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature. Versions of the Source (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983); Luc Rasson, “Rabelais et la maıˆtrise: l’exemple du Tiers Livre,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 62.3 (1984): 493–503; Franc¸ois Rigolot, “Encomie et botanique,” Les langages de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1996); Franc¸ois 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-

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sein de Rabelais (Paris: SEDES, 1957), rpt. in his Rabelais dans son enqueˆte, vol. 1 (Paris: SEDES, 1983); Michael A. Screech, The Rabelaisian Marriage (London: Arnold, 1958). Franc¸ois Rigolot

PANTAGRUELISM A term invented by Rabelais 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 offenses, and disregards adversity for the sake of good companionship, conviviality, and communion. 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 imperfections 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 anything else” (GP 246). This well-known passage defines a frame of mind that does not easily take offense, but rather inclines to view the necessarily imperfect words and deeds of fellow mortals in the most favorable light, overlooking any flaws and pardoning any offense they may contain. Thanks to this quality, Rabelais’s readers will not be scandalized by his book but will welcome 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 mismanagement of his newly acquired fief, for example, 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 condemned; 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 “Pantagruelisme” 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” already hint at the quality that will eventually be named Pantagruelism. In the prologue to Gargantua, 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 example 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 Rabelais’s readers may properly be viewed as Pantagruelism avant la lettre. After the Third Book, Pantagruelism is no longer an important concept. The hero of the

Panurge 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 epicureanism: “a certain gaiety of spirit, an indifference to all the accidents of daily life” (GP 383). Readings: Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’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). Despite his disheveled appearance, Panurge already demonstrates his extraordinary powers by asking Pantagruel for help and food in a dozen different 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 Rabelaisian text, which scholars have described as a kind of Bildungsroman of the Christian, humanist 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 Hermes, the god of magic, arcane knowledge, rhetoric, 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 behind him fire and the smell of sulfur; and with

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Ulysses, the classical exemplar of worldly curiosity” (Duval 1991: 63). This association with the primal figures of folk tales, such as the trickster, means that Panurge is a character whose textual being is cyclical, cosmic, and carnivalesque, 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 introduction (P 9, 14–25), which may seem episodic 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 nouvelles, and which was still alive and well in Renaissance France, in popular festivals into which Gargantua and Pantagruel would later be incorporated in public readings. Like so many of his predecessors from this tradition—the millers, Franciscans, and gentils compagnons of comic tales, for example—Panurge 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 unsuspecting 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 maıˆtres e`s arts in the Latin quarter, displaying 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 parody of the Corpus Christi procession and even as

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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 misogyny should be read in the context of his antagonism toward almost every other social group represented in the work—from “sugary” ladies to lowly students, from farcical experts to traveling English charlatans. In general, Panurge as character reproduces attitudes and actions that function as literary commonplaces within the tradition of comic literature that Rabelais inherited from the Middle Ages. As such, he literally is a compendium of signs meant to signify comic attributes 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 series of meaningless yet somehow suggestive visual 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 personifies 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 recognizes Panurge as a cuckold [4BK 5]). The redundancy 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 repeatedly seeking an answer to the question as to whether he will be cuckolded by his future wife if he marries. While the transformation of Panurge from charlatan and trickster in Pantagruel to potential cuckold in the Third Book may be read as an example of inconsistent character development, Panurge’s obsession with signs, portents, and omens could be interpreted as the logical 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 Panurge of the Third Book is a pretext for a set of variations on Rabelais’s favorite theme: the relation 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 becomes an allegorical figure in his quest for an answer to a simple question and represents perhaps 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 phenomena. 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 associated with sexuality, scatology, vigorous yet meaningless debates, comic violence inflicted on others—resurface forcefully. According to Ge´rard Defaux, Panurge’s ferocity, thoroughly enmeshed 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 understand this last of his completed books. In conclusion, as paradoxical and inscrutable as Panurge may seem, his character and attributes are crucial to Rabelais’s oeuvre, the profound multiplicity of which cannot be appreciated without an attentive reading of this puzzling and devilish figure. Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. He´le`ne Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Ge´rard Defaux, introduction to the Quart Livre (Paris: Livres de Poche, 1994); Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Carla Freccero, “Damning Haughty Dames: Panurge and the Haulte Dame de Paris (Pantagruel, 22),” JMRS 15.1 (Spring 1985): 57–67; Raymond C. La Charite´, Recreation, Reflection, and Re-creation: Perspectives on Rabelais’s Pantagruel (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1980). David LaGuardia

PAPACY The government of the Roman pontif, who heads up the Western Christian church.

Papimanes and Papefigues 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 consistently played against one another. Sumptuous and extravagant, the existence of the Roman Curia 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 Papefigues 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 resistance to Church reform alternated between a Curia that stymied papal efforts and popes that remained 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 doctrinal 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 moments. During his trips to Rome in the entourage of Cardinal Jean du Bellay, Rabelais saw the Roman Church at first hand. His critiques perhaps speak to this experience. It is significant that Rabelais felt free to express his distrust of Ro-

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man Church politics and the “legalese” of papal law statutes, the De´cre´tales (4BK 49–53). Readings: Jean Batany, “Les ‘Quatre Estats’ de l’Ile des Papimanes,” BAARD 3.10 (1981): 425–29; Richard Cooper, “Rabelais et l’eglise,” Rabelais et son demi-mille´naire: 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’e´vangelisme de Rabelais: Aspects de la satire religieuse au XVIe sie`cle, 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 includes Quaresmeprenant, L’Isle Farouche, and the physetere. At the level of generality, the physetere (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 simply the physical reproduction envisaged by Gargantua (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 identified for us by Joachim du Bellay in his Regrets (135) as “Swiss people, whom the good Rabelais named ‘Sausages’ ” (“Suysses . . . que le bon Rabelais a surnommez Saulcisses”), who by their generic designation are Swiss reformers (Andouilles, Saulcissons Montige`nes) 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 being at daggers drawn with the Holy Wowser,

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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 ambiguous 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 Pantagruel and company, and the giant and his people obviously approve them. And yet no other island draws such heavy criticism from the company. Papal authority and its instrument, the Decretals, the papal presumption of being God on earth, veneration of objects, relics, unnecessary rituals, confessions, holy water, monastic institutions, indulgences, the self-indulgence of prelates, 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 eminent critics to regard Rabelais as a Papefigue, one who gives the Pope the finger. But if we compare the Island of the Antipapists with Nuts-on-the-Popeland, we find it desolate, storm-ridden, and overrun by devils, as the Papefigues eke out a precarious living. In Papimania, 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 expedition. In Papefiguie`re, however, they go into a chapel to take holy water and are then merely witnesses of events. In the spectrum of sixteenthcentury 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: Fre`re 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 between 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 Fre`re Jean and Pantagruel in the course of the banquet offered to the guests. This contrasts sharply with the ridicule 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 imperfect beings—Fre`re Jean in the Church and Panurge, 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 humanist 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. Fre`re Jean lusts for them (4BK 54). Now Panurge is a repentant lecher and lust-

Paris ful by nature, but this is the first and only time in all the chronicles that Fre`re Jean lusts. Why? Because the Clerices belong in the Church, in his domain. Homenaz reproves him, and when Pantagruel 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. Humanity in the figures of Fre`re Jean and Panurge is imperfect; so also is Homenaz in Papimania, the Church of Rome, the home of good Christians. Yet Pantagruel, the exemplar of the Perfect Church, says of the Roman Church, “I never saw better Christians than these Papimanians.” Its imperfections 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, Gallicans, and Romans, it is surprisingly the Papimanes for which Rabelais shows the most affinity. 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 message, seen throughout the Chronicles, but specifically in the Couillatris story of the Fourth Book prologue, the Clerices in Papimania, and the Bottle 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. Saulnier, Rabelais II: Rabelais dans son enqueˆte; Etude sur le Quart et le Cinquie`me livre (Paris: SEDES, 1982); Michael A. Screech, “Sagesse de Rabelais: Rabelais et les ‘bons Christians,’ ” ER 21 (Geneva: Droz, 1988): 9–15; Michael A. Screech, L’evangelisme de

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Rabelais: Aspects de la satire religieuse au XVIe sie`cle, ER 2 (Geneva: Droz, 1959). Fred W. Marshall

PARIS A noisy, bustling, crowded urban center, with a widely variable population (150,000 to 300,000 inhabitants over the course of the sixteenth century). Clearly one of the major commercial centers of France, it was also an important university town. As a royal city, its political centrality was evident. The majority of Parisians remained staunchly Catholic throughout the century. The conservative scholasticism that dominated the faculties of the Sorbonne (theology, medicine, canon law, and the arts) at first stifled the sort of literary Renaissance that was flourishing 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 Noˆtre 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 resemble 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: resentment 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 Protestant (Lutheran) heretic took place in 1523. Religious repression escalated after the Affaire des Placards (1534), when posters against Catholic mass were posted all around Paris and elsewhere

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in France. In January 1535, an elaborate procession 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 Renaissance 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 Miquel, Les guerres de religion (Paris: Fayard, 1980); William Monter, Judging the French Reformation: Heresy Trials by Sixteenth-Century Parlements (Cambridge, 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 Re´gime. Divided into multiple chambers during the Renaissance, including the infamous Chambre 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 willingness 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 evidence that the court’s decisions were unduly influenced by the king. In fact, the magistrates routinely delayed action on royal proposals that did not suit them, including a plan by Francis I to establish a new Chambre des Enqueˆtes in 1521 (Roelker 1996: 10). True, conservative groups

within the high court actively supported the Sorbonne’s suppression of religious dissidence, earning Parlement a reputation for rubber stamping 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 “discussion,” at times his superficially positive allusions 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 displayed by a Parisian fool to be equal to that of France’s high court (3BK 37); and the Mirelinguan 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 Picrochole’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 justice are routinely perverted by base human appetites, 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 Reformations of the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

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 Nazareth (although he never met him) and next to Jesus the most important figure in the early development of Christianity. He is also one of the primary sources of early Church doctrine, since

Petrarch and Petrarchism 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. Augustine’s interpretation of Paul’s teaching on original sin, the corruption of human nature, grace, faith, and free will became authoritative for Western Christianity. It was the mature Luther’s liberating encounter 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 teaching that justification comes by faith alone promised deliverance from the massive, corrupt ecclesiastical establishment which had imposed itself between individual believers and their God, replacing Christ as the only true Mediator and Advocate. This regenerative aspect of the early Lutheran message appealed to believers in France variously known as bibliens, re´formistes, or e´vange´liques. Marguerite d’Angouleˆme and Bishop Guillaume Bric¸onnet gathered together in the “Cercle de Meaux” like-minded evangelical humanists, including Jacques Lefe`vre d’Etaples and Cle´ment Marot. Only in this context can we understand Rabelais’s relentless attacks 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, Reformation, Dissent (Baden-Baden: V. Koerner, 1992); Stephen Westerholm, Preface to the Study of Paul (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997). William H. Huseman

PETRARCH AND PETRARCHISM Francesco 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

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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 devices, including antithesis, adynaton (a declaration of impossibility or inexpressibility), paronomasia (the use of words that sound alike but differ in meaning), and oxymoron. They also popularized short lyric forms, especially the sonnet, and drew from his favorite themic material, including exaggerated descriptions of the lady’s beauty. Petrarchism became increasingly fashionable in France during the 1530s under the reign of Francis I, who supposedly encouraged a Lyonnais humanist, Maurice Sce`ve, 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 parodic 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 socially and sexually), the highly rhetorical description of her “celestial beauties,” and the composition 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 genealogy became known through the unearthing of a long-forgotten tomb. Rabelais wrote this chapter in Lyon at a time when Sce`ve’s discovery of Laura’s tomb would have been widely discussed. Indeed, certain details from this chapter closely parallel the account of the discovery published by Jean de Tournes in his 1545 dedication (to Sce`ve) 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-

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responds to Sce`ve’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 enigmatic 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 scattered 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 version 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 annosa questione: Maurice Sce`ve e la ‘scoperta’ della ‘tomba di Laura,’ ”Quaderni di filologia e lingue romanze 2 (1980): 1–70; Jean-Luc Nardonne, Pe´trarque et le pe´trarquisme (Paris: PUF, 1998); Franc¸ois Rigolot, “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, Fili¬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 reasoned philautia as the basis for all human relationships. However, the term was used more frequently 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 Philautia as one of Folly’s indispensable servants, and Alciato uses Narcissus as the personification of this vice in his Emblematum Liber (1546: Emblem 69). Panurge, of course, incarnates philautia throughout the Third Book. Although Pantagruel uses the term only once, it is an extremely

important reference that summarizes his companion’s increasingly uncontrollable narcissistic obsessions: “philautie et amour de soy vous dec¸oit” (3BK 29). The only possible remedy for such destructive self-love is “le Pantagrue´lisme” (3BK 2). In a larger sense, however, the major institutions denounced so virulently by Rabelais can all be described as victims of philautia. The Church, the monarchy, the feudal nobility, and the faculties of theology, law, and medicine had originally 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 selfaggrandizement and self-enrichment and had themselves become the chief beneficiaries. Rabelais clearly saw his humor as a means of pricking their inflated egos. Readings: Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’ Tiers Livre de Pantagruel, ER 34 (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Ire´ne´e Haussherr, Philautie: de la tendresse pour soi a` la charite´ selon saint Maxime le Confesseur (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 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 imaginary, 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 physetere engenders intense fear in Panurge, who inflates the animal’s mystique rhetorically by likening 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 episodes that enhance and are enriched by the sea monster’s myriad connotations. Connected to Physis and Antiphysie by virtue of their phonetic similarity, for example, the phystere also

Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni functions implicitly as a Lenten fish in the tension between Quaresmeprenant and the reformist Andouilles. Finally, the crew members’ decision to dissect the whale and sell the oil from its kidneys smacks of pragmatic maritime commerce, a far cry from the mythic encounter Panurge imagined. Readings: Paul J. Smith, Voyage et e´criture. Etude sur le quart livre de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1987); Marcel Tetel, “Le physete`re bice´phale,” Writing the Renaissance (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1992). Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

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 Quaresmeprenant 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 offspring named Immoderation and Discord (GP 453). Profoundly envious of Nature and her perfect children, Antiphysie invents a myth to legitimate her own deformity, contending it is her own children and not those of Nature who resemble 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 upsidedown, it also functions as a condemnation of what the author deems monstrous in his own society, especially those religious and political bigots who persecute the “upright,” claiming their own unnatural theology is that of God. Reading: Alice Fiola Berry, The Charm of Catastrophe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA, GIOVANNI (1463–1494) This influential Renaissance humanist 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

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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 Conclusiones, 900 statements on thinkers as diverse as Plato and Aristotle, Avicenna and Averroes, and Pythagoras, and on ideas from hermetic and kabbalistic 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 become the classic statement of the intellectual ambitions of the Renaissance humanist. Pico’s insistence on breadth of knowledge underlies Gargantua’s letter to Pantagruel (P 8). His emphasis on the kabbala led to the beginnings of Christian kabbalism, and familiarity with it is evident in Rabelais’s books: references to kabbala and kabbalists (e.g., its inclusion in P 8) and kabbalistic ideas (e.g., l’isle de Ruach, 4BK 43). In 1487, Pico published a kabbalist interpretation of the creation story called Heptaplus. He also intended to write a work reconciling the philosophies 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 threatened human free will. Before he died in 1494, Pico, possibly under the influence of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, decided that astrology 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. Readings: G. Mallary Masters, Rabelaisian Dialectic and the Platonic-Hermetic Tradition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1969); Sheila J. Rabin, “The Qabbalistic Spirit in Gargantua and Panta-

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gruel,” Voices in Translation, ed. Deborah SinnreichLevi 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 cole`re or anger, means “bitter bile.” Both a neighbor and a former friend of the utopian king, Picrochole refuses to negotiate 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). Picrochole 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 instinct as a youth was to act selfishly and impulsively, Gargantua matures dramatically over the course of the Picrocholine War, following the lead of his temperate father. In contrast to Picrochole, 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 leniency to the prisoners he has conquered (G 50). Readings: Richard Berrong, Every Man for Himself: Social order and Its Dissolution in Rabelais (Stanford, CA: Anma Libri, 1985); Max Gauna, The Rabelaisian Mythologies (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996). Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

PLACARDS, AFFAIR OF (L’AFFAIRE DES PLACARDS, OCTOBER 17–18, 1534) Considered a turning point in the relationship between 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, Orle´ans, Blois, and Amboise. The text is attributed to a pastor from Neuchaˆtel, Antoine Marcourt. The reaction of the Parisian authorities was swift and brutal: over three hundred people were arrested (including the poet Cle´ment Marot), and thirty-

five burned. In January 1535, an impressive procession 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 printing, 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. Although the affair did not mark an abrupt transition from tolerance to persecution, as has sometimes been argued, it did reveal the level of discord within France, crystallize opposing positions, 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 Gargantua was published before or after the affair. Although Rabelais makes no direct mention of the Placards, references to the religious quarrels abound in his work, and it is certain that the unrest 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 salamander’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 emblematic of a community of persecuted Protestants in search of a more tolerant society. However, Rabelais spares neither side of the quarrel, as ongoing critical debates show. Readings: Gabrielle Berthoud, Antoine Marcourt: re´formateur et pamphle´taire du ‘Livre des Marchans’ aux placards de 1534 (Geneva: Droz, 1973); Ge´rard Defaux, “Rabelais et les cloches de Notre-Dame,” ER 9 (1971): 1–28; Marcel Franc¸on, “Note sur la datation de Gargantua,” ER 11 (1974): 81–83; Arlette Jouanna et al., “Pre´sence re´elle,” 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 Franc¸ois Rabelais, Gargantua (Geneva: Droz, 1970); Michael Screech, Rabelais and

Pliny, The Elder the Challenge of the Gospel: Evangelism, Reformation, Dissent (Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1992). Louisa Mackenzie

PLAGUE Highly contagious, incurable sickness 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 contamination 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 Pantagruel’s throat, to the giant’s stinking garlic breath (P 32). By placing deadly plague within the realm of the carnivalesque, Rabelais acknowledges a subject of concern while promoting a transformation of public reaction to it; what provoked fear may now bring laughter. Rabelais also speaks out against fear and associations of plague and other epidemics with divine punishment in Gargantua 45. Here Grangousier 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 appease God and the saints as more poisonous than the plague itself—a deadly sickness to the soul. Rather than embarking on futile, dangerous travels, Gargantua’s wise father encourages the travelers to stay home, care for their families and land, and work hard. Living in this way, unaffected by unreasonable fear, he promises, guar-

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antees that God, the angels, and the saints will protect them from plague. Readings: Roland Antonioli, Rabelais et la me´decine, ER 12 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1976); Gilles Henry, Rabelais (Paris: Librairie Acade´mique Perrin, 1988). Lesa Randall

PLINY, THE ELDER (GAIUS PLINIUS SECUNDUS, A.D. 23–79) Author of the Natural History (Historia Naturalis), thirty-seven books containing a compendium of facts about the natural world. Pliny’s work is an important source of information on Roman beliefs concerning nature, 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 complex 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 Renaissance 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. Evidently, Rabelais was familiar with the entirety of the Natural History. Pliny was a crucial, if inaccurate, source of information on distant races and exotic plants for Renaissance readers. Rabelais 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 century. Nonetheless, Rabelais rejected the “medical” information Pliny offered. Rabelais’s allusions 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

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Plotinus

Press, 1954); Pliny, Natural History, 10 vols. (Cambridge, 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 philosophy in Rome. His philosophical system consisted of an exposition of Plato’s dialogues, in particular the Parmenides, and contained an important 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 reality is founded upon three principles or “hypostases”: 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 Intellect, which is also the domain of Forms, a multiple 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 hypostasis contemplates its superior state, is “conversion.” 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 between 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 mentioned 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 debate against Thaumaste (P 18). (No editor of Rabelais to date has noticed that this is a fictitious title.) Pantagruel also cites Plotinus as one of many authorities in support of his recommendation 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 individual mind upward while asleep is certainly based on his hypostases. The doctrine of the immortality 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 published. Readings: Max Gauna, The Rabelaisian Mythologies (London: Associated University Presses, 1996); Francoise Joukovsky, Le regard inte´rieur: the`mes plotiniens chez quelques e´crivains de la Renaissance franc¸aise (Paris: Nizet, 1982); Robert Marichal, “L’attitude de Rabelais devant le ne´o-platonisme,” Franc¸ois 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 observances of every kind. “Popular” culture is defined 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 perhaps on safer ground in defining popular culture in the early modern period as the culture of the

Power, Discourses of preponderantly nonliterate as against the literate and Latinate culture of the Church and the professions. 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/literate 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 sixteenthcentury noblemen remained illiterate. (The literacy of women follows different patterns and is now beginning to be studied intensively.) Perhaps “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 popular culture could thus be seen as a “trickledown” from elite or “official” culture, just as many of the tales kept alive by fireside storytelling 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 Franc¸ois Rabelais and Popular Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but French critics much earlier than 1965 had already explored 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 preexisting chapbooks) credited with the creation of

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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 authority 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 implications 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 common practice of reading aloud, or storytelling, to an audience from the point of departure of a printed text (which is what, after all, Maistre Alcofrybas is supposed to be doing in the prologues of Pantagruel and Gargantua). Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. He´lene` Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT 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 culture 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 Foucault 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 determine 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, structuralism, and twentieth-century linguistics have contributed to a contemporary notion of discourses of power, Rabelais’s sixteenth-century interest in language as it affected politics, relig-

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ion, and personal lives offers many interesting parallels. Furthermore, Rabelais’s fiction provides a wealth of discourses to analyze (for example: legal, medical, theological, pedantic, mercantile, 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 disrupt 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 outside of the dominant group can also use discourse to advance themselves socially. His rhetorical skill gives him access to power through imitation. 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 understanding and manipulation of the discursive rules meet with a happier outcome. One of the most interesting discursive confrontations pits Panurge against the Haughty Lady of Paris (P 21–22). Both of them have claims to elements of a male, aristocratic hegemonic discourse, but neither dominates it entirely. Both vie to establish discursive superiority. 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, Panurge 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 discourse by exploring many of the same themes (unintelligibility, double meanings, domination) through signs as well as through words. He ironically (and perhaps wistfully) evokes the possibility 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: Selected 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; Franc¸ois Rigolot, Les langages 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 Rabelais’s early editions, printed by such noted publishers as Franc¸ois Juste, Sebastian Gryphius, and Chre´tien 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 classes of books) were giving way to a nearly universal 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 Pantagruel and Gargantua, in keeping with their popular trappings, were apparently meant to be printed in the “outdated” baˆtarde of early vernacular printing, a semi-cursive script related to everyday handwriting, the first editions of the Third and Fourth Books adopted italic and roman, respectively. Rabelais understood the importance 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 printing) should cease, the most important early discussion of printing in Rabelais’s fiction occurs in the famous letter from Gargantua to the student

Printing Pantagruel (P 8). Here, in his non-giant persona, Gargantua refers to the progress made in learning, especially in the ancient languages (a clear reference to the establishment of the Lecteurs royaux in 1530) since the invention of divinely inspired printing, which he contrasts (as had Erasmus and others) with diabolically inspired 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 continued 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, Franc¸ois Juste, were retained in editions published by E´tienne 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 danger. In his later fictional work he took steps to protect himself. Rabelais’s first privile`ge or Royal Privilege, which authorized the publication of his works and provided an early form of copyright protection, dates from September 19, 1545 [OC 1362– 3]. Prohibiting the publication of editions unauthorized by Rabelais, the Royal Privilege issued by Francis I praises the Gargantua and Pantagruel as “no less useful than enjoyable,” but complains that “the printers corrupted and perverted the books in several places.” As a result, we are told, Rabelais has refrained from publishing a sequel to his earlier bestsellers (“se seroit abstenu de mectre en public le reste et sequence des dictz faictz et dictz Heroı¨ques”), despite strong encouragement by “learned and knowl-

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edgeable people” to do so. This royal defense of works proscribed by the Sorbonne, largely on the basis of their literary merits, is particularly noteworthy. Despite the privile`ge, and the volume’s dedication to Marguerite de Navarre, the Third Book (NRB 28), printed by the humanist Chre´tien Wechel of Paris, was also banned in December 1546. Shortly thereafter, Rabelais himself fled France for Metz: ultimately the Royal Privilege 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 surprisingly, 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 privile`ge dated August 6, 1550 (343–44). Granted under the aegis of a powerful protector, Odet de Chastillon, and reading 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 privile`ge authorizing its publication, however, the Fourth Book was quickly condemned. The king backed Rabelais in the face of this condemnation, virtually guaranteeing the volume’s succe`s de scandale, 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 privile`ge and powerful patronage. Rabelais was typical of authors of his period: his views on printers were not uniformly favorable, and like other sixteenth-century writers he could not fully control the output or quality of his published works. Overall, however, his references 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

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as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe. 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Stephen Rawles, “What Did Rabelais Really Know about Printing and Publishing?” E´diter et traduire Rabelais a` travers les aˆges, 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 (Geneva: Droz, 1987). Stephen Rawles

PROGNOSTICATIONS Genre in which Rabelais began writing at the same time he undertook 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’ suspicion of supranational authority and mocks the “folz astrologues de Lovain” (“the foolish astologers 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 evangelical 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 Prognostications resemble the surviving Almanachs. The passage from the du Bellay Me´moires that helped late twentieth-century scholars understand the context for the Pantagrueline Prognostication also serves as pretext for one of the earliest chapters of the Essais (1.11), in which Montaigne 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, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon, 1991); Pantagrueline Prognostication pour l’an 1533, ed. M. A. Screech, TLF (Geneva: Droz, 1974). Edward Benson

PROLOGUE, TO PANTAGRUEL The prologue 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 adversarial 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 importance 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 interpretations focusing on playfulness and unpredictability, on varying degrees of underlying coherence, or on stylistic, rhetorical, or narratological aspects of the text. Floyd Gray (1974) argues that the heterogeneous audience addressed by Alcofrybas Nasier at the beginning of the prologue (“Tres illustres et tres chevaleureux champions, gentilz hommes et aultres”) immediately suggests play, instability, and equivocation. Raymond 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 instruction as well as pleasure, and emphasizes the importance of the parallel Alcofrybas draws between 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 prologue in the context of rhetorical paradox, and who sees Rabelais as exploiting the rhetoric of billingsgate (named for a London fish market renowned for its foul language) and figures of the more serious epideictic rhetorical tradition. Paul

Prologues, Fourth Book Smith (1984), who characterizes the prologue as “a conscientious work, composed according to the rules of rhetoric” (“un travail conscientieux, accompli selon les re`gles de la rhetorique”), extends the Losse analysis by examining the prologue 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 (narrataire), rendered particularly complex because of a narrative situation in which the utterance (e´nonce´) 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 chapters 17 and 32, and chapter 34, where the narrator makes a final admission of powerlessness. Connections between the function of Alcofrybas in the prologue and other chapters of Pantagruel are also made by Mary Baker (1990), who defines some common and occasionally overlapping critical terminology used to describe the narrative communication situation. She then examines 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 Chapters 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 playing with narrative norms in the prologue and keeps on playing in the rest of the book, continually 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 criticism indicates, the gateway to Rabelais’s first book continues to challenge its readers. Readings: Mary J. Baker, “Narration in Pantagruel,” RR 82.3 (May 1990): 312–19; Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Andrea Frisch, “Quod vidimus testamur: Testimony, Narrative Agency and

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the World in Pantagruel’s Mouth,” FF 24.3 (1999): 261–83; Floyd Gray, Rabelais et l’e´criture (Paris: Nizet, 1974); Floyd Gray, “Rabelais’s First Readers,” Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays on his Art, ed. Raymond C. La Charite´ (Lexington, KY: French Forum Publishers, 1986); Raymond C. La Charite, Recreation, 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); Franc¸ois Rigolot, “Vraisemblance et narrativite´ 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, includes three liminary texts: the 1548 prologue, the 1552 prologue, and the Dedicatory Letter to Odet de Chaˆtillon, 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 reminiscent 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 Silenuslike figure suggestive of hidden meanings and serious as well as comic intentions that is reminiscent 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 putting on his spectacles. The fictive reader is literally 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 almost 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

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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 Chaˆtillon.” It was to the cardinal that Rabelais owed the obtaining of the Royal Privilege, dated August 6, 1550, for a period of ten years, allowing him to reprint his prior works and to print new ones. Odet de Chaˆtillon 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 Montmorency, 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 dedicated his poem Hercule Chrestien to the cardinal. In his Dedicatory Letter, Rabelais acknowledges the support of Chaˆtillon and reserves the heights of encomiastic rhetoric for the praise of the cardinal as Gallic Hercules, a figure of Hercules 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 patient, the scorn for his accusers—but with a major 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 concealment by aesthetic, stylistic, or ironic distance. The 1552 prologue displays a new tone somewhere between the sarcasm of the 1548 prologue and the official pieties of the Dedicatory Letter to Odet de Chaˆtillon. 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 Couillatris—itself fraught with ambiguities—the Olympian setting of the tale defines an ambiguous mythical and mimetic space, permitting Rabelais to comment obliquely on topical contemporary controversies and political events. Thus, the violence of tone and the Silenic ambivalence of the 1548 prologue were replaced in 1552 by two discourses functioning in an intratextual 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 prologue invokes in comic style the humble goutteux, or people afflicted with gout, in their modest, 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 prologue. They constitute a disjunctive, oblique discourse whose ironies (i.e., contradictions and incompatibilities) 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. Readings: Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Livre de Pantagruel, ER 36 (Geneva: Droz, 1998); Max Gauna, The Rabelaisian Mythologies (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996); Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Camilla J. Nilles, “Reading the Ancien Prologue,” ER 29 (Geneva: Droz, 1993); Jerome Schwartz, Irony and Ideology: Structures of Subversion in Rabelais (Cambridge: Cambridge University 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 descended from the Aeneid, prophecy serves as an instrument of teleology and as a legitimation of

Propos des Bien Yvres, Les the ruling dynasty. Epic prophecy wards off digression and ensures an orderly resolution of the plot. Since Rabelais does not write dynastic epics, 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 accompanied 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. Episte´mon’s death and resurrection in chapter 30 parody the epic motif of the descent to the underworld where the hero receives a prophetic vision 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 prescribed 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 Prophecy that provokes a conflict of interpretation between Gargantua and Fre`re Jean. This episode accurately foretells the course of the remaining books, where the itinerant heroes repeatedly disagree 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 techniques in the tradition of Cicero’s On Divination (De divinatione), and Panurge’s pursuit of the future 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 Macreons, 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

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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 effort 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 invasions, new religions, and all the epochal changes experienced by Rabelais’s contemporaries 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 engages the larger question of how to understand the episodic structure of his work. Recently, there has emerged in Rabelais criticism a controversy 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 sporadic connection resists the type of overview or synoptic vision claimed by prophecy. Many years ago a prominent critic observed that divination 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 preconceptions that we bring to the text and shows whether we conceive of reading as the search for order or the recognition of contingency. Readings: Jean Ce´ard, La nature et les prodiges. L’insolite au 16e sie`cle (Geneva: Droz, 1977); Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Laurent Gosselin, “Rabelais, une ontologie de la contingence,” Cahiers 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-

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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 polylogue. 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 Devinie`re, 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 exclamation. 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 convivium, a banquet, in which stereophony— voices heard at one end of the gathering in visual and vocal counterpoint to those at others—prevails. 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 performance 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 advance or retard cosmic events or to regulate the rhythms of nature that might be out of joint or synchrony (Le´vi-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?” Antithetical 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. Chantons, 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 intonation (“etonnons”) gives rise to a funnel, which figures both as an object thrust in the celebrants’ 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 [plane`tes] 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 esprit of the propos. Sacred and popular worlds are of the same order. The ivres celebrate their emergence 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 propos are of a textual wealth and complexity that inspire a great deal of modern writing. Reading: Claude Le´vi-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 character functions, in part, as an allegory of Lent. While the name “Quaresme,” or Careˆme, designates “Lent,” the period of nonindulgence between Carnival and Easter, despite many ambivalences, the combination Quaresmeprenant has been widely identified with Mardi Gras. Embedded between the physetere and Andouilles episodes, Quaresmeprenant constitutes part of Rabelais’s satires of religious extremes. The halfgiant is described in four chapters of the Fourth Book (4BK 29–32) by Pantagruel’s comrade Xenomanes who, upon invitation, offers a sequence of six appreciations concerning the physical attributes and demeanor of this bewildering character. Included in those depictions are Quaresmeprenant’s garments, nourishment, pastimes, and behavior (4BK 29); lists of seventy-eight internal and sixty-four external body parts (4BK 30–31); and an itemization of thirty-six expressions related to his comportment, including some rather singular physical features concerning his composure (4BK 32). Xenomanes’s statements regarding Quaresmeprenant encompass both anatomical or medical panoramas and include rhetorical components. Medically speaking, this freakish character possesses an exceedingly peculiar anatomy. While Rabelais’s “grotesquely real” approach to the internal anatomical dimensions of Quaresmeprenant provides evidence that he conformed to common practice in sixteenth-century public dissection, scholars have supplied abundant argument that Rabelais was playfully making fun of certain controversial aspects of sixteenthcentury medicine, such as Galen’s erroneous attribution of seven ribs to the human anatomy,

which was based only on his dissection of a monkey. With respect to accounts of Quaresmeprenant’s external anatomy, while suggesting medical accuracy, the Rabelaisian text offers a confused, topsy-turvy format reversing the medically accepted 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 reinforces the unnaturalness of this being. Some scholars contend that Quaresmeprenant’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 (representing bodily form), whereas the account of his comportment (4BK 32) belongs to the notatio (describing a person’s character). Lastly, evidentia (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 elements used in Rabelais’s treatment of Quaresmeprenant may have been inspired by contemporary rhetorical handbooks, above all the Rabelaisian text utilized those elements in a comically corrupted form. Throughout the chapters describing Quaresmeprenant, it is obvious that, despite all attempts to describe him, Quaresmeprenant 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 description should be read “metadiscursively” as entertaining considerations of the possibilities and impossibilities of either anatomical or rhetorical description. Readings: Marie-Madeleine Fontaine, “Quaresme-

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prenant: l’image litte´raire et la contestation de l’analogie me´dicale,” Rabelais in Glasgow, ed. J. Coleman and C. Scollen-Jimack (Glasgow, 1984); Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Paul J. Smith, “Dissecting Quaresmeprenant—Rabelais’ 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 (Burlington, 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 Rabelaisian work is his 1965 novel Les Fleurs bleues, whose intricate pattern of allusions to Rabelais has attracted much critical attention. More generally, Queneau’s work exemplifies the Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s insight, founded largely on a reading of Rabelais, that language is the hero of the novel. In this respect, Queneau’s vertiginous Exercices de style, which offers ninety-nine versions of the same banal incident, is a paradigm of the novel, where plot is cruelly subordinate to style. Indeed, Queneau may have rediscovered what Leo Spitzer identified as Rabelais’s principle of the gratuitous plot. The essays and interviews collected in the 1950 volume Sticks, Figures, and Letters (Baˆtons, 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 Preliminaries, Queneau repeatedly addresses the widening gap between written and spoken language and champions what he calls neo-French, or the spoken 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 champions 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 sensitive 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 pseudomedieval phrases reappear in a modern context, while conspicuously modern words frequently intrude in medieval conversation. Anachronism thus represents not only a problem but also a structure and even a resource of language. Queneau also enjoys playing with etymologies and coining improbable neologisms in the same spirit as Rabelais. Queneau’s fictional onomastics explore 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: Noe¨l Arnaud, “Encyclope´die et encyclope´disme chez Rabelais et chez Queneau,” Raymond Queneau encyclope´diste? (Limoges, 1990); Dorothy Gabe Coleman, “Polyphonic Poets: Rabelais and Queneau,” Words of Power (Glasgow, 1987); Marie-Luce Demonet, “Un philosophe des langues,” Magazine litte´raire 319 (1994): 42–45; Monique Manopoulos, “Carnavalesque et tiers-espace chez Rabelais et Queneau,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1994). Eric MacPhail

QUINTILIAN First-century Roman rhetorician and educationalist whose twelve books of Institutiones oratoriae were very popular during the Renaissance. After the discovery of the complete manuscript in 1416, it was studied by Italian humanists like Lorenzo Valla, and the editio princeps was published in Rome in 1470. In France many editions and commentaries were issued 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 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 languages 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-

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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 gesture. It is often not possible to distinguish between the influence of Cicero and that of Quintilian, 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 rhe´torique et cre´ation litte´raire chez Rabelais,” Humanisme et face´tie (Orle´ans: Paradigme, 1994). Peter Sharratt

R RAMINAGROBIS (3BK 21–23) In his quest to decide whether or not he should marry, Panurge goes with Pantagruel to Villaume`re (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 Raminagrobis’s second wife “was the magnificent Pock-face, who gave birth to the beautiful Bazoche” (“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 contradictory 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 villainous creatures, foul and filthy beasts, a disgusting motley, monkish crowd, in black and brown and white and gray” (“un tas de villaines, immondes et pestilentes bestes, noires, guarres, fauves, blanches, cendre´es, grivole´es” [GP 299; 3BK 21]), which Panurge identifies with the mendicant friars and other monks with their distinctive habits. As a result, he considers Raminagrobis a heretic. The author of the poem was the Rhe´toriqueur Guillaume Cre´tin (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 appearance of Abel Lefranc’s Oeuvres de Franc¸ois Rabelais, 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, quibbler, hair-splitter, and fool”—admirably fits Ramus’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 corresponds 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 serenity of his death in 1543, and parallels have been made with Erasmus’s Funus (The Funeral) and the sickbed scene in Farce de Maistre Pathelin. Duval has stressed the central role of Raminagrobis 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 connotations, however, are of hypocrisy which Rabelais underlines in the Pantagrueline Prognostication of 1533. As Duval suggests, Raminagrobis is acting 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. Readings: Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Edwin M. Duval, “De la dive bouteille a` la queˆte du Tiers Livre,” Rabelais pour le XXIe sie`cle, ed. Michel

Reading, Portrayal of Simonin (Geneva: Droz, 1998); Peter Sharratt, “Rabelais, Ramus and Raminagrobis,” RHLF 82 (1982): 263–69; Andre´ Tournon, “En sens agile”: les acrobaties de l’esprit selon Rabelais (Paris: Champion, 1995). Peter Sharratt

RAMUS, PETER (1515–72) Peter Ramus (Pierre de La Rame´e), 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 humanist, rhetorically orientated reform of logic based on a tendentious rejection of Aristotle; his Dialecticae partitiones and Aristotelicae Animadversiones of 1543 formed the basis of many reeditions and reworkings in Latin, with one important French edition (La Dialectique, 1555). After being banned from teaching philosophy because of such subversiveness, he turned first to the study of rhetoric in association with his colleague Talaeus (Omer Talon), indulging in a similar 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 Colle`ge 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 argued 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 alluded to in the multi-faceted “maıˆtre Raminagrobis.” In 1551 he published his Pro philosophica Parisiensis academiae disciplina oratio, defending his own pedagogical practice of teaching philosophy and literature together in a shortened arts-course, and was appointed Professor of Philosophy and Eloquence at the Colle`ge 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 chaotically poetic approach to learning, likening his

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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 professors 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 orateurs (slandering, libeling, and howling at the ancient philosophers and orators).” Together they are responsible for “feu de faction, simulte, sectes couillonniques et partialite´” (“the fire of factionalism, enmity, ballocky sects, and divisiveness”), an early reference to Ramism and the Ramist controversies. Jupiter cannot decide between 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 Platonist; 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. Readings: Ge´rard Defaux, Rabelais agonistes: Du rieur au prophe`te. Etudes sur Pantagruel, Gargantua, Le Quart Livre (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Droz, 1998); Kees Meerhoff, Rhe´torique et poe´tique au XVIe sie`cle en France: Du Bellay, Ramus et les autres (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986); Peter Sharratt, “Ramus 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 earlymodern print, described forty years ago by Marshall McLuhan in his Gutenberg Galaxy (1962: 149). The first two books, Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua (1534), are filled with discussions of

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reading to and by characters, as well as salutations, 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 endeavors, 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 imitating 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 The´le`me, 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 disappeared. Fre`re Jean mocks those monks who spend their lives in study and reading (52, 56, 57). A second aspect of reading in Rabelais is advised 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 didactic view of reading, which outlines a passive role for the reader, are the analogy in the prologue 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 active, 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 authorcentered 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 reading. While Gargantua looks for a religious interpretation, Fre`re Jean compares the reading process 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 interpretation; 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 communicationbased 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 manuscripts 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 active role for his own readers. Here we see Rabelais’s exploitation of the typographic book, references to printing, and use of visual style (Rawles 1997: 9). The tension between descriptions of reading and of writing in Rabelais’s work shows him to be a transitional figure in early modern views of communication, as Marshall McLuhan demonstrated forty years ago. But in addition, recent attention to reading by scholars of print, publication, and the physical book gives a more concrete meaning to the subject of

Reception and Influence in France reading in Rabelais and suggests a new direction for research by Rabelais scholars. Readings: Cathleen M. Bauschatz, “ ‘Une description 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’: Didacticism in Rabelais’s Pantagruel and Gargantua,” MLS 19.1 (1989): 37–49; Barry Lydgate, “Printing, Narrative and the Genesis of the Rabelaisian Novel,” RR 71.4 (1980): 345–73; Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); Stephen Rawles, “What Did Rabelais Really Know about Printing and Publishing?” Editer et traduire Rabelais a` travers les aˆges, ed. Paul J. Smith (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi [Faux Titre], 1997). Cathleen M. Bauschatz

RECEPTION AND INFLUENCE IN FRANCE The great number of editions of Rabelais’s fictional works (the New Rabelais Bibliography 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 Gre`ve, Rabelais’s influence on his contemporaries was profound, varied, and immediate. 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 PuyHerbaut, Franc¸ois Le Picart, and Guillaume Postel 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 magpie, 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 PuyHerbaut]” (ch. 32). Some imitations like Franc¸ois 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 fiction because he reacted to them by rewriting them. Among his sixteenth-century readers we find

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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 simplement plaisans” is mitigated. Narratives by Noe¨l du Fail, Barthe´lemy Aneau (Alector, 1560), Nicolas de Cholie`res, 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 Satyre me´nippe´e (1593) and in works by Agrippa d’Aubigne´ and Marnix de Saint-Aldegonde. The virulent Rabelais reforme´ (1619) by the Jesuit Franc¸ois Garasse attacked the Protestant Pierre Du Moulin violently by relegating him to the detestable followers of Rabelais. Franc¸ois 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 Franc¸is Villon and Cle´ment Marot, he increasingly became a popular 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 rabele´sique [1638]) and other festivities. Rabelais continued to be read and admired by libertine authors like Gassendi, Naude´, Guy Patin, Cyrano de Bergerac, SaintAmant, and Scarron. However, the age of classicism tended to disapprove of Rabelais’s extravagances, as is seen in the statement of La Bruye`re: “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, Molie`re quotes him in his comedies, and Racine alludes to him in his only comedy Les Plaideurs (1668). The seventeenth century marked the beginning of a linguistic interest in the language of

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Rabelais, as is visible in Randle Cotgrave’s French-English Dictionary (1611) and the lexical works by Gilles Me´nage and Furetie`re. This interest goes with the great editions of Rabelais’s works, published in Amsterdam, meant for the French market: the first attempt, including a lexical commentary and a life of Rabelais, was issued by the Elzevier printing house (1663, several [pirated] re-editions), which in 1711 was to be followed by the monumental Amsterdam edition 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 Beaumarchais, Diderot, Andre´ Che´nier, 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 preoccupation with biense´ance is especially visible from the numerous editions of Rabelais in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, being “abridged, disciplined, bowdlerised, purged, anthologized, all in the name of decency, and under such labels as Le Rabelais moderne, Le Rabelais populaire or Le Rabelais classique” (Richard Cooper). Andre´ Gre´ty’s ope´ra-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 literary 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 illustrations of Rabelais’s works, Gustave Dore´ expressed his gloomy Gothic vision of Rabelais. In the twentieth century, Rabelais continues to symbolize creative liberty, although for the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Ce´line 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 Vale`re 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 Rabelais’s life on stage. The nouveau romancier Michel Butor wrote some influential critical essays on Rabelais (Rabelais ou c’e´tait pour rire, 1972). Another Minuit-novelist, Franc¸ois Bon, edited his works, wrote an essay (La folie Rabelais, 1992), and worked allusions to Rabelais into his novels. Michel Radon wrote a biographical 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 dictionaries of etymologies, proverbs, or citations), touristic and culinary guide books, as well as the Internet search engines show that at least his legend is still very much alive in the French language and culture. Readings: Jacques Boulenger, Rabelais a` travers les aˆges (Paris: Le Divan, 1925); Richard Cooper, “Le ve´ritable Rabelais de´forme´,” Editer et traduire Rabelais a` travers les aˆges, ed. Paul J. Smith (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997); Marcel De Gre`ve, L’interpre´tation de Rabelais au XVIe sie`cle (Geneva: Droz, 1961); Guy Demerson, Rabelais (Paris: Fayard, 1991); Donald M. Frame, Franc¸ois Rabelais. A Study (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977); Stephen Rawles and M. A. Screech, A New Rabelais Bibliography: Editions of Rabelais before 1626 (Geneva: Droz, 1987); L. Saine´an, L’influence et la re´putation de Rabelais (Paris: Gamber, 1930). Paul J. Smith

REFORMATION Although Rabelais had little liking for John Calvin, Rabelais, like Calvin, ended his days a virtual refugee. Rabelais had fled to the city of Metz shortly after the publication 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 fontes) and the exercise of critical discernment on those documents—might result in retaliation from the Sorbonne or even the crown. The Faculty 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 Rabelais, like his protectress Marguerite de Navarre, was an evangelical rather than a Protestant (the distinction being that evangelicals did not wish to leave the Catholic Church, but rather wanted to reform it from within by applying certain Protestant criteria, such as reliance on Scripture alone for revelation rather than on the twotiered Catholic system of authority, based on Scripture twinned with tradition). Yet it is certainly 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 evangelism by criticizing contemporary techniques of textual criticism (as well as the legal profession), thereby undermining accepted authorities. Particularly in Gargantua, which was published in 1534, probably just prior to the Affaire des Placards, Rabelais clearly and cogently argued the case for evangelical doctrine with its advocacy of communal, public confession rather than private 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 theology. Rabelais also attacked clerical corruption, the distortions of the Sorbonne’s scholastic approach to texts, and religious superstition in Gargantua. While in the Third Book Rabelais prudently refrained from further direct religious satire, he continued, albeit less explicitly, to destabilize contemporary systems of knowing and world-views through his characterization of Panurge, a skeptic never satisfied with any answer who repeatedly turned systems of knowledge upside down. Finally, the Parlement roundly denounced the Fourth Book for its satire concerning 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 Rabelais 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,

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speech scaffolded on the truth of Scripture rather than adorned with rhetoric for purely aesthetic purposes). He practiced biblical precepts (“Remembering 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 understand 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 manipulation of rhetoric and tropes of the Reformation is concerned. The Catholic hierarchy need not have been so concerned that any sort of unified, monolithic endorsement of protoProtestant dogma might emerge from Rabelais’s work. When Luther, Calvin, and other Protestants called for the Bible to be translated into the vernacular, the unanticipated consequence was a Babel of language unleashed, a plethora of perspectives and interpretative possibilities that complicate a formerly fairly orderly intellectual universe (see Interpretations). This phenomenon is especially pronounced in Rabelais: multiple meanings result, suggesting a linguistic variant 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 always to be mistrusted. Readings: Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Ge´rard Defaux, Pantagruel et les sophistes. Contribution a` l’histoire de l’humanisme chre´tien au XVIe sie`cle (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973); Jan Miernowski, “Literature and Metaphysics: Rabelais and the Poetics of Misunderstanding,” ER 35: 131–51; Michael Screech, Rabelais. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979). Catharine Randall

RELIGION A central preoccupation of Rabelais and his contemporaries that left its mark on

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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 criticisms that the schismatic Martin Luther and the more moderate evangelism movement had leveled against the Catholic Church had institutions like the Sorbonne and papacy on their guard. During such times of censure and summary executions, positions on religion were not expressed 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 appropriate (or amusingly inappropriate) for the characters and situations. Consequently, in the matter of religion, Rabelais has been all things to all people. However, a selective review of the predominant positions can elucidate the contentious issues in Rabelais’s text. In 1922, Abel Lefranc wrote a preface to Pantagruel 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 hypocritical 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, Rabelais 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 Rabelais as a champion of a simple, unadorned Gospel and an adherent of the evangelism movement of the stripe of Lefe`vre d’Etaples, Guillaume Bric¸onnet and Desiderius Erasmus. Febvre’s attachment to history was unwavering, and his Rabelais lived in a world circumscribed by

environment, with friends like Jean and Guillaume du Bellay and enemies like Guillaume Postel and Noe¨l Be´da. Febvre’s Rabelais engaged 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 heterodoxy, squabbles, and power plays, particularly 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 Warburg school took Febvre’s desire to place Rabelais in context to heart. Their commitment to Rabelais’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 reserved for the wayward. The focus is on close reading to capture the spirit of the letter of Rabelais. We could add that Rabelais often uses his characters to take any number of sides in his parodies of contemporary debates. This is the case in the discussion surrounding the foundation of the Abbey of The´le`me (G 50); the debate between Panurge and Thaumaste, the English theologian (P 17); the reactions of the main characters to the storm in the Quart livre (4BK 21); and the encounter with the Papimanes and Papefigues (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 sympathies for what would later become the Reformation movement, like Marguerite de Navarre and Cle´ment 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 Pauline scriptures). However, most critics agree that

Religion Rabelais was no “lutherien” in the strictest sense, although in his time the word was rather indiscriminately 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 Ce´ard has noted, a playful fascination and a condemnation of future-telling astrologie judiciaire (“judicial astrology”). The same must be said for the various 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 debate over what the “plus hault sens” (higher meaning) might be. Those scholars who emphasize Rabelais’s materialism contest its existence, but most readers still wonder where the “substantificque 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 religious expression evolved over time. The watershed 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 religious 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 Fre`re 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. Parodies 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

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lifted up unto Thee) is used to refer to the male anatomy. Talk of the sacrament of marriage between 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. Fre`re 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. Fre`re Jean has the monopoly 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 harangue 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 preceptors, wreak havoc on the young giant (G 20–22): their vain daily routines, set like monastic clockwork, actually seem to distance the young giant from his faith. Fre`re 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 Abbey of The´le`me (G 50–56), a utopian “antiinstitution” that cuts a sharp contrast with monastic 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

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be more aggressive toward the Sorbonne. Critics have seen the systematic replacement of the´ologien with sophiste in the 1540 and 1542 editions of Gargantua and Pantagruel as either a biting comment that adds insult to injury or a meaningful concession to the threat of censorship. However 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 Bakhtin 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 quasideification of the most human of emotions. At the very least, laughter, as man’s exclusive property, sits at the heart of Rabelais’s humanism. Perhaps it offers “redemption” as well—for even if laughter is no Messiah in Rabelais, while reading 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 Ce´ard, La nature et les prodiges, L’insolite au 16e sie`cle (Geneva: Droz, 1977); Reuben C. Cholakian, “A Re-Examination of the Tempest Scene in the Quart Livre,” FS 21.2 (April 1967): 104; Richard Cooper, “Rabelais et l’Eglise,” Rabelais en son demi-mille´naire: actes du colloque international de Tours (24–29 septembre 1984) (Geneva: Droz, 1988); Ge´rard Defaux, Pantagruel et les sophistes. Contribution a` l’histoire de l’humanisme chre´tien au XVIe sie`cle (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973); Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, 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,” Me´langes de linguistique franc¸aise 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 Franc¸ois Rabelais (Paris: Champion, 1912–27); Claude A. Mayer, “The Genesis of a Rabelaisian Character: Menippus and Fre`re Jean,”

FS 6 (1952): 219–29; Lynette Muir, “The Abbey and the City: Two Aspects of the Christian Community,” AJFS 14: 32–38; Franc¸ois Rigolot, “ ‘Enigme’ et ‘Prophe´tie’: Les langages de l’herme´tisme chez Rabelais,” Oeuvres et critiques 11.1 (1986): 37–47; Michael A. Screech, The Rabelaisian Marriage: Aspects of Rabelais’s Religion, Ethics and Comic Philosophy (London: Arnold, 1958); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais and the Challenge of the Gospel: Evangelism, Reformation, 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 Renaissance corresponds almost perfectly to the sixteenth century. Jules Michelet, the French historian 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 philosophies. Based primarily in philology and its methods, the humanist movement that accompanies the Renaissance looked to Athens and Rome for models. Confident that the complete foundation for scientific, moral, and political systems was already present in the ancients’ writings, 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, intellectuals 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 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 inquiry had to reflect the unprecedented complexity that nagged intellectuals by midcentury. Consequently, “variety” reoccurs as a leitmotif in texts written at that time, and traces of relativism accompany 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 Renaissance, and consequently of the values it stood for, shows through in the institutions that served to educate the elite of the time. Numerous treatises written by aristocrats recommended a more practical education that emphasized mathematics (ballistic), geography, and history. Likewise, the rising bourgeoisie expected a more practical education for its children, with a focus on arithmetic and legal education. This utilitarian approach 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 asserted the “precellence” or unequaled excellence of French (Gallic) civilization and insisted on the relativist relationship between history and its institutions and, in doing so, helped to develop a nationalistic sentiment. In fact, historians used relativism as a weapon against the cultural domination 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-

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ess and consequently cannot be invoked to create a cultural order among civilizations. For this reason, many Renaissance thinkers become primarily observers rather than system builders. There are very few periods in history where politics and culture become as closely intertwined as they did during the Renaissance. PostMachiavellian 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 compass, or the printing press, but the individual. Indeed, it is during the Renaissance that the individual asserts himself as both the source and end of knowledge. The Renaissance drew a parallel between the idea of history and the self who attempts to trace his own existence amid a series of carefully reported incidents. During the Renaissance, 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 acting subject has much to do with this new form of self-expression. Literature, for example, witnessed both the birth of the modern hero (Panurge 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 ancients. Practice counted more than ever and relegated 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

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world; they also placed him on an equal footing with any other source of authority (God included). Providence no longer dictated the subject’s existence and a new freedom of thought and consciousness pointed to the horizon. For all these reasons, the Renaissance represents a key historical period in which the individual slowly abandoned looking toward the classical past in order to create his own becoming. With his mind fixed on the future, the individual emerging during the Renaissance would soon turn inward to find the necessary resources to write from the perspective of individual human 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); Philippe Desan, ed., Humanism in Crisis: The Decline of the French Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991); Jules Michelet, “La Renaissance,” Renaissance et Re´forme, L’histoire de France, vol. 9 (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1982). Philippe Desan

RHETORIC Because of its verve, inventiveness, 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 persuasion through speech. As one of the boisterous tipplers or “bien ivres” in chapter 5 of Gargantua points out jokingly, however, drunkenness is indeed the mother of eloquence: “ ‘Is there anyone who hasn’t been turned into an orator by having his glass continually refilled?’—as Horace puts it” (“Facundi calices quem non fecere disertum?” [GP 17]) (see Propos des bien ivres). Notwithstanding its aura of spontaneity, the Pantagrueline epic is in fact permeated with a concern for verbal expressiveness and efficiency, both key traits of humanism that Paul J. Smith has rightly described as a “rhetorical preoccupation” or “callilogia.” Borrowed from Guillaume Bude´, this neologism is diametrically opposed to the medieval and scholastic preference for dialectic, which Bude´ associates with a dislike of language or “misologia.” This rhetorical preoccupation is evident in the

composition of the work, particularly in the expertly cultivated abundance of the elocutio, which, as Terence Cave notes, is in keeping with the recommendations of Erasmus in his De duplici copia verborum et rerum (1511). Characterized as a “cornucopia of gaiety” (3BK prol.) in the Third Book prologue, Rabelais’s text with its interminable lists at times seems more reminiscent 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 favored 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 “e´loge des braguettes,” or Praise of Codpieces [3BK 8]), has been interpreted both as a derision of Galen’s theory about the generation 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 example of this genre, “l’e´loge 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. Furthermore, the entire conclusion of the Third Book (49–52) constitutes a panegyric of the Pantagruelion, a plant with a thousand uses that is identified with hemp-flax and interpreted in almost 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 division into parts: narration, confirmation, refutation, and peroration. In keeping with humanistic efforts to restore rhetoric and its five traditional parts in their entirety, moreover, Rabelais’s “rhetorical preoccupation” extends well beyond the processes of style alone. In addition to considerations related to the dispositio (arrangement) as we have seen above, the dispute by signs between Thaumaste and Panurge (P 19) refers to

Ringing Island 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 Rame´e) reform of the curriculum and the attendant restructuring of the domains of rhetoric and dialectic, as reflected in the Fourth Book prologue where Pierre Galland 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 reserved for music, seems to refer to Aristotle’s Rhetoric (3.14); and the Fourth Book harbors numerous technical terms belonging to rhetorical nomenclature, whose meaning is elucidated in the Briefve De´claration (for example, “prosopopoeia,” “period,” and “solecism”). This selfreflective tendency often announces explicitly and facetiously the very processes used, as we see in Episte´mon’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 Episte´mon obscenely, referring to the rhetorical process of separating a word in two parts. Throughout, however, in Rabelais’s rhetoric in action and in his self-reflective tendencies, eloquence is never envisioned 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 potential rhetorical figure in their own right, following the example of Fre`re Jean who legitimizes his own use of swear words by invoking the model of Cicero: “That was just verbal decoration,” he says, “just Ciceronian rhetoric” (G 39). Readings: Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text. Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Guy Demerson, “Tradition rhe´torique et cre´ation litte´raire chez Rabelais,” Etudes de lettres 2 (1984): 3–23; Anna Ogino, Les

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e´loges paradoxaux dans le Tiers et le Quart livres de Rabelais. Enqueˆte sur le comique et le cosmique a` la Renaissance (Tokyo: Tosho, 1989); Paul J. Smith, “Fable e´sopique et dispositio e´pidictique. Pour une approche rhe´torique du Pantagruel,” Rabelais pour le XXIe sie`cle, actes du colloque du Centre d’e´tudes supe´rieures de la Renaissance (Chinon-Tours 1994), ed. Michel Simonin, ER 33 (Geneva: Droz, 1998): 91– 104; Paul J. Smith, “Aspects de la rhe´torique rabelaisienne,” 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 Prognostication had been in print since 1553, but it was only in 1562 that Ringing Island (L’Isle sonante, par M. Francoys Rabelais, qui n’a point encores este´ imprime´e, ne mise en lumie`re: en laquelle est continue´e 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 enigmatic publication, a satire of the papacy and the Church, has been the object of much speculation regarding both its authorship and the circumstances of its appearance during a time of religious 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 Orle´ans, with another edition, now lost, published in Geneva. But the virulent religious criticism does not necessarily 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 (Cinquiesme livre des faicts et dicts Heroı¨ques du bon

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Pantagruel), published in 1564, and a manuscript from the sixteenth century, neither of which reproduces the last chapter, the Island of the Ignorant (“Apedeftes”), or the paragraph that precedes 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 chapters) 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 (“Island of the Ignorant”). Ringing Island, where Rabelais plays with equivocal variations on papegaut (literally “parrot,” but pape means “pope”) and gaut, is the favorite habitat of “clergyhawks, monkhawks, preacherhawks, abbothawks, bishophawks, 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 margaux (magpies) near Terre-Neuve, evoked by Jacques Cartier in his travel narratives. The author criticizes the customs of the papal court, its institutions (bells, fasting), and the temporal organization of the Church (monastic institutions, orders of knighthood, financing of the clergy). Religious implications also figure as undercurrents in the episodes of the Isles of Ferrements (“Toolmaking,” 5BK 9) and Cassade (“Lying Illusions” 5BK 10). The idea of the Isle of Ferrements (iron tools and weapons), where swords and knives grow on trees, is borrowed from the Disciple of Pantagruel, an anonymous work published in 1538 that clearly left its mark on Rabelais’s Fourth Book: equivocal innuendos, marriages 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 Fourrez and their archduke Grippeminault are described as monsters, signals the corruption and

venality of the justice system, as well as the relentlessness 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 parodic 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 Administration, should be read within the context of the radical reorganization of that office in the midsixteenth century. It is completely foreign to the stylistic characteristics of the rest of the text, which correspond to the artificial linguistic system Rabelais set up in his other works. The sharpness of the religious and judicial criticism of Ringing Island brings to mind the acerbity 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 circumstances, one might hypothesize that Ringing Island is a Rabelaisian text contemporaneous with the Fourth Book, written during the Gallican crisis 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 Rabelais, the editors have added a second group of episodes containing a sea journey, which they append to the text as a conclusion to the Pantagrueline chronicles. Readings: Alfred Glauser, Le faux Rabelais (Paris: Nizet, 1975); Mireille Huchon, Rabelais grammarien. De l’histoire du texte aux proble`mes d’authenticite´, ER 16 (Geneva: Droz, 1981); G. Mallary Masters, Rabelaisian Dialectic and the Platonic-Hermetic Tradition (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 Authenticity of the Cinquiesme Livre de Pantagruel: A Quantitative Study,” ER 13 (1976): 1–64. Mireille Huchon

RONDIBILIS (3BK 31–34) Physician consulted by Panurge in chapters 31–34 of the Third Book, whose derogatory views on

Ruach women’s anatomy and character, along with chapters 15 and 22 of Pantagruel, contribute to Rabelais’s long-standing reputation as an antifeminist. Of the five “treatments” for concupiscence 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 possibility 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 Hippocrates 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, capricious, inconstant, and imperfect” (3BK 32)— thus prone to infidelity. Because Pantagruel makes an explicit connection between Rondibilis and Rabelais, who supposedly performed together in a morality play in Montpellier, scholars such as Abel Lefranc often 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 detractors of women revived by La Broderie in 1542. However, Rondibilis’s preference for Plato over Galen, though approved by Pantagruel, arguably 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 The´le`me suggest that Rondibilis’s opinion, while representing a frequently held view in the Renaissance, should not be considered identical to that of the author. Readings: Roland Antonioli, Rabelais et la me´decine, ER 12 (Geneva: Droz, 1976); Donald Frame, Rabelais. A Study (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London: Duckworth, 1979). Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

RONSARD, PIERRE DE (1524–85) Prolific poet and leading member of the Ple´iade who wrote in a wide range of genres. His work in-

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cludes lyric sonnet sequences, odes after Pindar and Horace, mythological hymns, elegies, eclogues and an unfinished epic. Ronsard encouraged 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 Franc¸ois 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. Retrospective 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 instance, 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 intriguing overlap remains. Although belonging to a younger generation with very different aspirations, Ronsard’s literary debut in 1549–50 falls between the 1548 and 1552 editions of Rabelais’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 Lebe`gue, “Ronsard lecteur de Rabelais,” BHR 16 (1954): 82–85; Marcel de Gre`ve, L’interpre´tation de Rabelais au XVIe sie`cle (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 before he wrote the Fourth Book, doubtless knew the connotations of Ruach in the Old Testament,

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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 nothing—only wind” (GP 471; 4BK 43). Their houses are weathervanes; the poor nourish themselves 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 Lutherans who believe in the real presence in the Eucharist of the natural body and blood of Christ, and whose detractors called them “Fleischfresser” 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 windmills, 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 Countries. In addition, the religious tradition of Holland 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 spiritually present. This belief constituted the greatest difference between them and the Lutherans. Cornelius 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 Quaresmeprenant, an incarnation of Charles V, who persecuted the Reformers in Holland but who ultimately “breaks his nose” on their stubborn resistance. Readings: Jean-Jacques Altmeyer, Les pre´curseurs de la Re´forme 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 (London: Hamledon, 1990); Edwin M. Duval, “La messe, la ce`ne et le voyage sans fin du Quart Livre,” ER 21 (1988): 131–141; Florence Weinberg, “L’isle de Ruach,” Rabelais et les lec¸ons du rire (Orle´ans: Paradigme, 2000): 195–205. Florence M. Weinberg

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 education 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 convinced him to enter holy orders before being appointed almoner to the king in 1525. Francis rewarded 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 Cle´ment Marot, consists of light and graceful verse—mostly rondeaux and chansons— as well as witty epigrams. He epitomized the style attacked by the Ple´iade. 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 SaintGelais among his model authors, and at the very end of Gargantua. During the excavation of the foundation for The´le`me, 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 The´le`me

when Gargantua interprets it as an allegory of the religious troubles facing France. Fre`re 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 “undoubtedly Melain de Saint-Gelais,” but there seems to be little basis for this identification. Readings: Henri Joseph Molinier, Mellin de SaintGelais (Geneva: Slatkine, 1968); Jean-Yves Pouilloux, Rabelais: rire est le propre de l’homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1993); Elizabeth Zegura and Marcel Tetel, Rabelais 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 readers today. Sandwiched between the obvious satire of the Ecolier Limousin (6) and the serious humanist message of Gargantua’s letter on education (8), we find a list of 139 (in the 1542 edition) mostly imaginary books in the real Parisian 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 concrete and abstract, are mocking many late medieval 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-

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gesting that theology and law will be the main targets. There is certainly some joking about both, often so complex that a detailed explanation would occupy several pages. Beda de optimitate triparum implies that the celebrated (and by evangelical humanists, execrated) Sorbonne theologian 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 Racquedenari de bobelinandis glosse Accursiane baguenaudis repetitio enucidiluculidissima (OC 1264 n.28) pokes fun at medieval law, the celebrated commentator Accursius, glosses (the humanists’ 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 macaronic 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 Ortwin Gratius (a German humanist [1475–1542]). Ars honeste pettandi in societate per M. Ortuinum 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 erudition on a subject that will never be mentioned again. It forces the reader to jump from one language to another and from subject to subject: theology, law, medicine, even social mores (Le culpele´ 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 importantly, 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 Library of Saint-Victor,” Lapidary Inscriptions: Renaissance 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 cre´ativite´ ne´ologique: Quelques remarques sur l’absurdite´ d’un monstre linguistique,” ER 39 (Geneva: Droz, 2000): 59–85; Paul Lacroix, Catalogue de la Bibliothe`que de l’Abbaye de Saint-Victor au seizie`me sie`cle (Paris: Techener, 1862). Barbara C. Bowen

SAINTS, IMAGINARY Following the medieval tradition (Eustache Deschamps, Jean Molinet, the Sermons joyeux, the sotties or fools’ plays, etc.), Rabelais allows a multitude of imaginary saints into his works. Although it is sometimes 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 evoking them. Of the about 120 occurrences of official 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 different imaginary saints; cf. Merceron 2002). During 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 allusion to the giant mentule (“john-thomas,” phallus) of Gargantua. Additionally called vit (“prick”), the Gargantua’s appendix also transpires in the Saint Vit (⫽Guy) of the 1535 edition. 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 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 ne`fles (“medlars”), Saint Pansard or Saint Fatpaunch (from panes, meaning “big belly”) is a facetious saint who personifies the Big Belly of the Carnival giant, who was already mentioned by Gauthier 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 Island of Cheli (4BK 10). Other imaginary or dubious saints partake in the realms of bawdiness and scatology, such as Saint Balleran (ms. BNF, 5BK 32 bis) or Saint Bal(l)etrou (Saint Shakehole): “ ‘A turd for them, a turd!’ exclaims Panurge. ‘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 invented 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 imaginary saints. Several came from the medieval tradition, and we know that he borrowed Saint Alipentin (“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 always added new layers of semantic complexity to his texts. Readings: Donald Attwater with Catherine Rachel John, The Penguin Dictionary of Saints (London: Penguin Books, 1995); Henri Clouzot, “Saint Guodegrin,” RER 8 (1910): 361–63; H. Folet, “Rabelais et les saints pre´pose´s aux maladies,” RER 4 (1906): 199– 216; Claude Gaignebet, A` plus haut sens. L’e´sote´risme spirituel et charnel de Rabelais, 2 vols. (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1986); Raymond Mauny, “Rabelais et les Saints,” BAARD 12.8 (1969): 239–43;

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Jacques E. Merceron, Dictionnaire des saints imaginaires et face´tieux (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 prudently raised doubts about the reliability of some of the old Saints’ Lives. Erasmus (1466?–1536) had made some ironic comments about “superstitious” devotions toward saints in his In Praise of Folly (1511) (chap. 50–51). However, it is during Rabelais’s own time that reformists became 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 Melanchthon, 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 articles 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

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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 He´rodote [chap. 38, 1566]), debunked idolatry and superstition, focusing particularly 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 popular 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 material on two distinct levels: a rhetorical and “poetic” 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 utterances 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 Arnauld’s head” [3BK 42]), curses and maledictions (“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 Anthony” [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, incongruous unions between the realm of sainthood and other areas such as wine, sex, and scatology. For example, the pun on service divin— service du vin (divine service—wine service [G 27]) runs through many hagiographical occurrences, 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 curious 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 ballocks, 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 donkey” (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 fostered 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 crossroad 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. Gargamelle, 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 edition). 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 ular illness can inflict that same illness in human beings and animals. This idea, Rabelais insists, is blasphemous, scandalous, and steeped in paganism: “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 characterized 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 protection (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 example, 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 calendar 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 shootwarming saints from the July–August “dog-days” period!

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Many other practices related to saints receive brief mentions in Rabelais’s works, often in humorous 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]); children’s games (“Saint Cosma, I come to worship you” and “At Saint Founded” [G 22]), etc. Finally, according to Claude Gaignebet, although not directly mentioned, three saints play an underlying 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: Penguin Books, 1995); Henri Clouzot, “Saint Guodegrin,” RER 8 (1910): 361–63; H. Folet, “Rabelais et les saints pre´pose´s aux maladies,” RER 4 (1906): 199– 216; Claude Gaignebet, A` plus haut sens. L’e´sote´risme spirituel et charnel de Rabelais, 2 vols. (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1986); Raymond Mauny, “Rabelais et les saints,” BAARD 2.8 (1969): 239–43; Jacques E. Merceron, Dictionnaire des saints imaginaires et face´tieux (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 disappearance, to Panurge (3BK 2), which has generally been interpreted as an oversight by Rabelais. Considering that “salmigondis” is a type of ragout, a hotchpotch of leftover meats, one could also see a design behind the property’s reassignment. Reminiscent of the farce and the coq-a`l’aˆne, 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

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favor of the more serious “medical doctor Franc¸ois 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 Papimanes episode, where Homenaz’s farce gives Episte´mon diarrhea (4BK 51), as well as in Panurge’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 applause, 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 Fre`re Jean’s culinary army assembled to fight the chitterlings (4BK 40), and second, as one of the offerings 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 Rabelais’s strategy by turning it into the target of a more literary satire. Readings: Franc¸ois Dumont, “La donation du Salmigondin, Tiers livre II,” Franc¸ois Rabelais. Ouvrage publie´ pour le quatrie`me 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 episode of Satin (GP 5BK 30–31; OC 29–30) consists 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 continues 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 descriptions of this fabulous animal, known as rare, solitary, and ferocious—very different from the description of the gentle animal found in the Medamothi 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 translations from Pliny’s Natural History, while others 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 figure of Ouy-Dire or Hearsay. Among his followers are mentioned great names from ancient and modern times (Herodotus, Pliny, Marco Polo, Jacques Cartier, etc.). For most critics since Verdun-L. Saulnier (Jean Ce´ard, Daniel Me´nager, Paul J. Smith, etc.), the episode deals with problems of ecphrasis and items such as scientific (ir)reliability and usefulness, direct observation versus the practice of borrowing from authoritative 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 l’inauthenticite´ du Cinquie`me livre (Paris: Nizet, 1975); Verdun-L. Saulnier, Rabelais II. Rabelais dans son enqueˆte. Etude sur le Quart et le Cinquie`me livre (Paris: SEDES, 1982); the articles of Jean Ce´ard, Paul J. Smith, Daniel Me´nager, and Marie Madeleine Fontaine, in Le cinquiesme livre, ed. Franco Giacone (Geneva: Droz, 2001). Paul J. Smith

SATIRE (SATYRE) As even its spelling suggests, 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 menippe´e (1594) summarizes the diverse influences that had combined throughout the century to accentuate the inherent hybrid character of a genre predestined to absorb various influences: (1) A poem criticizing someone’s public or private vices in the tradition of Lucilius, 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 oxtongues. 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 explicit fashion. All these disparate traditions blend into Rabelais’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 versions 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. Alcofrybas’s vigorous yet comic assertions of truthfulness (“to any point short of the stake”) accompanying his fantastic tales and Panurge’s verbal virtuosity and public humiliation of his hypocritical and pseudo-erudite victims are all examples 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 collaboration to unfold its full impact and is therefore susceptible to a plurality of meanings. This development had seen its beginnings in

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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 Fre`re Jean and Episte´mon 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 Chitterlings (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 victims: covered in excrement after a rather harmless trick played by Fre`re Jean. This scene confirms Episte´mon’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 ambiguity and the plurality of interpretative possibilities. The Third Book’s central question of Panurge’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 ignores his personal responsibility to know himself, which is spelled out several times, especially in the Her Trippa episode (25), where Panurge’s severe criticism of the astrologer’s lack of selfknowledge actually amounts to involuntary selfsatirization. Throughout the text, we see more localized 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 exemplary 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-

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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 departure, 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 somewhat toned down in favor of a more straightforward religious satire, particularly in the “Papimanes” 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 authority and dogmatism in true Menippean fashion. It is therefore not primarily erudition that characterizes 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 encounters with disturbing monsters, enigmatic “thawing words,” and strange peoples all call on the readers’ input, which might be the Menippean satire’s main contribution to the overall orientation of the text, echoing and fulfilling the demands 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; Ge´rard Defaux, “Rabelais, le Quart Livre et la crise gallicane de 1551: Satire et alle´gorie,” Rabelais agonistes: du rieur au prophe`te (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Bernhard Fabian, ed., SATVRA. Ein Kompendium moderner Studien zur Satire (Hildesheim, NY, 1975); John W. Jolliffe, “Satyre: 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 franc¸aise (Geneva: Slatkine, 1984); Bernd Renner, “Du coq-a`-l’aˆne a` la me´nippe´enne: le me´lange comme expression lit-

te´raire de la satire rabelaisienne” Ph.D diss. Princeton University, 2000. Bernd Renner

SCATOLOGY The study of excrement. If Rabelais enjoys an enduring popular reputation, it has most often been attributed to the happy fiction of Maıˆtre Franc¸ois as a “beuveur tresillustre” (illustrious drunkard), or a “goutteux tresprecieux” (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 himself. 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. Moreover, they perform all of these too-human functions using the most unblushing, frank vocabulary then current, setting a benchmark for all subsequent Western authors from Jonathan Swift to Antonine Maillet. It could be argued that Rabelais invented the excretory or scatological arts in literature—that is, the representation of pissing, 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 experimental 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 constipation (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 attention to the scatological and to its efficacy as a literary device seems to have waned in the decade 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 suggests. Because of the comparatively greater popularity of the first two books in the chronicles, however, the impression of Rabelais as a joyous and unabashed scatolog persists. In his marked enthusiasm for “bathroom humor” he was actually not, it must be noted, exceptional among contemporaries, nor did he represent a departure from many of his predecessors. The scabrous and the scatological were the stockin-trade of the vernacular medieval fabliaux, facetiæ, farce, and mock-epic traditions, so adroitly exploited by Panurge and Fre`re Jean and so evidently appreciated by the indulgent giant princes they serve. Marguerite de Navarre’s relatively circumspect Heptame´ron, composed in the 1540s but published posthumously in 1558, includes more than one such incident, as do Noe¨l du Fail’s Propos rustiques (1547) and Bonaventure Des Pe´riers’s Nouvelles re´cre´ations et joyeux devis (1558). All of them are indebted to such earlier collections featuring excremental episodes as the fifteenthcentury Cent nouvelles nouvelles and Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century Decameron. Moreover, the tradition, already irrevocably associated with the adjective “Rabelaisian” by century’s end, continued unabated in the works of E´tienne Tabourot des Accord, whose Escraignes dijonnoises (1588) are made up almost exclusively of scatological anecdotes, Cholie`res, The´ophile, Sorel, Scarron, and others. Rhetorical mud- or shit-slinging also has a distinguished 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 following 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 Gargantua (G 30) and Panurge (3BK 25) repeat versions of the anticlerical soubriquet “maschemerde” (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

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as adventures on the islands of Tapinois (4BK 29–32), Farouche (4BK 35–42) and of the Gastrolatres (4BK 57–62). However much scatological 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 issues 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 Rabelais, which reached European and Western academic readers in translation in the late 1960s and early 1970s, offered one solution to that problem—or, rather, attempted to show the problem itself to be something of an historical fiction. Bakhtin’s work even foregrounded the importance of the “material bodily lower stratum” in efforts to interpret the author and his era. Bakhtin’s “discovery,” as Samuel Kinser encapsulates it, is that “it is no longer possible . . . to treat Rabelais’s ‘low,’ popular aspects as incidental de´cor to an essentially elite masterpiece” (254). Consequently, and in fitting concert with the rise of microhistory and cultural studies, interest in both restating and reinstating the scatological in Rabelais, together with the obscene and other features long thought inconvenient and incidental, has grown. The resulting labors include such painstaking fieldwork as Claude Gaignebet’s exhaustive 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. Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. He´le`ne Iswolsky (Boston: MIT Press, 1968); Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Claude Gaignebet, A plus haut sens. L’e´sote´risme spirituel et charnel de Rabelais (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1986); Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival (Berkeley: University of California

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Press, 1990); Jeff Persels, “ ‘Straightened in the Bowels,’ or Concerning the Rabelaisian Trope of Defecation,” 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 recovery of logical works of Aristotle previously unknown 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, action, and affections. Applied to the various sciences, 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 approaches 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 “confusing 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 systematized the whole gamut of doctrinal and ethical questions. Its best and most famous expression was the Summa theologiae (1266–73) of the Dominican 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 increasingly 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 subschools proposing nuanced variations, quarreled

among themselves. In the print era, they produced for university classrooms numerous works of logic, many of them variations of the Summule of Peter of Spain (Pope John XXI, d. 1277). Editions 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 possible abuses in their science, scholastics nevertheless 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 humanitatis 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 dialectical principles was unquestionably more certain and valuable in an age of controversy than the admittedly more elegant but unsystematic approaches of the Fathers of the Church, whom the humanists sought to promote and substitute for medieval scholastic theologians. For both humanists and scholastics, therefore, there was too much at stake to compromise, and each side painted the other in caricature. Humanists lampooned scholastics as ignorant buffoons. Rabelais 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 Noe¨l Be´da and Pierre Cousturier equated humanists with blasphemers and heretics. Ironically, a balance between scholasticism 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 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 Profession 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 undiscovered 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. Pantagruel 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 literature to destruction” (P 8). Now that the art of printing has restored and circulated ancient languages everyone can become learned. “I see brigands, 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 cosmography, the study of the workings of the whole of

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nature. The student must learn languages faultlessly: Greek (via Plato), Latin (via Cicero), Hebrew, Chaldaic, and Arabic, respectively. He must pursue the liberal arts, avoiding astrology by embracing astronomy, and also immerse himself 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 saplings 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 Talmudists and kabbalists; and, by frequent anatomies, 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 reduced 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, curiosity, and application. It is equated with movement into and out of things, and with continual creation and self-perpetuation. After his epiphany, he tells his son: “for now that you are becoming 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 implement 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

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de nous) in legitimate marriage” (P 8) alleviates the burden of original sin. In his long life, Gargantua 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 emergency. If science is an abyssal relation with the unknown, 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 human 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 representing 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 anatomy. Spelled out in this crucial chapter is a credo of science affecting what follows in the other books. Pantagruel suddenly embraces the unknown (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 obscure 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 Pantagruel give way to mobilization of knowledge in Gargantua, while the Third Book affiliates science with doubt, and the Fourth Book calls into question any cohering or redemptive trait associated with learning. Great writers are defined by their sum of different, often conflicting, paradoxical 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 Montaigne later confirms, is a companion of conscience. Readings: James Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern 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, Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Tom Conley

SHAKESPEARE Evidence that Shakespeare read Rabelais is suggestive, if uncertain. The pedantic 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 dramatizing 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 invention. 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 replies, “You must borrow me Gargantua’s mouth first,” memories of Rabelais would suit the play’s

Sibyl 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 Rabelais’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 Fre`re Jean’s consoling celebration of cuckoldry (3BK 28; the play’s cynical Parolles, moreover, is a nastier Panurge). These and other parallels cannot be true intertextual 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, carnival reversal or festivity, and the utility to wise kingship of morally problematic and foxy cunning. 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 Panurge, 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. Readings: Huntington Brown, Rabelais in English Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933); Margaret Jones-Davies, “Paroles intertextuelles: Lecture intertextuelle de Parolles,” Collection Astraea 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 Haven, 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, chapters 16–18, Panurge follows Pantagruel’s advice 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

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Panurge’s folly. Among the many resonances of the episode are the place of prophecy in a Christian view of history, and fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury 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 baseless optimism, while Episte´mon moves from initial 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 Episte´mon’s reactions to her suggest a variety of lore about witches (old, ugly, solitary, poor) that circulated among both learned and illiterate contemporaries of Rabelais. In fact, except for her age, the Sibyl of Panzoult more resembles contemporary stereotypes about witches than she does classical or early Christian descriptions of the Sibyls. The Sibyls, usually described as ten in number, were ancient pagan prophetesses who, according to certain Fathers of the Church (particularly Lactantius, a.d. c. 300), were divinely inspired to predict the coming of Christ and describe 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 century b.c. and the seventh century a.d., and were polemically invoked by Jewish and Christian theologians. Early Christian writers, notably Lactantius 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 fifteenth century, when Neoplatonic philosophers such as Marsilio Ficino sought confirmation of Christian truth among supposed pre-Christian pagan writers such as Hermes Trismegistos (the thrice-great). (In reality, the texts were produced in the early centuries a.d., and show the influence of the new religion—hence their seemingly

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marvelous and prophetic confirmation of its doctrines.) In Rabelais’s era, Hermes and the ten Sibyls appeared together in the inlaid pavement of Siena cathedral (1480s) as prophets of the Incarnation. Readings: Peter Dronke, Hermes and the Sibyls: Continuations and Creations (Inaugural Lecture Delivered March 9, 1990) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (London: Duckworth, 1972). Walter Stephens

SILENI (G PROL) These grotesquely carved boxes containing precious substances, immediately compared to Socrates’s ludicrous appearance and divine wisdom, form the opening metaphor of the prologue to Gargantua. Although the image initially appears to provide a set of instructions for interpretation, the exhortation to seek a plus hault sens or higher meaning is complicated 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 translation 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 cautions against excessive manipulation of a text in order to extract a redemptive meaning (see Allegory). This questioning of medieval allegoretical practices in favor of individual contemplation (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 prologue’s status as the product of reading and interpretation. Rabelais juxtaposes close translations from Erasmus’s adage Sileni Alcibiadis with the reinscription of elements of Plato’s Symposium absent from Erasmus, notably a comic tone and references to drunkenness, thereby asserting the work’s humanist credentials and subtly conferring prestige on the prologue’s narrative stance. The tension between the grotesque and the sublime, and the use of the prologue to

problematize rather than clarify authorial intention, 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 meaning (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 de´fi des signes (Orle´ans: Paradigme, 1994); Raymond La Charite´, “Rabelais and the Silenic Text: The Prologue to Gargantua,” Rabelais’s Incomparable Book, ed. La Charite´ (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986). Jennifer Monahan

SKEPTICISM Critical comment on skepticism in the literature of the Renaissance in general, 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 perception 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 agreeably as possible, however, the Skeptic will follow undogmatically the general rules of societal behavior. In order to eradicate dogmatic opinion in himself and others, he will “oppose appearances to appearances,” using his reason to antirationalistic 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 accept assertions he finds unlikely before submitting them to logical and above all sensory veri-

Social Class fication—the opposite, in many ways, of Skeptical procedure. Rabelais, toward the end of his life and especially just after his death, had the reputation of being a skeptical mocker cast in the mold of Lucian, who was certainly one of his inspirations. Certain recent critics have taken a directly contrary line, seeing him as a “full Christian skeptic,” 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-inthe-wool skeptic. Such an attitude is hard to reconcile with Christianity in general, for the believer 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 unorthodox 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 witnessed at the deathbed of his patron Guillaume du Bellay: of the heavenly signs and portents preceding the demise and of the prophecies uttered 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 Mirandola had exploited the newly available Sextus 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,

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is in chapters 35 and 36 of the Third Book, in which the perplexed Panurge consults the supposed wisdom of Trouillogan, the Skeptical philosopher, who gives him the most infuriatingly slippery series of answers imaginable. If the answers 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 increasingly maddened Panurge. Rabelais gives the final word on the matter to the very authoritative figure of Gargantua, who expresses in no uncertain terms his disapproval of philosophers who do not talk straight. It is pretty safe to assume 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 Renaissance (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992); Richard Popkin, History of Scepticism 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 liberal 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, religious tensions, and financial difficulties developed, 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 suggest a much more socially conservative author.

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The first book, Pantagruel, contains the most numerous elements of a distinctly popular culture. As peasant revolts and religious violence challenged traditional social structure, Rabelais’s literary world focused more and more on the educated, nonnoble group to which he belonged, eliminating references to the urban poor and portraying increasingly resigned peasants and authoritative 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 monarchs 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 slavery 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 determine 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 origins are deliberately ambiguous) revels in humiliating the wealthy and the powerful. His tricks focus on the symbolic trappings of privilege that ostentatiously express a sense of superiority (luxurious clothing, for example [P 16]). Panurge’s strategies of social resentment reappear in Episte´mon’s description of Hell (P 30) where the privileged in this world are humiliated by menial jobs in the next while the formerly disempowered assume positions of power. In the utopian Abbey of The´le`me, even showy

apparel is redeemed since everyone wears the same fabrics and colors (G 56). But the equity in The´le`me 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 majority seem to require their leadership. The forces of good prevail thanks to military discipline and respect for authority (G 47). Commoners who escape personification as superstitious fools (4BK prol., 46) know their place in society and resist any temptation to improve it. Even Panurge remains 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 The´le`me, 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). Readings: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. He´le`ne Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968); Ge´rard Defaux, “De Pantagruel au Tiers livre: Panurge et le pouvoir,” ER 113 (1976): 163–80; Richard M. Berrong, Every Man for Himself (Saratoga, 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 appearance of wisdom. The Sophists were fifth-century b.c. philosophers criticized by Socrates for their practical applications of philosophy. Plato’s dialogue 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 scholastic 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 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 simple 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, however, proves less transparent in Pantagruel than in Gargantua. Many of the characters display sophistic 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 challenges a series of theologians, lawyers, and doctors to public debates with no apparent goal beyond 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 contestatory public debates in his stead. Ge´rard Defaux argues that Panurge becomes the foil, liberating Pantagruel from the taint of sophistry. While Pantagruel seeks the truth and acquires the reputation of a selfless sage, Panurge vaingloriously 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 posturing and empty bravado. In the Third Book, Rabelais 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 demonstrates sophistic argumentation with his falsely confident, contestatory interpretations and his self-interested relativism, Pantagruel also argues speciously. The jurist Bridoye uses sophistic arguments in his self-defense, but his caricature

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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 portraits 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 Pantagruel,” BHR 28 (1966): 615–32; Ge´rard Defaux, Pantagruel et les sophistes: Contribution a` l’histoire de l’humanisme chre´tien au XVIe`me sie`cle (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973); Edwin M. Duval, “The Medieval Curriculum, the Scholastic University, and Gargantua’s Program of Studies (Pantagruel, 8),” Rabelais’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 Aristotelian 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 writings 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 Noe¨l Be´da made no distinction between 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 Lefe`vre 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 frittered away by access to the Bible in translation. Evangelicals such as Lefe`vre d’Etaples were providing 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

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side with Hebrew and Greek scholars who proposed 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 Parlement. They were not always successful, particularly in the case of Rabelais who had powerful protectors in the du Bellays, also enemies of the Sorbonne. Nevertheless, the Sorbonne put Rabelais’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 Theology, 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 Gargantua and Pantagruel. In the 1533–34 editions of Pantagruel, Rabelais came out with raised fists against the Sorbonne and in the process championed the cause of the du Bellays (whose irenism did not sit well with the Magistri nostri). The Sorbonne’s most prominent figure, Noe¨l Be´da, bears the bulk of Rabelais’s joking. Hunchbacked and lame, Be´da had been depicted as a monster by Parisian students. On the Library of Saint-Victor’s shelves, Be´da 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 dispute 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 “sophist” for later editions of his first two books. But it was Be´da’s special brand of intransigence that made him an easy target for Rabelais. Indeed, some critics have likened the seethings and ragings of Picrochole to the Sorbonne’s hottempered Syndic. To be sure, Be´da groomed his horrible reputation among humanists when he led the charge against Erasmus and repeatedly requested the interdiction of printing altogether. He had even tried to prevent lectures on religious

texts in Francis I’s showcase for the new learning, the Colle`ge des Lecteurs Royaux. In Rabelais’s eyes, such a stance made him an obscurantist theologian and enemy of letters. Grandgousier’s praise for his son’s ingenious arsewipe is to compare him to a “docteur en Sorbonne” (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 Janotus 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 Ge´rard Roussel’s evangelical sermons during Lent in 1533–34. Be´da himself was exiled over the affair. Rabelais called the theologians of Paris “Sophistes, Sorbillans, Sorbonagres, Sorbonige`nes, Sorbonicoles, Sorboniformes, Sorbonisecques, Niborcisans, Borsonisans, and Saniborsans.” Whatever you call them, they take it on the chin in Rabelais’s work as caricatures of the old, lifeless learning. Readings: Ge´rard Defaux, “Rabelais et les cloches de Notre-Dame,” ER 9 (1971): 1–28; Ge´rard Defaux, Rabelais et les sophistes. Contribution a` l’histoire de l’humanisme chre´tien au XVIe sie`cle (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973); Francis Higman, Censorship and the Sorbonne (Geneva: Droz, 1979); Jean Larmat, “Picrochole est-il Noe¨l Be´da?” 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 companions 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 Carpathian 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 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 somewhere in the dialogue. In fact, after Philip the historian recounts the death of Pan, the grammarian 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 spora´das (419 E), or dispersed. Later in the dialogue, Plutarch’s son Lamprias admits that he has often spoken on the topic of oracles, but his religious duties always interrupted and dispersed his conversations, resulting in “lo´gous . . . spora´das” (431 D), or scattered speech. What Rabelais has done, here as elsewhere, 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 sporadic 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 Rabelais’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 attributing symbolic values to the personae, objects 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

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the complexities of the Rabelaisian text, and scholars have in the main abandoned this approach. Some, for example, Terence Cave, contend 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 Chronicles 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 deliberate contradictions that guide and drive understanding. Rabelais says as much in describing the sustantificque mouelle, the substantial marrow 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 described in the rules of allegory; among them one stands out as obvious. There were ideas in midsixteenth-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 impenetrable to those outside the inner circle. The Chronicles are deliberately evasive. The symbolic system has its roots in Pantagruel 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 underlies 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-

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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 between humanity and the divine, like Hurtaly sitting 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 militant 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. Below 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 implicit Christ is replicated in his ideal body on earth, the giant Church (Grandgousier and Gargantua) which contains in its retinue imperfect ecclesiastics: Janotus and the monks of Seuilly on the one hand and Fre`re Jean on the other. The shortcomings (αµαρτ␫α) of the first group are mortal, whereas those of Fre`re Jean are venial, the criterion being whether or not the persona does the will of God (⍜εληµα). Fre`re 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 Pichrocholian 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 conclusion 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 obvious differences is the horse symbol. In Gargantua horses are doctrines; the play horses of

the juvenile Church (G 12) are part of the preparation 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 horseback. 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 Augustinian doctrine—flattens the allegorical Forest of Meanings (see Allegory) around Orle´ans, 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 Hippothade´e. 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 Thaumaste 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. Fre`re 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 Gargantua’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 Pichrocholian 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 dominant 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 undrinkable, perilous to the pilgrim Panurge by its storms, but also a source of wonder and adventure. 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 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 marriage theme and the nature of Panurge’s quest— the Couillatris episode of the Fourth Book’s second 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 Sce`ve, figured their beloved as an Ideal. Among other things, De´lie is an anagram of l’Ide´e, the Idea. Rabelais reverses the metaphor. The idea, thought, doctrine, belief, philosophy, becomes woman. The conmentanom (whatsit) in its essential femininity is, in the case of the farmer’s wife in Papefiguie`re, 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 Jupiter 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 supported by the contrasted blazons in the Third Book (26, 28): Fre`re Jean’s generative potential is vigorous, but Panurge’s is failing. Couillatris, representing the ordinary human mind, has, in the mental maelstrom of the Reform, lost his coigne´e 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 transformation 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

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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 Fre`re Jean in the Papimania episode, in a different 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 genitals. 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 Panurge 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 Pantagruel, has put off his old lustful ways, symbolized by his codpiece, and in 3BK consults all the sources of wisdom available about the outcome 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 “cuckolded, beaten, and robbed.” Lust being forbidden, he must choose between an imperfect marriage with undesirable offspring or continence and no posterity. His problem is resolved at the Divine Bottle. As with Couillatris’s gold and silver axe-heads, and the consummation of the marriages 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. He´le`ne Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); S. B. Bushell, “Rabelais and Christian 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’esote´risme spirituel et charnel de Rabelais (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1986); Fred W. Marshall, “The Allegory of

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Rabelais’ Gargantua,” AJFS 24.2 (1987): 115–154; “The Great Allegory” AJFS 26.1 (1989): 12–51; F. W. Marshall, “Les Symboles des Alle´gories de Rabelais,” BAARD 5.2 (1993): 86–102; F. W. Marshall, The Water Symbol in Rabelais: A Study Based on the Three Central Books (Waikato: University of Waikato, 1990); Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London: Duckworth, 1979). Fred W. Marshall

SYPHILIS (LA VE´ROLE) Deadly, sexually transmitted disease thought to have been contracted by sailors under Columbus and subsequently spread through Europe with the help of mercenaries and prostitutes following various armies during the Italian campaigns (hence the term mal de Naples) at the onset of the Renaissance. Over the course of thirty years, spreading from popular classes to the highest ranks of society, syphilis or la grosse ve´rolle had attained epidemic proportions by the time Rabelais began work in Lyon. His arrival there coincided with an important increase in the presence of syphilitics 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 market surfaced for charlatan doctors and barbersurgeons 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 punishment, syphilis was also blamed on women as perceptions of uncontrolled female lust intensified 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 encouraged a tendency to see in syphilis divine punishment for sins of luxure or lust. Fully disgusted 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 dedications 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 presented 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 reasoning 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 converge 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). Having 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 superiority of health, longevity, and freedom from sickness and pain. Readings: Roland Antonioli, Rabelais et la me´decine, ER 12 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1976); Lesa Randall, “Representations of Syphilis in SixteenthCentury 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 Dialogues As Entertaining as They Are Useful (Dialogues non moins profitables que facetieux) were published. They achieved immediate success, and by 1602 they had run through an astonishing 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 informative 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 silence regarding such success is even more surprising, 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 poetry. 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 because 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 possibility of unbelief during the French Renaissance. The work’s aggressive rationalism is highly remarkable because it is based on Epicurean sensory 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 itself, in which Islam in particular is denigrated for features that also apply exactly to Christianity—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 commemorating the older writer’s passing shortly before his own death in 1555. In that work, the young poet emphasized Rabelais’s penchant for mocking 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 Monographs 45 (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1983); Max Gauna, Upwellings: First Expressions of Unbelief in the Printed Literature of the French Renaissance (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, Poe´sies 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 Medamothi. Like all other persons, paintings, and animals (unicorn) described in this initial episode, the tarande is on the edge of reality and hallucinating fictionality. The animal’s description 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

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mentioned by the ancients, the animal’s ontological status remained uncertain at the time of Rabelais’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 contributes to the Fourth Book’s local color. Because of his mimicry, it informs the reader on the (symbolic) colors of the characters’ clothes it approaches: scarlet for Pantagruel, grey for Panurge. The description’s ludic use of zoological and fictional discourses amused the modern novelist Georges Perec, who in his La vie mode d’emploi (1978, chapter 4) integrally incorporated Rabelais’s description of the tarande. Readings: Marie Madeleine Fontaine, “Une narration biscornue: le tarande du Quart Livre,” Poe´tique et narration. Me´langes offerts a` Guy Demerson, ed. Franc¸ois Marotin and Jacques-Philippe Saint-Ge´rand (Paris: Champion, 1993); Conrad Gesner, Historia animalium. De quadrupedis viviparis (Zurich: Froschoverus, 1551); Conrad Gesner, Appendix historiae quadrupedum viviparorum et oviparorum (Zurich: Froschoverus, 1554); Paul J. Smith, “Description et zoologie chez Rabelais,” Description-e´criturepeinture, 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 Colle`ge de Sorbonne. He became the leading interpreter of the Franciscan scholastic theologian Duns Scotus in Paris and taught logic at the Colle`ge de Reims. His books on logic, Aristotelian ethics, and Scotist theology were popular with many but were viewed as sterile by humanists such as Lefe`vre 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 condemned 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 seventeenth century. Readings: Auctarium chartularii universitatis Parisiensis, 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, Bibliothe`que de la Sorbonne, Registre 89; Augustin Renaudet, Pre´re´forme 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 contemporary epics, the life-threatening storm found in chapters 18–24 of Rabelais’s Fourth Book offers distinctive narrative aspects. Whereas the storms in stories such as Lucian’s True History and Folengo’s Macarone´es function as initiations into fantastic worlds which then become the focus of the stories, Rabelais’s storm episode is at the center—sequentially and, arguably, thematically—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 expressions of faith of the Pantagruelists when faced with peril. The extended witty dialogue between Panurge and Fre`re Jean lightens the tone of its serious topic, while the detailed description of the endangered sails and fittings recall Rabelais’s preference for technical accuracy throughout his books. After encountering nine ships on their way to the Council of Che´sil, a reference to the Council of Trent, the Thalame`ge is buffeted by lightning and high winds. Rather than assisting his companions to secure the ship, Panurge crouches in fear, praying to all the saints and to the Virgin Mary. He then begs Fre`re Jean to hear his confession, 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

Thalame`ge of the storm, Pantagruel implores the grace of God, while Fre`re 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 adjusts 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 sparing all aboard the Thalame`ge. Episte´mon explains 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, Panurge 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 citing the ancients’ commentaries on death and drowning. Eusthenes concludes the storm episode 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 Thalame`ge community working toward a common goal. It stands in stark contrast to the Fourth Book’s insular communities which are static and incapable of change. Thematically, it links the issue of death and manners of dying broached during the visit to Tohu and Bohu and concluded on the next island visited, the Macraeons. Readings: L. Denoix, “Les Connaissances nautiques de Rabelais,” Franc¸ois Rabelais. Ouvrage publie´ pour le quatrie`me centenaire de sa mort 1553– 1953 (Geneva: Droz, 1953); Paul J. Smith, Voyage et ecriture: Etude sur le Quart livre de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1987). Margaret Harp

TEMPEˆTE, PIERRE (c. 1480–1530) Principal of the Colle`ge de Montaigu in Paris. Tempeˆte 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 Noe¨l Be´da selected Tempeˆte to succeed him as principal of the Colle`ge de Montaigu, although Be´da continued to exercise considerable direction of

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college affairs. Tempeˆte 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 Tempeˆte’s name, depicting him as a tempestuous pedagogue who beat the students at Montaigu (Montem Acutum): “Horrida tempestas montem turbavit acutum. Tempeste feut un grand fouetteur d’escholiers au colle`ge 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 Tempeˆte propagated by Rabelais and Erasmus (“A Fish Diet” [1526]), but the Colle`ge de Montaigu was at this time the second-largest arts college in Paris and attracted notable students, among them John Calvin and Ignatius Loyola. Readings: James K. Farge, “Tempete, Pierre,” Biographical Register of Paris Doctors of Theology, 1500–1536 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), no. 450: 412–13; Marcel Godet, “Le colle`ge de Montaigu,” RER 7 (1909): 297–302; Augustin Renaudet, Pre´re´forme et humanisme a` Paris (1494–1517), 2nd ed. (Paris: Argences, 1953). James K. Farge

THALAME`GE The name of Pantagruel’s ship in the Fourth Book. Described by the narrator Alcofribas (Alcofrybas) Nasier at the outset of the Fourth Book, the Thalame`ge 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 Fre`re Jean’s Abbey of The´le`me, Rabelais’s best-known model of an ideal community, described at the end of Gargantua (53). The most apparent similarity between Fre`re Jean’s abbaye and Pantagruel’s ship lies in their names, The´le`me and Thalame`ge. The word the´le`me, also of Greek origin, means volonte´ or “will.” Although dissimilar in meaning, the two

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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 The´le`me and the Thalame`ge. They are the centers, the former fixed and the latter mobile, of activity for Pantagruel and his companions. Although The´le`me is the domicile for the adherents of Gargantua’s evangelism, the Thalame`ge is the actual home, albeit temporary, of Gargantua’s son, Pantagruel. Most significantly, they both serve as model communities to Rabelais’s readers. Their joyful atmospheres stand in contrast to the funny but often chaotic milieux Rabelais describes surrounding them. Contemporary readers may have made another association with the name Thalame`ge, as the Greek word talame signifies “nuptial chamber.” Specifically, Rabelais’s literary contemporaries would be most aware of the term from its presence in the Greek name for a nuptial song, the e´pithale`me. 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 Pantagruel’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 etymological link between the two terms underscores the leitmotif of marriage first established in the Third Book. The theme of marriage, in turn, introduces that of union and community at large. As a vessel in motion with no fixed position, the Thalame`ge becomes a model community that passes from one static community to another on its way to find the final “word” of the Holy Bottle. A paradigm of model and inadequate communities establishes itself throughout the narrative with each insular encounter. Reading: Franc¸ois Rigolot, Poe´tique et onomastique: 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. Rabelais lists several similar journeys undertaken in antiquity and doubtless recalls his own transalpine 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 express 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 preparatory 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 substantiate his master’s brilliance. However, instead of addressing serious matters, the ensuing disputation is an elaborate piece of dumb-show involving complicated gesticulations on either side which play with the conventions of academic interchange. For the most part, however, they mystify 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 discussions 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 episode’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 humiliates. Various corresponding clues indicate his connexion with cabbalistic thought, to which Erasmus (Rabelais’s inspiration in so many areas) was quite hostile (see Kabbala). However the scene’s conclusion in no way substantiates this pattern; moreover Thaumaste’s stated motive

The´le`me, Abbey of in meeting Pantagruel is not to best him in debate, but merely to authenticate his reputation, as indeed happens, albeit paradoxically. Thaumaste insists (though perhaps insincerely) that his desire 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 characters’ 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 actual 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 injudiciously risked a fart as part of the act. Accordingly, 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 exchanges have been “mocqueries,” a tongue-incheek 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 Debate 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 University Press, 1991); Armine Kotin, “ ‘Pantagruel.’ Language vs. Communication,” MLN 92 (1977): 691–709; Ion Muraret, “La Critique de la rhe´torique des sophistes dans l’œuvre de Rabelais,” Analeli Universitatii 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

THE´LE`ME, ABBEY OF (ABBAYE DE THE´LE`ME) Gargantua gives the Abbey of The´le`me to Fre`re 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-

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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 contrasted to other monastic establishments which remain “de ce monde” or “of this world,” mocking the failures of walls and mechanical rules to restrain human will. The´le`me 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 implications. Rabelais’s edition of Giovani Marliani’s Topography of Ancient Rome (Topographia antiquae Romae) is contemporaneous with Gargantua. Several real buildings constructed in the first third of the sixteenth century have been suggested as models for the abbey: Bonnivet’s chaˆteau, Francis I’s new chaˆteaux at Chambord, his chaˆteau de Madrid in the bois de Boulogne, Serlio’s reconstruction of the port at Ostia, the chaˆteau de Concressaut in Berry. At the center of The´le`me’s courtyard is a fountain, influenced by an illustration in the Dream of Polyphilus (Hypnerotomachia Poliphili), where the Graces supply “eau vive,” metaphorically, the living Word. The recurrence of six in the abbey’s architectural scheme invites numerological inquiries: the abbey 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 because we are told they may marry, all The´le´mites will do so, a reaction encouraged by the evangelicals’ pro-marriage position and by reformers’ suggestions that monastic establishments be turned into schools preparing young people for Christian marriage. From this some see The´le`me as the prototype of such an institution. Others see marriage as the moment of departure from The´le`me’s terrestrial paradise. The´le´mites are bien

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ne´s, innately good. The courtly setting marks the Abbey as a spiritually noble place. Its inhabitants’ rich dress mirrors their spiritual and intellectual riches. Odor and the two other nonmaterial senses, sight and hearing, are privileged in The´le`me. In contrast to their prominence elsewhere 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 The´le´mites 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 “Enigme en prophetie” or Enigmatic Prophecy, Rabelais’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 salvation and concludes Gargantua. Andre´ Tournon convincingly connects it to the spirit of the abbey, as a realm of Christian perfection that neither Gargantua nor Fre`re 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 The´le`me et le temple des rhe´toriqueurs,” Rabelais pour le 21e sie`cle, ed. Michel Simonin, 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 Huchon, “The´le`me et l’art ste´ganographique,” Rabelais pour le 21e sie`cle, ed. Michel Simonin, ER 33 (1998): 149–60; Giles Polizzi, “The´le`me ou l’e´loge du don: le texte Rabelaisien a` la lumie`re de l’Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,” RHR 25 (1987): 39–59; Jean-Yves Pouilloux, “Notes sur l’abbaye de The´le`me,” Romantisme 1.2 (1971): 200–204; Bettina Rommel, Rabelais zwischen Mu¨ndlischkeit und Schriftlichkeit: Gargantua: Literatur als Lebensfu¨hrung (Tu¨bingen: Niemeyer, 1997); Marian Rothstein, “Gargantua: Agape, Androgyny and the Abbaye de The´le`me,” FForum 26.1 (2001): 1–19; Jerome Schwarz, “Gargantua’s Device 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’antiThe´le`me,” BHR 14 (1952): 159–75; Andre´ Tournon,

“L’Abbaye de The´le`me,” Saggi e ricerche di letteratura francese 26 (1987): 199–220. Marian Rothstein

THENAUD, JEAN (1474?–after 1542) Franciscan 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 relation (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 Erasmus’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 Ge´ne´alitic de la tre`s sacre´e majeste´e du Roy tre`s 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), referring to his Voyage d’outremer in his description of the longtailed sheep (G 16), modern critics (L. Saine´an, Schuurs-Janssen) have found several intriguing lexical resemblances between the two authors. For Marie Holban, Fre`re Jean is a comical persiflage of the historical Jean Thenaud. Among numerous thematic resemblances 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. SchuursJanssen, Nazaire, the name of one of the characters of Thenaud’s Triumphe des vertus, presented 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 hypothesis implies that the intellectual and succesful Thenaud could have functioned as a mentor for young Rabelais during his Franciscan years, of which almost nothing is known.

Third Book Readings: Marie Holban, “Autour de Jean Thenaud et de fre`re Jean des Entonneurs,” ER 9 (1971): 49–65; Anne-Marie Lecoq, “La grande conjonction de 1524 de´mythifie´e pour Louise de Savoie. Un manuscrit de Jean Thenaud a` la Bibliothe`que nationale de Vienne,” BHR 43 (1981): 39–60; Lazare Saine´an, “Jean Thenaud 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. SchuursJanssen, “ ‘Plus feal que ne fut Damis a Appoloneus.’ Rabelais et Jean Thenaud avant 1517: quelques hypothe`ses,” Rabelais au Poitou, ed. Marie-Luce Demonet (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 heroı¨ques du bon Pantagruel), first printed in Paris in 1546 by Chre´tien 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, Marguerite 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, triggers the series of consultations with various oracles, 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 examples 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 Ple´iade edition of Rabelais’s works. The Third Book consists mainly of monologues and dialogues involving two or more characters, onto which are grafted a variety of

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other genres, such as paradoxical encomia, blazons and counter-blazons, maxims, and poems. The symmetrical design of the Third Book has attracted much scholarly attention. Edwin M. Duval sees the book as a set of concentric frames at the center of which lies the answer to Panurge’s dilemma. While the initial chapters, dealing with the government of Dipsodie, form a transition and ensure narrative continuity between the Third Book and Pantagruel, the final chapters prepare the voyage in quest for the Divine Bottle or Dive Bouteille which is the subject 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 Mosaic 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 Virgilian lots, the dream, the Sybil of Panzoust, the deaf-mute Nazdecabre, the dying poet Raminagrobis (3BK 9–23) and ends with the counsels of learned representatives of the higher faculties, the theologian Hippothade´e, the doctor Rondibilis, 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, enclosed by the twin counsels of Episte´mon and Fre`re 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 variation, most episodes consist in an exposition of the particular method of divination by Pantagruel, at whose instigation nearly all the consultations take place, followed by an account of the consultation itself and its interpretation. The verdict 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-

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gruel, the Christian-Stoic sage who embodies the spirit of charity, has traditionally been seen as opposed to Panurge, whose chief vice is identified 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 rehabilitate 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 dialogical form of the book. Pantagruel and Panurge would thus be complementary rather than antithetical figures. Critics have also varied in their assessment of the subject of the Third Book. Abel Lefranc famously saw the book as an episode in the contemporary querelle des femmes, linking the theme of marriage at the heart of the Third Book to the debates that opposed feminists and antifeminists in France at the time. Others have questioned 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 preoccupation 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 engage in many contemporary medical, legal, theological, 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 interpretation of verbal and nonverbal signs; Panurge’s sophistry and his linguistic agility; and the peculiar admixture of comedy and erudition that characterizes the Third Book. Readings: Jean Ce´ard, La nature et les prodiges. L’insolite au XVIe sie`cle 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; Franc¸ois Rigolot, Les langages

de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1987); Michael A. Screech, The Rabelaisian Marriage: Aspects of Rabelais’s Religion, Ethics and Comic Philosophy (London: Edward Arnold, 1958); M. A. Screech, Rabelais (London: Duckworth, 1979). Agnieszka Steczowicz

THIRST The theme of wine and drink, inspired 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, Rabelais evokes another Pantagruel, the little demon featured in medieval myste`res who throws salt into the mouths of sleeping drunkards. Accordingly, 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 Pantagruel’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 consumption 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 tre`s 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, apparently written by Rabelais himself, advises his readers—buveurs infatigables, or tireless drinkers—to consume books much as they do

Translations, Dutch and German 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.

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largely based on Tiraqueau’s famous Commentary on the Law, “Si unquam” (1535).

Readings: Jean Larmat, “La vigne et le vin chez Rabelais,” Revue des sciences humaines (1966): 179– 92; Florence Weinberg, The Wine and the Will (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972). Margaret Harp

Readings: Jacques Brejon, Un jurisconsulte de la Renaissance: Andre´ Tiraqueau (1488–1558) (Paris: Librairie du Recueil Sirey, 1937); Enzo Nardi, Rabelais e il diritto romano (Milan: A. Giuffre` Editore, 1962); Charles Perrat, “Rabelais et Tiraqueau,” Bibliothe`que d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 16 (1954): 41–57. Agnieszka Steczowicz

TIRAQUEAU, ANDRE´ (1488–1558) A renowned French jurist, member of the Parlements of Paris and Bordeaux, “le docte Tiraqueau” (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). Rabelais’s friendship with Andre´ Tiraqueau dates back to their formative years at Fontenay-leComte in Poitou, when both belonged to the socalled ce´nacle 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 following the publication of an expanded version of On the Laws of Marriage (De legibus connubialibus [1524]), a highly controversial collection of commonplaces about women to which Rabelais contributed. All references to Rabelais disappear 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 Hippothade´e 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), Rabelais drew on Tiraqueau’s On the Law of Primogeniture (De iure primigeniorum) of 1549. The name of Judge Bridoye’s interlocutor, the magistrate 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 elevenmonth pregnancies in Gargantua (3), which is

TRANSLATIONS, DUTCH AND GERMAN (16TH–17TH CENTURIES) The first translations of Rabelais’s works originated from Protestant countries: respectively, the southern Netherlands (especially Flanders, situated on the borderline between Catholicism and Reformation, 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 Koopmans, the “prophecy” mentioned in the title probably 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 Rabelais’s or Pantagruel’s names. Lines from the Lieripe literally reappear in the Testament rhetoricael, a manuscript collection of texts (finished in 1561) by the Brugean poet Eduard de Dene, which includes many other Rabelaisian borrowings 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 Strasbourg, translated the Pantagrueline pronostication in German under the title Aller Praktic

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Grossmutter (1572). In 1590 he published a Catalogus catalogorum perpetuo durabilis, an adaptation of Rabelais’s satirical Library of SaintVictor, 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 Klitterung ⫽ “hotchpotch”), a free version of Rabelais’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 polemical 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 satirical: as a Lutheran he is not only anti-Catholic, but also opposes Erasmian humanism (contrary to the Erasmian inspiration of his model). Because of his linguistic invention, Fischart is considered 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 the´orique” [G 5]), Fischart expands: “Ich verstand dise Redtorich [pun on “Rede” (“discours”) and “Tor” (“fool”)], Theoric solt ich sagen,” followed by Urquhart who has: “I understand not the Rhetorick (Theorick I should say).” In 1682, a Dutch translation of all Rabelais’s works was published by a certain Claudio Gallitalo, a pseudonym of the Dutch translator Nicolaas 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 biographical sketch and the lenghty linguistic commentaries as well. He also compared this edition with some older ones and checked his transla-

tions upon the versions of his German and English predecessors Fischart and Urquhart. Readings: Articles by Dirk Geirnaert, Jelle Koopmans, Enny Kraaijveld, and Paul J. Smith in Paul J. Smith, ed., Editer et traduire Rabelais a` travers les aˆges (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997); Michael Schilling, “Einleitung,” Johann Fischart, Catalogus Catalogorum perpetuo durabilis (1590) (Tu¨bingen: Niemeyer, 1993); C. L. Thijssen-Schoute and Nicolaas Jarichides Wieringa, Een zeventiende-eeuwse vertaler van Boccalini, Rabelais, Barclai, Leti e.a. (Assen: Van Gorcum, 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 Rabelais’s works have been translated numerous times into English since the seventeenth century, the two best English translations remain the Urquhart–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 translation and completed his own translation of the last two books. Even today this joint translation is available, and it has been included in its entirety 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 Urquhart–Motteux translation had a profound influence on numerous English writers of the Restoration and during the decades immediately after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. From a linguistic point of view this translation is somewhat difficult for modern English speakers to understand 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 writings, 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 still in print in both cloth and paperback. This excellent translation reads very well, and it captures very nicely Rabelais’s wit, wordplay, and the different levels of style for the different characters. 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 Pantagruel. Burton Raffel correctly understands that most modern readers of English do not possess a solid command of Latin and would not appreciate the satirical intentions of many of the fanciful 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 Fre`re 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 reproduces the sharp wit and subtle humor of Franc¸ois Rabelais. Readings: Huntington Brown, Rabelais in English Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933); Franc¸ois Rabelais, Five Books of the Lives, Heroic Deeds, and Sayings of Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Thomas Urquhart and Peter Motteux, 1653–93; http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/web bin/gutbook/lookup?num⫽1200 (accessed August 14, 2003); Franc¸ois 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 literature was perhaps influenced by the new mobility of the European population that was promoted 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 Renaissance travel writing were the journeys of Marco Polo (which first appeared in French translation

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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 Portuguese and Spanish monarchies. It is not by chance that, in Pantagruel, when the young giant returns to his native Utopia, he at first follows the exact itinerary pioneered by Portuguese mariners on their journeys to the Far East, although the final segment is pure fantasy. The “New World,” however, generated less interest than might be expected in Renaissance France. According to Geoffroy Atkinson (1969: 10ff), almost twice as many books were published on the Mediterranean region and the Middle East as on the Americas. This can perhaps be explained by a lack of French colonial involvement 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” (e´chelle), 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 interest 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 Le´ry. Andre´ Thevet (1516–92), selfstyled cosmographer of four kings (Henry II through Henry III), was a Franciscan. His first major work dealt with the Middle East (Cosmography of the Levant, 1554), but his 1557 Singularities 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 sixteenth century, Jean de Le´ry (1534–1613). Le´ry was a Calvinist minister who wrote his own version of the French expedition in Histoire d’un

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voyage fait en la terre du Bre´sil (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 members 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 importance 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. Le´ry is closer to the modern anthropological point of view in presenting, or purporting to present, 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 Le´ry. Perhaps because of the interest generated by these three writers and the progressive engagement of the French in America, travel literature became more and more focused on the New World. Samuel de Champlain wrote about his journeys there in 1608 and 1611 and later in the seventeenth century, and the Jesuit missionaries produced a body of literature that provides valuable information on the Amerindian 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 horizons de la Renaissance franc¸aise (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 Le´ry, Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Bre´sil, ed. Frank Lestringant (Paris: Livre de poche—Bibliothe`que Classique, 1994); Frank Lestringant, E´crire 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, Cosmographie de Levant, ed. Frank Lestringant (Geneva: Droz, 1985); Andre´ Thevet, Le Bre´sil d’Andre´ Thevet: les singularite´s 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 Andouilles, Rabelais refers to the gathering pejoratively 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, Franc¸ois Rabelais: A Study (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977). Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

TRIBOULLET (TRIBOULET) This character, 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 Francis I. It has been suggested that Triboullet was also the name of a particular individual, the author 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 perhaps the author of the Farce de Maıˆtre Pathelin. The word tribouler means to agitate. A play entitled La farce ou sotie des vigilles Triboullet describes a fictional funeral procession organized by an acting troupe for Triboullet. Triboullet became 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 encounter that Panurge comes up with the idea to go in search of the Dive Bouteille or the Holy

Trickster Bottle. Seven chapters earlier (3BK 38), Pantagruel and Panurge expound upon the virtues of Triboullet in a format that combines the genres of blason and dialogue. The structure of this dialogue opposes Pantagruel, who focuses on extreme or even divine folly, with Panurge, who opts for a more earthy and material folly in describing the professional fou. After this theatrical exchange, the subsequent consultation with Triboullet is delayed for seven chapters with the insertion of the trial of Judge Bridove. When Pantagruel 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, Triboullet’s placement at the end mirrors the position of Pantagruel at the beginning, thus contrasting 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); Euge´nie Droz, Le recueil trepperel (Paris, 1935); Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s 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, Belgium: Brepols, 1999); Bruno Roy, “Triboulet, Josseaume et Pathelin a` la cour de Rene´ d’Anjou,” Le moyen franc¸ais 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 Rabelais’s works possess some of the attributes of tricksters, most notably the figure of Panurge, but also Fre`re Jean des Entommeurs, as well as

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many of the wandering minor characters who joust with the protagonists, such as Thaumaste the Englishman (P 19–20), Janotus de Bragmardo (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, Rabelais’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 celebrate Mardi Gras by eating massive amounts of tripe with Gargamelle and Grandgousier just before Gargantua’s birth (G 5). While the Panurge of Pantagruel may represent the trickster in his purest form, especially in the chapter that describes 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 education (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 Rabelaisian text, in the notorious prologue of Gargantua as in the description of the giant’s dual education, eventually is personified in the opposition of Pantagruel and Panurge, the humanist prince versus the trickster. From a modern perspective, it may be difficult to understand why the learned and disciplined side of Renaissance thinking, at least in its Rabelaisian variant, was

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affixed to a carnivalesque underside that was associated with Panurge the trickster, whom Rabelais 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 Panurge,” while the following possibilities have been explored. Most notable among these is the “cosmological” and “carnivalesque” answer offered by Bakhtin, who somewhat naively and optimistically reads the cruel and scatological elements of Rabelais’s work as belonging to a cosmic whole, in which positive and regenerative elements 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 Rabelais’s more scandalous chapters as instances of male bonding accomplished at the expense of female 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 Pantagruel 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 Heptame´ron. Ge´rard 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 demonic 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 institutionalized misogyny of the exemplary Disciplina clericalis as well as the medieval fabliaux, the learned facetiae, and the Renaissance nouvelle, in which trickster figures, rogues, charlatans, 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 extraordinarily 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. He´le`ne Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Ge´rard Defaux, Rabelais agonistes: du rieur au prophe`te. 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 LaGuardia, “ ‘Un bon esmoucheteur par mousches jamais e´mousche´ ne sera’: Panurge as Trickster,” RR 88.4 (November 1997): 519–28. David LaGuardia

TROUILLOGAN (3BK 29, 35–36) A philosopher whom Panurge consults in the Third Book. Early in the book, Panurge expresses a wish to marry but, as he is aging, he fears cuckoldry. 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 matrimonial 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 Pantagruel claims here that Trouillogan answers all uncertainties “assertivement,” that is, “affirmatively” 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 nonexistent. (It seems that, for his day, Rabelais was unusually well informed about pyrrhonism.) Initially, when Pantagruel asks Trouillogan whether or not Panurge should marry, he an-

Turks 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 alternative was preferable (marriage or nonmarriage), 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 “assertivement,” 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.” Hippothade´e 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 resumes, “Should I marry?” While the subsequent dialogue still does not satisfy Panurge, Trouillogan 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 advice. 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 possibilities: at any moment, one must either be married or not married; and similarly, one cannot be both married and not married. Here, Trouillogan’s response really is self-contradictory and pure pyrrhonism. Thus, though highly comic, this exchange does not mean that Trouillogan is being merely evasive; as befits a “perfect philoso-

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pher,” he is consistently giving the best answers available to him, within his pyrrhonist philosophy. Similarly, when Panurge rephrases his question without an alternative (“Are you married?”), Trouillogan replies, “I think so.” For a pyrrhonist, this is a sensible answer. Not surprisingly, Panurge gives up in despair. More strikingly, however, Gargantua shares his frustration at Trouillogan’s noncommittal answers: “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 Trouillogan’s deliberately oblique language is partly responsible for Panurge’s failure to gain enlightenment from their dialogue. Readings: Emmanuel Naya, “Ne scepticque ne dogmatique, et tous les deux ensemble”: Rabelais “On Phrontistere et escholle des pyrrhoniens,” ER 35 (1998): 81–129; Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London: Duckworth, 1979); Ve´ronique Zaercher, Le dialogue 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 under Sultan Suleyman II destroyed the Hungarian kingdom at Mohacs in 1526 and besieged Vienna—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 Rabelais of these events and of the depiction of the Turk in travelers’ writings. Rabelais’s letters from Rome (1535–36) contain news of the Ottoman campaign in Persia as well as skeptical references to crusade indulgences and to a prophecy of the Turks’ imminent overthrow that was being widely published by Charles V’s supporters. The mockery of Picrochole’s ambition in G 33 includes probable allusions to Charles V’s thwarted ambitions in North Africa, where he besieged Tunis in 1535 and Algiers in 1541, to his support for the Knights of St. John, recently expelled from Rhodes and reestablished by Charles

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on Malta, and to the unthinking bloodlust and territorial ambition of the new crusaders: “ ‘Shall we not kill all these dogs of Turks and Mahometans?’ 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 implicitly rejects “holy war” and refuses to intervene 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, implicitly, to turn against Charles V) and in that Tripoli, 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’ geopolitical role, one picturesque scene in Panta-

gruel (14) is set in Turkey. Panurge, who in chapter 9 revealed that he had been taken prisoner in Louis XII’s expedition to Mytilene (Lesbos) 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 mussafiz (glossed in the Briefve De´claration as “doctors and prophets”), deplores the Muslim prohibition on wine, and essays some cod-Arabic. In this pseudoromantic scene, the formidable Turks are comfortingly portrayed as buffoons and cowards. Readings: Clarence D. Rouillard, The Turk in French History, Thought and Literature (1520–1660) (Paris: Boivin, n.d.); Fre´de´ric Tinguely, L’ecriture du Levant a` la Renaissance: Enqueˆte sur les voyageurs franc¸ais dans l’empire de Soliman le Magnifique (Geneva: 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 returned to Scotland in 1635. From then onward his life was never untroubled, and his eccentric works, or “elucubrations” as he termed them, always 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 Trisssotetras postulated a mnemonic approach to trigonometry, but his enormous Latin- and Greekbased coinages render the book virtually impenetrable. From 1651, in prison, Urquhart can hardly have stopped writing. After Pantochronocanon (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 Logopandecteision (1653), the guidelines of a universal language accompanied by much selfaggrandizing 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 highspiritedness happily combined as literature. Apparently, Urquhart’s self-petitioning reached Cromwell’s ears, for in 1653 he was released. He died in Middelburg, in Holland, in 1658. An unconfirmed 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 Research University Press, 1993); “Sir Thomas Urquhart’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: Scottish Academic Press, 1983); John Willcock, Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromartie (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, 1899). Roger Craik

UTOPIA The shortened title of a work of fiction 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 familiar 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 Christian traditions. But More’s Utopia does not depend on divine intervention or require the universal 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 Gargantua share deep affinities with the spirit of Utopia. Rabelais’s goal of reforming secular and religious education, which is largely implicit in Pantagruel but which constitutes the principal theme of Gargantua (13–15, 21–24), is presented as a way of greatly improving the lives of all members of society. The lessons to be drawn from the Picrocholine War (G. 25–50) are also utopian in

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the sense that they oppose the Erasmian education of the ideal prince to the chaotic medieval traditions of militaristic aggression, continual territorial expansionism at the expense of the weak, unbridled violence, and so on. The celebrated Abbey of The´le`me (G 52–57) can be seen as a scaled-down version of More’s Utopia, and Rabelais’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 largescale transformations and paint a darker picture of human nature, which seems better suited to creating dystopias. Panurge’s obstinate, seemingly inexorable descent into moral and spiritual autism renders him incapable of using his reason or grasping the liberating potential of evangelical charity and pantagrue´lisme. He also becomes

vulnerable to the most absurd suggestions about obtaining answers to his questions. The archipelago 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 expectations 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, “The´le`me: Temporality, Utopia, Supplement,” 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 University Press, 1998). William H. Huseman

V VILLON, FRANC ¸ OIS (1431–after 1463) Villon is a French fifteenth-century poet and scholar remembered as much for his brazen personality as for his fine and witty verse. Described by Cle´ment Marot in 1533 as “the best Parisian poet around” (“le meilleur poe`te parisien qui se trouve”), Villon is best known for the works Testament, 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 vanished when he was thirty-two and no subsequent record of him exists. This mysterious disappearance augments his legend. Much read in the sixteenth 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 English king Edward V. Rabelais has transformed Villon into an older gadfly who mingles com-

fortably with peasantry and royalty alike. Rabelais’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 surprisingly 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 Picrocholine War (G 25–42), which parodies the figure of the Habsburg emperor Charles V. Having 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, Fre`re 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 FrancoSpanish 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 according 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 follows the dictates of the parodic, anatomical descriptions that are among the distinguishing characteristics of the author’s style, as in the near

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blasphemous scene of Gargantua’s birth (G 6), or in the aforementioned passage in which Fre`re 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 Parisian 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 procession, 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 being shocked by their violence. Hence, the issue of realism is crucial to an understanding of violence in Rabelais. After nearly two hundred years of realism and its attendant valorizations, it is difficult for modern readers to see the depiction 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 unacceptable to a modern reader. Perhaps a more appropriate reaction to Rabelais would be to understand the depiction of violence as one type of conventional description among many others derived from the multiplicity of narrative traditions and techniques that the writer adopts and parodies. Readings: Douglas L. Boudreau-Tiefezh, “Death in the Quart Livre,” RN 37.2 (1997): 183–91; Guy Demerson, “Rabelais et la violence,” Revue litte´raire mensuelle (Europe) 70.757 (1992): 67–79; Dominique Garand, “Rabelais au risque de la topique,” Violence et fiction jusqu’a` la Re´volution, ed. Gabrielle Verdier (Paris: Etudes Litte´raires Franc¸aises, 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 distinctively 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 complicated 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 Iliadic and, by extension, an Aeneidic theme. It is also true that Gargantua and Pantagruel are Parisian narratives and that Rabelais’s Paris can be viewed as Virgil’s Rome. The famous or infamous image, envisioned by Panurge, of a city whose walls are constructed entirely of vulvas and that must therefore be indestructible, suggests 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 reintegrate into the community. But Pantagruel remains one with his friends (a symbol of cohesion, 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 community 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 everywhere concerned with foundation, with the construction of ideal communities or utopias. The´le`me, of course, represents the most obvious and explicit of these communities. (Pantagruel’s own nation is the Amaurotes, or “Obscure”; it is situated in Utopia.)

Voyage The´le`me, 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 Gargantua’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 humankind 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 stability. The most powerful instance of this practice is to be found at Gargantua 1, where Rabelais capitalizes on the early modern topos of the translatio imperii and studii. This is a Virgilian genealogy of cultural power that links cultural origins seamlessly with a utopian future. The model here is once again Anchises’s posthumous narration of Roman past, present, and future in Aeneid 6—the single most significant passage for Rabelais’s purposes in the Chroniques. 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 Bacchus, 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

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Eucharist: bees symbolizing humanity regenerated 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 destinations. 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 triumphant in the Aeneid itself is undermined by intimations of moral bankruptcy and the possibility 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 Virgil, for Rabelais the past is no guarantee of the future. One might conclude here with Panurge’s consultation 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 random. But randomness is precisely the problem in Rabelais, as it is in Virgil. It is interesting to see how Rabelais both embraces and distances himself 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 aleatory. The image is one that suggests the emblematic Rabelaisian synthesis (or lack of synthesis) between historical precedents or textual grounds and the uncertain and uninterpretable force of the random. Readings: Ge´rard Defaux, “Le curieux, le glorieux et la sagesse du monde dans la premie`re moitie´ du XVIe sie`cle,” French Forum Monographs 34 (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1982); Myth and Legend in French Literature, ed. Keith Aspley, David Bellos, and Peter Sharratt (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1982) 47–50. Matthew Gumpert

VOYAGE Rabelais traveled extensively during his lifetime. Born near Chinon, he studied at Fontenay-Le-Comte in the Bas-Poitou and at Maillezais. He then traveled to Bordeaux, Tou-

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louse, Orle´ans, Paris, Lyon, Montpellier, and throughout the south of France. He later practiced 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 experienced 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 conventional and unconventional ways (how they enlarge the scope of hermeneutical apprehension and the philosophical language of alterity), Pantagruel, Gargantua, the Third Book and the Fourth Book are also masterpieces of a new variant of travel literature. They both describe the real space in which their fictive exploits transpire—Chinon and environs, in Gargantua; Poitou, Paris and—a hint of theoretical space—Utopia 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, apparently 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 landlinked 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 keeping a wife. In that sense, the Third Book is perhaps 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 Ge´rard 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 fascination 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 fascination with travel, cartography, and cosmography, 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 Romans, but also the noble Greeks” (P 1; GP 135). By commencing Pantagruel with reference to other nations of the world (“Arabs,” “Barbarians,” “Romans,” “Greeks”) and thereby introducing 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 encyclopedic 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 beyond: one who will become, like Rabelais himself, “ung abysme de science” (“an abyss of knowledge” [P 8]). Readings: Elizabeth A. Chesney, The Countervoyage of Rabelais and Ariosto: A Comparative Reading 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. Raymond La Charite´ (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1992); Ge´rard Defaux, Rabelais agonistes: du rieur au prophe`te: Etudes sur Pantagruel, Gargantua, et Le quart livre (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Michel Jeanneret, Perpetuum mobile: Me´tamorphoses 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 Calvins, Genevan Impostors” [32]), and encouraged readers to revel in the giant’s destructive prowess. The Physetere episode leads immediately to the comic battle with sausages and then to the more obviously mimetic encounter with the redoubtable Homenaz. Along with the concluding chapters and the storm reworked from the 1548 edition, it can be read as a reassertion and celebration 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 Pantagruel and Gargantua more clear than in their martial metaphors. The contrast between Grandgousier’s eagerness to appease his choleric neighbors and Fre`re 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 independent kings was represented by the younger generation, Gargantua and his companions. The most explicit elaboration of this vision was Ulrich Gallet’s Ciceronian harangue, in which Gallet recalls how two autonomous monarchs were able to band together to preserve peace and prosperity for both of them. Such an arrangement recalled the brief but close alliance between Francis 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, Rabelais 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 partners, is reinforced reliance on patriarchal authority. Reading: Edward Benson, “The Development of Rabelais’ Historical Consciousness in the Picrocholine and Dipsodean Wars,” ER 13 (1976): 159–61. Edward Benson

WECHEL, CHRE´TIEN (ff. 1526–54) Parisian 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

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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 symbolic system in general. The opening words, “Beuveurs tre`s illustres” (“Illustrious topers,” G prol.) address readers capable of drinking in Rabelais’s message. The greatest topers are Pantagruel (⫽ 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 addressed to the Good Topers, inviting them to philosophize “en vin, non en vain, ains plus-quephysicalement” (“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 eternal source. It will never run dry; Good Hope lies at the bottom. Wine appears in repeated banquet scenes throughout the five books, prominently in Gargantua, the “propos des bien yvres,” where the punning is based on ecclesiastical and evangelical joking. Wine dominates chapter 27, where Fre`re Jean defends the abbey vineyard, decimating 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 resembling trampled grapes. In the Fourth Book, the figureheads on the twelve ships are mostly emblems of wine: a halffull 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 someone 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 reproductions of grape vines so realistic that the company feels it is walking above a real vineyard. The walls depict the conquest of India by Bacchus (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 ribaldry and joking, and profound seriousness. On the deeper level, he draws on traditional Christian and hermetic sources rediscovered by precursors: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio 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, increasingly bloody crucifixion scenes and crucifixes 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 eternal, inexhaustible blood, like the wine in Rabelais’s barrel, having already filled countless wine barrels being hauled away and stored in churches. Rabelais’s barrel-books contain Wisdom, the Good News as purveyed in his jolly Franciscan, Benedictine, evangelical idiom. His church, the wine of his message, consists of communion, prayer, thanksgiving, joy, and full participation in the banquet of life. Eucharistia, Ecclesia, 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 ce`ne, et le voyage sans fin du Quart livre,” ER 21 (1988): 131– 41; Etienne Gilson, “Rabelais franciscain,” Les ide´es et les lettres (Paris: Vrin, 1955); Fred W. Marshall, “Les symboles des alle´gories de Rabelais,” BAARD 5. 2 (1993): 86–102; Per Nykrog, “The´le`me, Panurge et la Dive Bouteille,” Revue d’histoire litte´raire de la France 65 (1965): 383–97; M. A. Screech,

Women L’Evange´lisme de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1959); Florence Weinberg, The Wine and the Will (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972); Florence Weinberg, Rabelais et les lec¸ons du rire (Orle´ans: Paradigme, 2000). Florence M. Weinberg

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 The´le`me 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 Pantagruel’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 The´le`me, whose presence counters conventional representations of convents and monasteries as gendersegregated 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 Rabelais’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 convention 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 dialogue with Panurge and leaves room in that dialogue for difference, especially the difference of

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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. Finally, the episode suggests that “woman” as intelligible sign functions as a relay for the masculine 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 company 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 inscription. The false diamond and the phrase, “lamah 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 laisse´e?” (“Say, false lover, why did you leave me?”). Itself 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. Although readers might therefore wish to point to this moment as further evidence of Rabelais’s erasure of or disregard for women, the text nevertheless seems to have anticipated just that perception; for the identification with and erasure of

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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 allegorizes the impossibility of either fully effacing or fully representing (sexual) difference, the difference 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: Minuit, 1977), translated as This Sex Which Is Not One,

trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Franc¸ois Rigolot, “Rabelais, Misogyny, and Christian Charity: Biblical 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 Rabelaisian 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 Thalame`ge 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 pe´rilleuses (passerby of perilous ways),” Xenomanes is perhaps an oblique reference to Rabelais’s friend, the poet Jean Bouchet who gave himself the same title as acknowledgment of his spiritual struggles. As navigator, Xenomanes 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 exaggerated and perpetual Lenten practice, devoid of spiritual intent. Xenomanes assures Pantagruel that the gaunt ruler’s habit of crying for threefourths of the day while maintaining a diet of dry peas would make him very poor company for the jubilant Thalame`ge 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. Pantagruel 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: Franc¸oise Joukovsky, “Les Narre´s du Tiers livre et du Quart livre” in La nouvelle franc¸aise a` la Renaissance (Paris: Editions Slatkine, 1981). Margaret Harp

Selected Bibliography SPECIALIZED BIBLIOGRAPHIES Braunrot, Bruno. Franc¸ois 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. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1956, 817–916. Cioranescu, Alexandre. Bibliographie de la litte´rature franc¸aise au 16e sie`cle. Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1959, 17933–18789. Cordie´, Carlo. “Recenti studi sulla vita e sulle opere di Franc¸ois Rabelais, 1939–1950.” Letterature moderne I (1950): 107–20. Plan, Pierre-Paul. Bibliographie rabelaisienne: Les e´ditions de Rabelais de 1532 a` 1711. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1904. Plattard, Jean. Etat pre´sent des e´tudes rabelaisiennes. Paris: Socie´te´ d’e´dition “Les belles lettres,” 1927. Rackow, Paul. “Der gegenwa¨rtige Stand der RabelaisForschung.” Germanisch-romanische Monatschrift 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 anne´es d’e´tudes rabelaisiennes.” Bibliothe`que d’Humanisme et Renaissance 11 (1949): 104–28. Schrader, Ludvig. “Die Rabelais-Forschung der Jahre 1950–1960: Tendenzen und Ergebnisse.” Romanistisches 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 comple`tes. 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 The´le`me. Ed. Raoul Morc¸ay. Geneva: Droz, 1947. Oeuvres comple`tes. Ed. Marcel Guilbaud. 5 vols. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1957. Oeuvres comple`tes. Ed. Jacques Boulenger and Lucien Scheler (Bibliothe`que de la Ple´iade). Paris: Gallimard, 1959. Oeuvres comple`tes. 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 comple`tes. Ed. Guy Demerson. Paris: Seuil, 1973. Oeuvres completes. Ed. Mireille Huchon. Bibliothe`que de la Ple´iade. Paris: Gallimard, 1994.

STANDARD TRANSLATIONS Franc¸ois Rabelais. Gargantua and Pantagruel. Trans. Jacques Le Clercq (The Modern Library). New York: Random House, 1936. Franc¸ois Rabelais. Gargantua and Pantagruel. Trans. John Michael Cohen. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1955. Franc¸ois Rabelais. Gargantua and Pantagruel. Trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart and Peter Le Motteux. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1955. Franc¸ois Rabelais. Gargantua and Pantagruel: Selections. Trans. Floyd Gray. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1966. Franc¸ois Rabelais. Gargantua and Pantagruel. Trans.

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Burton Raffel. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. Franc¸ois Rabelais. The Complete Works of Rabelais. Trans. Donald M. Frame. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

IMPORTANT PERIODICALS Bibliothe`que d’humanisme et Renaissance (1941 to present). Bulletin de l’association des amis de Rabelais et de la Devinie`re (1951 to present). Etudes rabelaisiennes (1959 to present). Humanisme et Renaissance (1913–32), (1934–40). Revue des e´tudes rabelaisiennes (1903–12).

IMPORTANT CRITICAL STUDIES Albala, Ken. Food in Early Modern Europe. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003. Antonioli, Roland. Rabelais et la me´decine. Etudes 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 Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. ———. Rabelais and His World. Trans. He´le`ne Iwolsky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968. Baraz, Michae¨l. 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 Order and Its Dissolution in Rabelais. Saratoga, CA: ANMA Libri, 1985. ———. Rabelais and Bakhtin. Popular Culture in Gargantua and Pantagruel. Lincoln and London: 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 Romance 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 Ambiguity 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 me´thode de lecture.” Cahiers de Varsovie 8 (1981): 111–26. ———. “Lenten Eels and Carnival Sausages.” L’esprit cre´ateur 21 (1981): 12–25. Brault, Ge´rard. “ ‘Un abysme de Science.’ On the Interpretation of Gargantua’s Letter to Pantagruel.” Bibliothe`que d’Humanisme et Renaissance 28 (1966): 615–32. Brown, Huntington. Rabelais in English Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933. Busson, Henri. Le rationalisme dans la litte´rature franc¸aise 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. Franc¸ois Rabelais: Critical Assessments. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Cave, Terence. The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. Ce´ard, Jean. La nature et les prodiges. L’insolite au XVIe sie`cle, en France. Geneva: Droz, 1977. Ce´ard, Jean, and Jean-Claude Margolin, eds. Rabelais en son demi-mille´naire. Actes du colloque international 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: Pressgang, 1983. Coleman, Dorothy Gabe. Rabelais: A Critical Study in Prose Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Colie, Rosalie. Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966. Conley, Tom. The Graphic Unconscious in Early

Selected Bibliography Modern French Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Cooper, Richard. Rabelais et I’Italie. Geneva: Droz, 1991. Costa, Dennis. Irenic Apocalypse. Some Uses of Apocalyptic in Dante, Petrarch, and Rabelais. Stanford, CA: Anima Libri, 1981. Defaux, Ge´rard. Le curieux, le glorieux et la sagesse du monde dans la premie`re moitie´ du XVIe sie`cle: l’exemple de Panurge (Ulysse, De´mosthe`nes, Empe´docle). Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1982. ———. “A propos de paroles gele´es et de´gele´es (Quart Livre 55–56): ‘Plus hault sens’ ou ‘lectures 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 chre´tien au XVIe sie`cle. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973. ———. Rabelais agonistes: Du rieur au prophe`te: Etudes sur Pantagruel, Gargantua, Le quart livre. Geneva: Droz, 1997. De Gre`ve, Marcel. L’interpre´tation de Rabelais au XVIe sie`cle. Geneva: Droz, 1961. Demerson, Guy. Franc¸ois Rabelais. Paris: Fayard, 1991. ———. Rabelais: Une vie, une oeuvre, une e´poque. Paris: Balland, 1986. Demonet, M.-L. “Rabelais me´talinguiste.” ER 37 (1999): 115–28. Desan, Philippe. L’imaginaire e´conomique de la Renaissance. Paris: Presses de l’Universite´ de Paris IV—Sorbonne, 2002. Desrosiers-Bonin, Diane. Rabelais et l’humanisme civil. ER 27 (Geneva: Droz, 1992). Dieguez, Manuel de. Rabelais par lui-meˆme. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1960. Dontenville, Henri. La mythologie franc¸aise. Paris: Payot, 1948. Dubois, Claude-Gilbert. Proble`mes de l’utopie. Paris: Archives des Lettres Modernes, 1968. Duval, Edwin. The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. ———. The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Livre de Pantagruel. Geneva: Droz, 1998. ———. The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel. Geneva: Droz, 1997. ———. “Interpretation and the ‘Doctrine Absconce’ of Rabelais’s Prologue to Gargantua.” Etudes Rabelaisiennes 18 (1984): 1–17. ———. “The Medieval Curriculum, the Scholastic University, and Gargantua’s Program of Studies (Pantagruel, 8).” Rabelais’s Incomparable

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Book: Essays on His Art. Ed. Raymond La Charite´, 30–44. Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986. ———. “La messe, la ce`ne, et le voyage sans fin du Quart Livre.” ER 21 (1988), 131–141. Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Farge, James. “Beda, Noe¨l.” Biographical Register of Paris Doctors of Theology. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980, 31–6 (no. 34). ———. Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Reformation France. The Faculty of Theology of Paris, 1500–1543. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985. Febvre, Lucien. The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais. Trans. Beatrice Gottlieb. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Originally published as Le Proble`me de l’incroyance au XVIe sie`cle: La Religion de Rabelais. Paris: Albin Michel, 1942. Frame, Donald. Franc¸ois Rabelais: A Study. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1977. France, Anatole. Rabelais. Paris: Calmann-Le´vy, 1928. Trans. Ernest Boyd. New York: Henry Holt, 1929. Franc¸ois Rabelais. Ouvrage publie´ pour le quatrie`me centenaire de sa mort. Geneva: Droz, 1953. Franc¸on, Marcel, ed. Les croniques admirables du puissant roy Gargantua. Rochecorbon (Indreet-Loire): C. Gay, 1956. Freccero, Carla. “Damning Haughty Dames: Panurge and the ‘Haulte Dame de Paris’ (Pantagruel 14).” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 15.1 (Spring 1985): 57–67. ———. Father Figures. Genealogy and Narrative Structure in Rabelais. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. ———. “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. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957. Gaignebet, Claude. A plus haut sens: l’e´sote´risme spirituel et charnel de Rabelais. 2 vols. Paris. 1986. Gauna, Max. The Rabelaisian Mythologies. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996.

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Selected Bibliography

———. Upwellings: First Expressions of Unbelief in the Printed Literature of the French Renaissance. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992. Glauser, Alfred. Le faux Rabelais, ou L’inauthenticite´ du Cinquiesme Livre. Paris: Nizet, 1975. ———. Fonctions du nombre chez Rabelais. Paris: Nizet, 1982. ———. Rabelais cre´ateur. Paris: Nizet, 1966. Gray, Floyd. Rabelais et l’e´criture. Paris: Nizet, 1974. ———. “Rabelais’s First Readers.” In Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays on His Art. Ed. Raymond La Charite´, 15–29. Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986. Greene, Thomas M. Rabelais: A Study in Comic Courage. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970. Guiton, Jean. “Le Mythe des paroles gele´es (Rabelais, Quart Livre, LV–LVI).” Romanic Review 31 (1940): 3–15. Hampton, Timothy. Inventing Renaissance France: Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. ———. “ ‘Turkish Dogs’: Rabelais, Erasmus, and the Rhetoric of Alterity.” Representations 41 (1993): 58–82. Harp, Margaret. “Franc¸ois Rabelais’s Almanachs.” Halcyon 16 (1994): 223–34. ———. The Portrayal of Community in Rabelais’s Quart Livre. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. Heath, Michael J. Rabelais. Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1996. Henry, Gilles. Rabelais. Paris: Librairie Acade´mique Perrin, 1988. Higman, Francis. Censorship and the Sorbonne. Geneva: Droz, 1979. Huchon, Mireille. Rabelais grammarien: De l’histoire du texte aux proble`mes d’authenticite´. Etudes rabelaisiennes 16. Geneva: Droz, 1981. Huguet, Edmond. Dictionnaire de la langue franc¸aise au 16e sie`cle. Paris: Champion, 1925. ———. Etude sur la syntaxe de Rabelais, compare´e a` celle des autres prosateurs de 1450 a` 1550. Paris: Hachette, 1894. Jeanneret, Michel. Le de´fi des signes: Rabelais et la crise de l’interpre´tation a` la Renaisssance. Orle´ans: Paradigme, 1994. ———. A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance. Trans. Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1991. Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism. Literary Texts and Political Models. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Jourda, Pierre. Le Gargantua de Rabelais. Paris: SFELT, 1948. Kaiser, Walter. Praisers of Folly: Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963. Keller, Abraham. The Telling of Tales in Rabelais— Aspects of His Narrative Art. Frankfurt am Main: Vl Klostermann, 1963. Kinser, Samuel. Rabelais’s Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Kline, Michael B. Rabelais and the Age of Printing. Etudes rabelaisiennes 4. Geneva: Droz, 1963. Krailsheimer, Alban J. Rabelais and the Franciscans. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963. Kritzman, Lawrence. “Rabelais’s Comedy of Cruelty: A Psycho-allegorical Reading of the Chiquanous Episode.” Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays on His Art. Raymond La Charite´ ed. Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986. ———. The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. La Charite´, Raymond, ed. Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays on His Art. Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986. ———. Recreation, Reflection and Re-creation: Perspectives on Rabelais’s Pantagruel. Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1980. Lavatori, Gerard. Language and Money in Rabelais. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Lefebvre, Henri. Rabelais. Paris: Editeurs franc¸ais re´unis, 1955. Lewis, Wyndham. Doctor Rabelais. London: Sheed and Ward, 1957. Losse, Deborah. Rhetoric at Play. Rabelais and Satirical Eulogy. Bern: Peter Lang, 1980. Lote, Georges. La vie et l’oeuvre de Franc¸ois Rabelais. Paris: Droz, 1938. MacPhail, Eric. “The Ethic of Timing and the Origin of the Novel: Speaking Too Soon in Rabelais and Cervantes,” Symposium 52 (1998): 155– 64. Marshall, Fred W. “The Allegory of Rabelais’ Gargantua.” Australian Journal of French Studies 24.2 (1987): 115–154. ———. “The Great Allegory.” Australian Journal of French Studies 26.1(1989): 12–51. ———. “Les symboles des alle´gories de Rabelais.” Bulletin de l’association des amis de Rabelais et de la Devinie`re 5.2 (1993): 86–102. Masters, Mallary. Rabelaisian Dialectic and the Pla-

Selected Bibliography tonic Hermetic Tradition. Albany: State University of New York, 1969. McFarland, Douglas. “Rabelais and Alchemy.” Rabelais in Context. Birmingham: Summa, 1993. McNeil, David O. Guillaume Bude´ and Humanism in the Reign of Francis I. Geneva: Droz, 1975. Morrison, Ian. Rabelais. Tiers livre, Quart livre. London: Grant and Cutler, 1994. Paris, Jean. Rabelais au futur. Paris: Seuil, 1970. Parkin, John. “Comic Modality in Rabelais: Baisecul, Humevesne, Thaumaste.” ER 18 (1985): 57– 82. ———. Interpretations of Rabelais. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002. Plattard, Jean. La vie de Franc¸ois Rabelais. Paris and Brussels: Van Oest, 1928. Trans. Louis P. Roche as The Life of Franc¸ois Rabelais. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931. Prescott, Anne Lake. Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Quinones, Ricardo. The Renaissance Discovery of Time. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972. Quint, David. Origins and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983. Rabelais en son demi-mille´naire. Actes du colloque international de Tours. Etudes rabelaisiennes 21. Geneva: Droz, 1988. Rabelais pour le XXIe sie`cle. Ed. Michel Simonin. Geneva: Droz, 1998. Ragland, Mary. Rabelais and Panurge. A Psychological Approach to Literary Character. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1976. Regosin, Richard. “The Ins(ides) and Outs(ides) of Reading: Plural Discourse and the Question of Interpretation in Raelais.” Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays on His Art. Ed. Raymond La Charite´. Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986. Rigolot, Franc¸ois. L’erreur de la Renaissance. Paris: Champion, 2002. ———. Les langages de Rabelais. Etudes rabelaisiennes 10. Geneva: Droz, 1972. ———. Le Texte de la Renaissance: Des rhe´toriqueurs a` Montaigne. Geneva: Droz, 1982. Rothstein, Marian. “Gargantua: Agape, Androgyny and the Abbaye de The´le`me.” FF 26.1(2001): 1–19. ———. “The Mutations of the Androgyne: Its Func-

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tions in Early Modern France.” Sixteenth Century Journal 34.2 (2003): 407–34. Saulnier, Verdun. Le dessein de Rabelais. Paris: Socie´te´ d’e´dition d’enseignement supe´rieur, 1957. ———. Rabelais II. Rabelais dans son enqueˆte: Etude sur le Quart et le Cinquie`me livre. Paris: SEDES, 1982. Schwartz, Jerome. “Gargantua’s Device and the Abbey of Theleme: A Study in Rabelais’ Iconography.” YFS 47 (1972): 232–42. ———. Irony and Ideology in Rabelais. Structures of Subversion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. ———. “Scatology and Eschatology in Gargantua’s Androgyne Device.” ER 14 (1977): 265–275. Screech, Michael A. L’evange´lisme de Rabelais. Geneva: Droz, 1959. ———. Rabelais. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979. ———. Rabelais and the Challenge of the Gospel: Evangelism, Reformation, Dissent. BadenBaden / Bouxwiller: Valentin Koerner, 1992. ———. The Rabelaisian Marriage: Aspects of Rabelais’ Religion, Ethics and Comic Philosophy. London: Edward Arnold, 1958. Simonin, Michel, ed. Rabelais pour le XXI sie`cle. Actes du colloque du Centre d’Etudes Supe´rieures de la Renaissance (Chinon-Tours, 1994). Geneva: Droz, 1998. Smith, Paul J. Voyage et e´criture: Etude sur le Quart Livre de Rabelais. Etudes rabelaisiennes 19. Geneva: Droz, 1987. Spitzer, Leo. “Rabelais et les ‘rabelaisants.’ ” Studi francesi 4 (September–December 1960): 401– 23. Stephens, Walter. Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. ———. Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient History, and Nationalism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Tetel, Marcel. Etude sur le comique de Rabelais. Florence: L. Olschki, 1964. Waswo, Richard. Language and Meaning in the Renaissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Weinberg, Florence M. The Wine and the Will: Rabelais’s Bacchic Christianity. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972. Zegura, Elizabeth Chesney, and Marcel Tetel. Rabelais Revisited. New York: Macmillan/Twayne, 1993.

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; disappearance 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 Renaissance 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, Barthe´lemy, 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 human reason, 158, 212; judicial and legal, 23, 111; misplaced, 186, 191; patriarchal, 64, 94, 261; political, 50, 54, 194; pope’s claims to, 163, 181–82; quest for, by Panurge, 223; respect for, 232; spiritual, 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 regeneration, 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; intellectual 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 Be´da, Noe¨l, 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 Be´rauld, Nicholas, 56 Berengario da Carpi, Jacopo, 20 Be´roalde 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, Franc¸ois, 206 Boniface VIII, 50 Bonnivet, chaˆteau 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 ecclesiastical, 209, 238; from French authors 15, 24, 51, 91, 94, 95, 125, 140, 163, 174, 212, 214; from Hebrew 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, Ge´rard, 131 Breughel, Pieter (the Elder), 59, 205 Bric¸onnet, 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 correspondence 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 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; reversal inherent in, 67, 131, 160, 229; spirit of subversion 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 Ce´ard, Jean, 209 Ce´line, 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 evangelism 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; associated with Quaresmeprenant, 7, 162, 216, 75, 85; identified with Picrochole, 92, 188, 235, 257; Rabelais’s mockery of, 122; rivalry with French kings, 59, 109, 253 Charmois, Charles, 12 Charpentier, Franc¸oise, 46 Charron, Pierre, 139 Chastillon (Chaˆtillon), Cardinal of (Odet de Coli-

275

gny), protector of Rabelais, 193; Rabelais’s dedicatory letter to, 26, 42, 53, 83, 109, 195, 196, 213 Chateaubriand, Franc¸ois 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 Cholie`res, Nicolas de, 205, 225 Christianization, of ancient thought, 48, 93, 173 Chroniques gargantuines. See Gargantuan Chronicles Church, the (Catholic), 214, 250; Rabelais and, 74; resistance to reform of, 181 Cicero, 24, 35–36, 118, 139, 145; Ciceronian “quarrel,” 127–28, 140, 203; De amicitia, 86; De divinatione, 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 The´le`me, 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 rhetorical paradox or satirical eulogy, 72, 104–5, 167, 212; related to rebirth and reproduction, 167 Coligny, Odet de, Cardinal de Chastillon, 126, 83, 213 Colle`ge de France, 84 Colle`ge de Montaigu, 19, 151, 241 Colle`ge 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 Protestants, 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’aˆne, 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, He´lisenne de, 61 Cre´tin, 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 Guillaume 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; connection to Frozen Words, 87–88; as satirical eulogy, 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, Ge´rard, 45, 90, 129, 131, 134, 203, 233, 252, 260 Demonet, Marie-Luce, 15, 23 Derrida, Jacques, 44, 115 Deschamps, Eustache, 218 Des Pe´riers, Bonaventure, 51, 225 Desprez, Franc¸ois, 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 Papefigues, 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; invention of, 97; part of Panurge’s wardrobe, 179; used for judgment and decision making, 22–23, 78, 135–36, 143, 163, 224, 247 Die´guez, Manuel de, 90 Dindenault (Dingdong), 10, 37, 40, 47, 52–53, 62, 180, 223, 251; burlesque, comical, and farcical elements, 72, 75, 123, 157, 224; economic dimensions, 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 toward, 13, 58, 167, 187; methods of, 1, 58, 110, 169, 202, 245–46; as a possible route to knowledge, 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 references 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; Hypnerotomachia Polyphili, allegorical dream vision (Colonna), 37–38; Plotinus, theories on dream interpretation, 190; as potential guide, 119; psychoanalytical theory and, 6

Index Dreams of Daniel (Les Songes Daniel), 58 Du Bellay, Guillaume, 59–60, 132, 231, 234, 260, 261; death of, 48, 150, 202; goodness and generosity 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; farcical and comical elements in episode, 75, 175; Latinisms 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 Chaˆteaubriant, 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 Episte´mon, 69–70; death and rebirth of, 197; engaged 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;

277

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 Bric¸onnet, 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 antidote´es, 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; Ringing 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 Panurge, 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 Fre`re 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 The´le`me, 39; interpretation of Enigmatic Prophecy, 68; scorn for empty vows, 70; strength, wisdom, and heroics, 74 Fre`res 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 textual, 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 Pantagruel, 63–64; livery of, 8, 36, 37, 38, 64, 131; origins, 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 Gre`ve, 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, Franc¸ois, 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 overtones 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; Episte´mon 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; accusations 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 He´roe¨t, 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 Hippothade´e, 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 Humor, 2, 30, 44, 74, 76, 122–24, 174, 194; Bakhtinian, 17–19; mixed with monstrosity, 83; as vehicle 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, Franc¸ois, 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 Bruye`re, 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

279

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, Cle´ment, 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; rationale 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; Asclepiades, 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; critique 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, Colle`ge 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; Alcofrybas, 2–3, 91; as character, 166, 176; unreliable, 172 Natural history, 33 Nature, 162, 167–69, 187, 189; and animals, 9; perversion 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 Olive´tan, 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 Panurge, 54; birth, 16, 20, 127; as Christ figure, 3; as contrasted with Panurge, 174; education and learning of, 66; exploits of, 143, 181; as King of the

Index 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 selfglorification, 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 Fre`re Jean, 85; as antipode of Gargantua, 93; in Bakhtinian criticism, 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 Pantagruel, 86; resuscitates Epistemon, 176; revives Epistemon, 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 Renaissance 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 Perrie`re, Guillaume de la, 65 Petrarch/Petrarchism, 63, 84, 127, 151, 185–86

281

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 Noe¨l Be´da, 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 reassessment 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, The´odule, 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 Fre`re Jean, 85; and medicine, 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 Rene´e 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 episode, 177; Petrarchist, 185; scholastic, 63 Rigolot, Franc¸ois, 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, Ge´rard, 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-Fosse´s, 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 hybrid 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 Sce`ve, 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; advances 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 Se´billet, 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; ambiguous, 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; effort 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 ve´role), 43, 156, 158–59, 238

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

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 Tempeˆte, Pierre, 151–52, 241 Tetel, Marcel, 87, 90, 159 Thalame`ge, 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 The´le`me, 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; illustrations, 65; recreation at, 125; utopian elements, 54 Thenaud, Jean, 107 Theology, Faculty of. See Sorbonne The´vet, 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, Franc¸ois de, Cardinal, 42 Tours, Pierre de, 82, 137 Translations, Dutch and German (16th–17th Centuries), 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

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, Franc¸ois de, 1 Valla, Lorenzo, 200 Vatable, Franc¸ois, 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, commissioned 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, Chre´tien, 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 Asclepiades, 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; exclusion, 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

About the 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’e´tudes supe´rieures de la Renaissance (Tours). EDWARD BENSON wrote a dissertation thirty years ago on Rabelais’s martial metaphors, 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 Que´becois author Anne He´bert. 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, scatological jokes, and of course Franc¸ois 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

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About the Contributors Studies. He is the author of L’imagination poe´tique chez Du Bartas and, more recently, Franc¸ois 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, Knoxville, 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 Erasmus 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 translator of “La Prisonnie`re” 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 Brasenose 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,

About the Contributors the theory and practice of literary imitation, and the phenomenon of European Petrarchism. She has written on a number of Renaissance poets (including Marot, Sce`ve, Du Guillet, du Bellay, Ronsard) as well as on imitation theory. PHILIPPE DESAN is Howard L. Willett Professor in the Department of Romance Languages 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 e´conomique 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), “Rabelais et la nature fe´minine” (ER 31), and “Macrobe et les aˆmes he´roı¨ques (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 Ceppe`de and eye imagery in the poetry of the E´cole 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, Marguerite de Navarre, Sce`ve, 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 Pe´riers’s controversial Cymbalum Mundi. He has also written books on Montaigne’s

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About the Contributors 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 me´moires of Simon Goulart (1543–1628) explores Calvinist Renaissance historiography 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 pe´riodique 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 Toronto 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 bibliography 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 proble`mes d’authenticite´, ER 16 (1981). She is also the editor of Rabelais’s Oeuvres comple`tes, Bibliothe`que de la Ple´iade (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 Languages, Literature, and Linguistics. He is the author of La personnalite´ litte´raire de Franc¸ois 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.

About the Contributors 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: Be´roalde 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 re´gime at the University of Que´bec 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 rhe´torique e´pistolaire 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, Marguerite 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 Turne`be, 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 The´odore 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 University 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.

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About the Contributors 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 landscape, travel writing, and images of Julius Caesar. She has articles published or forthcoming 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 Acade´miques, 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 Sce`ve, and Rabelais. DOUGLAS MCFARLAND received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and is the Manning M. Pattillo Professor in the Liberal Arts and Chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Oglethorpe University, where he teaches Renaissance literature, Latin, and Attic Greek. He has published articles on Spenser, 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, Bloomington. He is the author of Le message et sa fiction. La communication par messagers dans la litte´rature franc¸aise des XIIe et XIIIe sie`cles (1998) and Dictionnaire des saints imaginaires et face´tieux 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. Previous publications include articles on pre´ciosite´ 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.

About the Contributors 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 coauthor, 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 initials 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 Montaigne, Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, Bourdieu, French cultural studies, and Renaissance travel narratives. He is completing a book on Aristotelian masculinity in the Renaissance. LEVILSON C. REIS is an Assistant Professor of foreign languages at Otterbein College, Westerville, Ohio. He teaches French language and literature and pursues research interests 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 Cle´ment Marot and Franc¸ois Rabelais. Previous publications include articles on Rabelais, Montaigne, and Be´roalde de Verville. FRANC¸OIS 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 me´tamorphoses de Montaigne (1988); L’erreur de la Renaissance (2002); and Poe´sie 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 Me´rite 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

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About the Contributors 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 published extensively on Renaissance literature and thought in Latin and French and also on art. He was co-author with France Sharratt of E´cosse romane (1985), and co-editor, with Keith Aspley and Elizabeth Cowling, of From Rodin to Giacometti: Sculpture and Literature 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 (Netherlands). He is the author of Voyage et e´criture. Etude sur le Quart Livre de Rabelais (1987), co-author of Francis Ponge: lectures et me´thodes (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 currently 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 Supe´rieure (Fontenay). 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 Pe´riers 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), Gargantua in a Convex Mirror: Fischart’s View of Rabelais (1986), and Rabelais et les lec¸ons du rire: paraboles e´vange´liques et ne´oplatoniciennes (2000). Her works of fiction

About the Contributors 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 currently exploring issues of class, politics, and gender in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptame´ron.

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