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, FEA